Intuition should be heeded.

[Justforfun000]

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/99689.php

Intuition Is More Than Just A Hunch, According To Leeds Research
Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 06 Mar 2008 - 3:00 PST



Most of us experience 'gut feelings' we can't explain, such as instantly loving - or hating - a new property when we're househunting or the snap judgements we make on meeting new people. Now researchers at Leeds say these feelings - or intuitions - are real and we should take our hunches seriously.

According to a team led by Professor Gerard Hodgkinson of the Centre for Organisational Strategy, Learning and Change at Leeds University Business School, intuition is the result of the way our brains store, process and retrieve information on a subconscious level and so is a real psychological phenomenon which needs further study to help us harness its potential.

There are many recorded incidences where intuition prevented catastrophes and cases of remarkable recoveries when doctors followed their gut feelings. Yet science has historically ridiculed the concept of intuition, putting it in the same box as parapsychology, phrenology and other 'pseudoscientific' practices.

Through analysis of a wide range of research papers examining the phenomenon, the researchers conclude that intuition is the brain drawing on past experiences and external cues to make a decision - but one that happens so fast the reaction is at a non-conscious level. All we're aware of is a general feeling that something is right or wrong.

"People usually experience true intuition when they are under severe time pressure or in a situation of information overload or acute danger, where conscious analysis of the situation may be difficult or impossible," says Prof Hodgkinson.

He cites the recorded case of a Formula One driver who braked sharply when nearing a hairpin bend without knowing why - and as a result avoided hitting a pile-up of cars on the track ahead, undoubtedly saving his life.

"The driver couldn't explain why he felt he should stop, but the urge was much stronger than his desire to win the race," explains Professor Hodgkinson. "The driver underwent forensic analysis by psychologists afterwards, where he was shown a video to mentally relive the event. In hindsight he realised that the crowd, which would have normally been cheering him on, wasn't looking at him coming up to the bend but was looking the other way in a static, frozen way. That was the cue. He didn't consciously process this, but he knew something was wrong and stopped in time."

Prof Hodgkinson believes that all intuitive experiences are based on the instantaneous evaluation of such internal and external cues - but does not speculate on whether intuitive decisions are necessarily the right ones.

"Humans clearly need both conscious and non-conscious thought processes, but it's likely that neither is intrinsically 'better' than the other," he says.

As a Chartered occupational psychologist, Prof Hodgkinson is particularly interested in the impact of intuition within business, where many executives and managers claim to use intuition over deliberate analysis when a swift decision is required. "We'd like to identify when business people choose to switch from one mode to the other and why - and also analyse when their decision is the correct one. By understanding this phenomenon, we could then help organisations to harness and hone intuitive skills in their executives and managers."

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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The research is published in the current issue of the British Journal of Psychology.

Source: Jo Kelly
University of Leeds

[Kodiak]

This is interesting. I appreciated that in the incident w/ the racecar driver they were able to go back with him and he was able to figure out what made his "spidey sense" tingle. I look forward to more work in this field.

[Superman]

I wonder when journalists are going to learn that no psychiatrist/psychologist uses the term, "subconscious." The term is "unconscious."

[Rye]

This is odd, and the irony/pun is seriously not intended (I swear) as this was covered ages ago in a BBC documentary on intuition (they used examples of firemen dealing with backdraft to show how they thought it worked, the fireman in charge unconsciously spotted the signs as he'd been in one before and pulled the guys out in time). They even identified the lobe they associated with it, it was centrally located, as I recall.

[Molyneux]

Umm...the article's title is full of it. "...the brain drawing on past experiences and external cues to make a decision - but one that happens so fast the reaction is at a non-conscious level. All we're aware of is a general feeling that something is right or wrong" is exactly what a hunch is.

[Starglider]

Intuition is simply a failure of reflection. Quite simply, symbolic thought as implemented in the human brain is a massive bottleneck. There's the horrible 7+-2 short term memory limitation (reference count limitation effectively, with chunking) and the pathetic inference rate. Virtually all the lower-level processing going on in the brain (e.g. object recognition and tracking, motor control) is non-reflective (and in may cases, ballistic) anyway. The 'intuition vs conscious reasoning' distinction only comes up when there's some overlap between what we can do by consciously directed inference and what our brain can do by massively parallel local heuristic application.

Incidentally the fact that consciously directed inference is useful at all is extremely impressive in context. It's running at an effective clock rate of 2 to 3 (variable complexity) rule applications per second, as opposed to millions for subconscious inference. Yet for time-extended tasks logic lets us do vastly more than what we could do by intuition alone. This illustrates the power of reflection and active search control vs local brute force, and it's the primary reason why 'rational' cognitive-utility-driven AI designs (which run in 'conscious' mode virtually all the time) can in principle massively outperform messy local-algorithm-only (more human-like) connectionist ones.

[Adrian Laguna]

Intuition only really helps in one's field of expertise. Else, it can often lead to some pretty dammed stupid conclusions.

[Knife]

Intuition only really helps in one's field of expertise. Else, it can often lead to some pretty dammed stupid conclusions.

ah, but no body remembers when they had a hunch and it was wrong. Only when it was right.

[Sarevok]

Intuition is simply a failure of reflection. Quite simply, symbolic thought as implemented in the human brain is a massive bottleneck. There's the horrible 7+-2 short term memory limitation (reference count limitation effectively, with chunking) and the pathetic inference rate. Virtually all the lower-level processing going on in the brain (e.g. object recognition and tracking, motor control) is non-reflective (and in may cases, ballistic) anyway. The 'intuition vs conscious reasoning' distinction only comes up when there's some overlap between what we can do by consciously directed inference and what our brain can do by massively parallel local heuristic application.

Incidentally the fact that consciously directed inference is useful at all is extremely impressive in context. It's running at an effective clock rate of 2 to 3 (variable complexity) rule applications per second, as opposed to millions for subconscious inference. Yet for time-extended tasks logic lets us do vastly more than what we could do by intuition alone. This illustrates the power of reflection and active search control vs local brute force, and it's the primary reason why 'rational' cognitive-utility-driven AI designs (which run in 'conscious' mode virtually all the time) can in principle massively outperform messy local-algorithm-only (more human-like) connectionist ones.

So in other words intuition, gut feelings, emotion are really hardware acceleration ? Sort of like how a PC CPU performing maths to do 3D graphics is pathetically slow compared to a cheap video card doing the same thing with hard wired electronics ?

[PeZook]

ah, but no body remembers when they had a hunch and it was wrong. Only when it was right.

I've heard idiots claim that intuition is irrefutable proof for the existence of a soul. Because it's magic!

[TithonusSyndrome]

I contest the research's recommendations not because I contest the findings, but because every Joe Sixpack out there seems to make major life decisions based on their gut feeling and nothing else. Most of the people I meet are neither religious nor rational, they're working class stiffs who resent every authority figure and lump politicians, industrialists, priests and scientists together into one big group of pushy scheming anti-egalitarian assholes who don't have "street smarts" or "common sense", and only their private intuitions are qualified to guide them through life. That's why nobody respects scientists, they're painted as another breed of preacher by the nonreligious as much as by apologists or ID proponents.

[ArmorPierce]

Intuition only really helps in one's field of expertise. Else, it can often lead to some pretty dammed stupid conclusions.

Yup. If you are so familiar with doing something that it comes second nature, you often can feel that something is off. Of course you actually have to have a large base experience in order for this to do you any good.

[Darth Wong]

"Keen intuition" is nothing more than familiarity by another name. The other kind of intuition is just random bullshit.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Its just shows how your body and mind percieves everything. I once had a day where everything was just OFF. Nothing felt right, and I was all out of sorts. At the end of the day, I came to realize that my lucky coin had fallen out of my wallet the night before, and it was the weight difference that was throwing me off.

[nickolay1]

Its just shows how your body and mind percieves everything. I once had a day where everything was just OFF. Nothing felt right, and I was all out of sorts. At the end of the day, I came to realize that my lucky coin had fallen out of my wallet the night before, and it was the weight difference that was throwing me off.

That explanation sounds like a load of shit. A difference of a few percent in the mass of a wallet would likely be imperceptible.

[Terralthra]

Its just shows how your body and mind percieves everything. I once had a day where everything was just OFF. Nothing felt right, and I was all out of sorts. At the end of the day, I came to realize that my lucky coin had fallen out of my wallet the night before, and it was the weight difference that was throwing me off.

Hm, there's a latin phrase for this...something like cum hoc ergo propter hoc?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Its just shows how your body and mind percieves everything. I once had a day where everything was just OFF. Nothing felt right, and I was all out of sorts. At the end of the day, I came to realize that my lucky coin had fallen out of my wallet the night before, and it was the weight difference that was throwing me off.

That explanation sounds like a load of shit. A difference of a few percent in the mass of a wallet would likely be imperceptible.

My lucky coin was a large piece of brass about the size of a 50-cent piece. I got it in Boy Scouts.

[nickolay1]

Sure, those weight-sensing organs built into your legs in the areas of pockets are sensitive enough to detect a change of 10 grams.

[ArmorPierce]

perhaps it was something else besides the weight. Like you handled your wallet and it felt off?

[Hawkwings]

Or the fact that there wasn't any more pressure in your pocket from the coin. That's notified me of stuff missing from my pockets before.

[Darth Wong]

He could have subconsciously picked up the missing round protrusion in the wallet when he picked it up and put it in his pocket, and that bothered him the whole day without him consciously realizing it.