Qualities: INTUITION

Never use intuition.
––General Omar N. Bradley

The mind resorts to reason for want of training.
––Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907

The term “gut feel” reflects an attempt to differentiate between thoughts from the head––more rational, intellectual, and dispassionate––and those that come from somewhere deeper and are harder to articulate. Sometimes known as intuition, it is more closely tied to the unconscious, that part of our mind that operates largely outside of everyday awareness and that determines so much of our behavior.
––Dr. Kerry J. Sulkowicz, Fast Company Magazine, November 2004

One job of the unconscious is to act as a workshop for rough-shaping ideas; crafting notions as new parts or tools become available; storing observations until something relevant appears in the landscape––generally soaking, simmering, and incubating ideas. Gradually, while combing through its inventory, it finds bits and pieces that create a pattern. …We experience that unreasoned solution as intuition or insight. It may be wrong. Intuitions sometimes are. It may point us in a useful direction rather than offer a concrete solution. There are sudden intuitions (“snap judgments”), and there are gradual intuitions based on a slow, playful accumulation of details.
––Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind, 2004

The problem with feeling the rightness of something is that this is more rewarding emotionally and more tempting than the difficult and informed process of reasoning, but more likely to be wrong. Intuition, listening to the subconscious, should not be ignored, but only in the context of intelligent reasoning beforehand. Intuition is not a separate and alternative brain process, but an important and useful part of the primary one.
––John Roberts

Intuition is often used as an excuse for not doing your homework, for relying on emotions and disorganized thinking, for going with what you want to believe rather than digging up and facing harsh facts. Intuition, like many qualities, is most useful as a tool in an organized system that has learned from experience its limits and strengths; that system clearly understands the frequent value and correctness of the subconscious, but also knows the danger of depending too firmly on a decision-making process that uses a form of “reasoning and logic” that is beyond your control.
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A decision approaches. We can assemble the pluses and minuses on a yellow pad, review our capabilities, weigh the arguments, forecast the effects and responses of the ripples and waves that the decision will create. Yet, we can also feel the tug of other forces on our reason, hidden inclinations that cannot be put to paper. The line between the reason and intuition is not clear, we cannot seem to separate them and view the independent results. We can only hope they agree. When they do not, we often find strong emotions pushing aside the sensible logic and correctness we have so carefully built. It usually requires more courage to follow the reason than to follow the intuition, which is more satisfying.

Sometimes people luck out and their intuition proves correct. Naturally, they will place more value on it in the future. We must be on guard against this natural tendency to disregard reason and logic. But, let us accept that some people have actually developed their subconscious, or their ability to organize or read it. Sometimes we call that “sleeping on it” and the development of a problem leads to an awareness of subconscious attitudes or decisions the next day that may help to make a decision.

To be continued. See the current best-seller: Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. See also Diane Ackerman’s beautifully-written and enlightening book (quote above), An Alchemy of Mind, See also our previous September post: Qualities: BRAIN.