What is intuition: life experience, mysticism or a cheap notion?

Intuition is the ability to understand what is happening instantly and beyond conscious control, without resorting to conscious inference and reasoning. Mystical intuition is understood as knowledge received from the Higher powers, rational intuition is based on experience and is opposed to reasoning, expanded discursive thinking.

When making a decision, men often turn to the head, and for them an intuitive decision is where everything is clear right away, without much discussion. Women more often live with feelings and body, and for them the intuitive decision is the one with which they feel comfortable, after the adoption of which they become internally calm and comfortable.

When a wise, experienced person refers to his intuition, listen to him. Intuition as a convoluted, unconscious reasoning, intuition as an indicator of experience and professionalism — commands respect.

In a completely new situation, thinking first proceeds in an expanded and conscious form, in the form of reasoning. Mastering the situation, repeating over and over again, the reasoning becomes more concise and less conscious. If such internal reasoning is completely compressed, already unconscious and proceeds without tension, easily, against the background of habitual relaxation, a person more often speaks without thinking, sometimes finding it difficult to bring intermediate links of reasoning and simply referring to intuition. That is, on already unconsciously assimilated experience.

The experienced eye always sees more than the novice eye. Anyone who has been doing something for years already knows many things without any logic, simply on the basis of experience: “So it happens, but it doesn’t.” «I can feel it». Experienced aircraft designers can, without calculations, just by looking at the aircraft, say what its flight prospects are. An experienced psychologist or male psychiatrist is better at predicting the behavior of others than a young girl — just experience works. On the other hand, women more often and better than men intuitively feel what is happening and will happen in relationships, experience also works here. If girls play human relations for at least four hours a day, day after day, and adult women at their leisure discuss primarily the same relationships, if women’s attention is riveted not to objects, but to people and relationships, they naturally become in this area professionals and can often confidently predict (in body language, “anticipate”) things that are incomprehensible to men.

As Daniel Kahneman writes

At the same time, it is important to set limits: a professional uses the prompts of intuition, but trusts knowledge and accurate calculation more. Where you can find out exactly, a professional will take care to find out exactly. If the question is not so important, there is not enough time and, in principle, you can not strain and cheat — then we will use intuition. It’s not as good as exact knowledge, but done by a professional, it’ll do. We can say that in comparison with elite exact knowledge, intuition is a budget decision.

At the same time, intuition is not only experience and professionalism, not only folded discursive thinking. By operating with pictures and images, one can quickly find a solution that goes beyond ordinary logical reasoning, and this is also called intuition. A person with developed scenario thinking, simply looking at the situation and imagining its possible reversals, knows in advance: “It will go like this, but it won’t.” If a person has developed figurative and scenario thinking, all the more developed empathy, then surrounded by people who do not own this, he often gives the impression of a magician.

As for female intuition, it is once a fiction, and once a fusion of experience and natural ability to perfectly understand and speak body language.

It is not uncommon for women to insist that they «feel» the other person better than a man, for no reason. A group of researchers from the University of Hertfordshire, led by Richard Wiseman, conducted an experiment involving 15 subjects. 80% of women and 58% of men said they have good intuition. All volunteers were asked to study photographs of laughing people and determine which of them were sincerely happy and who was pretending, who smiles were sincere, and who were artificial. According to the Portal of Artificial Intelligence, the same number of women and men answered correctly — 70% each (more precisely — 72% of men and 71% of women).

At the same time, it is rather true that in the field of human relations, women understand better than men. An ordinary woman, better than an ordinary man, «reads» the interlocutor, feels his condition and understands his hidden intentions. However, having begun in the sphere of human relations, women’s intuition also ends there: in the objective world, women’s intuition should not be relied upon. And in the sphere of human relations, the female eye more often sees what is “here and now”, it is more difficult for a woman to calculate the future. If, however, women’s intuition begins to be influenced by her emotions, moods, hopes and fears, then there are even more mistakes.

When a girl is in love and hopes, her intuition tells her that everything will be fine. When a woman is afraid, her intuition will tell you that there are reasons for anxiety and you need to worry …

It is not uncommon for an intuitive decision to be passed off simply as the first random thing that comes to mind.

Suppose a girl says something without thinking, just the first thing that comes to her mind — cute girls are allowed to. But if suddenly she is asked: “Why do you think so?” and at least some reason is expected from her, then to say that she simply did not think would be already uncomfortable for her. In such a situation, it is more pleasant and more solid for her to say: “I feel it. This is my intuition!” It is clear that there is nothing behind such words. This is a cheap intuition, a simulacrum, a dummy instead of intuition, and such intuition should not be trusted.

A separate conversation is about mystical intuition as an irrational process. People for whom mysticism is attractive admit the presence of Higher forces in the world and the possibility of contact with them. For them, intuition is penetration into a special space, where suddenly all the mysteries of the world can open before them and the future will open its veils. They know that if you enter a special state of inner silence and listen to yourself for a long time, you can understand whether to go to an interview today or tomorrow, when a friend calls and which flight you need to take a ticket to avoid getting into a disaster.

Unlike rational intuition, which is based on experience and has its limits, mystical intuition goes beyond any limitations, everything is available to it. The difference between these kinds is simple: if the prediction is within any reasonable limits, it is a rational intuition. If the prediction is beyond the boundaries of reality — mystical. A sports coach can intuitively feel when it is necessary to replace one player with another in a game — this is rational intuition. But in order to accurately predict over and over again with what score the game will end, you need to have access to mystical intuition, to the Higher powers. Or — access to the sports mafia, which agrees on the results of the game.

The tendency to believe in mysticism and mystical intuition has no scientific evidence, but is humanly understandable. In a situation where there is not enough data to make a decision and it is necessary to calculate the risks, openly taking full responsibility personally, some people need a buffer that mitigates responsibility: “intuition prompt”. The less self-confident a person is, the more difficult it is for him (or her) to make a decision, the more often a person turns not to his head, but to the prompts of intuition. Most of all, insecure teenagers looking for support outside, girls and women who want to believe that they are not alone in this world, that they can count on communication with the Higher powers and good tips from them, are most looking for intuition tips.

Intuition, if it is not an irrational process, but a convoluted reasoning based on experience, can be developed quite well. How? Let’s think together, remembering those whose intuition is usually better developed. See →