Intuition can be described as ‘quick and ready insight’. It is a way of knowing or sensing something without observation, reason or experience, sometimes called instinct or a ‘gut reaction’. We have all experienced intuition at some time – about a person, a situation or a decision we were being asked to make. Intuition is usually very strong and immediate, and whether we act on it or ignore it will depend largely on the type of person we are. Creative people – musicians, writers, artists, designers, etc. – tend to be more intuitive and ready to listen to and act on their instinct, and women tend to be more intuitive than men.
Intuition often pops up when we least expect it, and research has shown that if we follow our instinct when making a decision, the decision is more than likely to turn out be the right one. This appears to fly in the face of rational and informed decision making – or does it?
Albert Einstein, generally considered to be the most accomplished scientist of the twentieth century and therefore presumably rational and level-headed, said, ‘The only real valuable thing is intuition,’ and that most of his innovation was just good guesswork. This association of reason with the fanciful seems an incredible contradiction – science and parapsychology (which intuition is) have traditionally been in separate camps. But research is now showing that our world is far more complex and multilayered than previously thought, and within those layers is room for intuition. Indeed research has also shown that intuition or instinct is far more informed and rational than originally thought, and can often be as good a judge as slow deliberation.
Before we look at what exactly is going on when we experience intuition and how we can fine-tune our ability to make the best use of it, let’s look at some examples of intuition:
We walk into a room full of people and are introduced to someone who is apparently liked and well respected. We take an immediate and instinctive dislike to that person for no obvious reason. Later – perhaps a lot later – our initial judgement is proved correct when something is revealed about the person or their behaviour. Conversely, we may immediately warm to someone on first meeting and they become our lifelong friend.
You are asked to make a decision, but what you instinctively feel to be the right decision is not the most logical or rational one.
You instinctively take a different route home, catch a different bus or train, or postpone a trip, and later find out that by doing so you avoided an accident. Whenever a plane crashes there is someone who should have been on the plane but changed their flight at the last moment because of a premonition.
You make a minor, spur-of-the-moment change to your plans that has a significant knock-on effect on the rest of your life.
As well as Albert Einstein there are many other famous examples of people who have achieved a great deal by acting on their intuition. Here are a few:
Ray Kroc went against his financial advisor’s advice and followed his instinct in 1960 when he borrowed $2.7 million and bought out the franchise of McDonald’s and turned it into the most successful fast food operation in the world.
Sir Richard Branson, who started out in his teens selling records from the boot of his car and became a multi-millionaire from his business enterprises, says he makes a decision about a person or business venture within thirty seconds of meeting the person or reading the business proposal. His instincts have clearly served him very well: a recent estimate put his fortune at £1.5 billion ($2.5 billion)!
Conrad Hilton, founder of the Hilton hotel chain, claims he often relies on hunches. For example, he wanted a property in New York that was being sold through sealed (secret) bids. At the last minute, on a hunch, he changed his bid from $159,000 to $174,000 and thereby secured the property. The next highest bid had been $173,000. He later sold the property for several million dollars.
Felix Dennis, who started work as a gravedigger, made a fortune in Britain from publishing. In his book How to Get Rich, he says he ignores sound advice from his directors, lawyers and accountants and goes with his gut instincts. At the last count he was worth £500 million.
Following instincts isn’t only about making money. Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine after spotting a flaw in a medical lecture at college. He later said, ‘The light went on at that point. Intuition tells the thinking mind where to look next.’
And possibly the most famous incident of intuition was that of the racing car driver Juan Fangio. He was racing at the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix and instinctively braked as he approached a blind corner, unaware there’d been a serious accident round the corner, which he would have driven straight into. He couldn’t possibly have seen round the corner but had gone with his instinct to brake sharply, which very likely saved his life.
These examples show that intuition is a very good asset. So what is actually happening to allow us what appears to be a magical or extrasensory power, and is it something we can develop? To answer this, first let us look at what researchers now believe happens when we experience intuition.
A good place to start is with the above example of the Argentinean racing driver Juan Fangio, who apparently had a sixth sense that he should brake. Here lies the key to understanding intuition. Picture the scene at the Grand Prix. Juan Fangio is racing around the circuit, foot hard on the accelerator, focused and intent on winning. The stadium is packed and the audience is watching the race with bated breath. Juan Fangio races along the straight and then towards the blind bend, beyond which there is a pile-up he cannot see. It is a disaster waiting to happen. But at the last second, instead of continuing round the bend and ploughing headlong into the other cars, to the amazement of those watching, Fangio brakes fiercely, thereby avoiding the accident and saving himself. Afterwards Fangio said he didn’t know why he’d braked: the decision to brake had been instinctive, and went against all his other thoughts of winning the race.
Fangio’s apparently amazing foresight was captured on camera and psychologists were very keen to investigate what appeared to be a first-class example of the sixth sense or intuition at work. Fangio agreed to do some work with the psychologists and together they analysed the CCTV tapes of the race. To begin with it looked as though Fangio had indeed had some dramatic intuitive perception, so startling was the evidence. But on further examination the tapes revealed something very interesting. The tapes showed Fangio’s car racing towards the blind bend but they also showed the audience in the stadium. The audience had a good view of the other side of the bend where the accident was, and they were looking not at Fangio’s car but at the pile-up. Fangio couldn’t possibly have consciously seen the audience: he was going so fast they would have been a blur. But subconsciously he had seen them and the looks on their faces as they saw the pile-up. In that split second, his brain, using his previous experience of racing, had interpreted their expressions as a sign of danger. It was this that had caused Fangio to brake.
It therefore appears intuition is not a sixth sense but that in a split second our brain subconsciously assesses external cues – i.e. what is going on around us – and processes these in the light of our previous experience. It then makes a decision and sends a message to our conscious brain which we perceive as intuition. Or to put it another way the brain is doing what it normally does – taking in and processing information and using it to make a decision – but with intuition it happens so fast we’re not aware of it.
Another more frequent, yet no less incredible, example of intuition is that of experienced firefighters. When firefighters are working in a blazing building they often experience an intuitive feeling or gut reaction that tells them when to get out of the building – a few seconds before a floor gives way or a wall crashes, for example – so saving themselves and their team. This intuition is based on years of experience from fighting fires in similar situations. So while the firefighters are concentrating on fighting the fire their brains are subconsciously picking up and processing all the external cues: changes in flame height or direction, a shift in the wind, a new draft, a stillness in the air, a sudden unidentified noise, etc. Their brains’ subconscious compares all these cues to their previous experiences of firefighting and make a decision on when it is time to get out. Obviously firefighters also make many conscious decisions on how to fight fires, but time and time again firefighters recount how they relied on gut instinct to abandon a blazing building and get out.
Likewise the ‘gut reaction’ we feel when we meet someone for the first time and either take an immediate dislike to them or instinctively warm to them is based on our brain receiving cues and assessing them in the light of our previous experience of people. As we are politely shaking hands and smiling at the person our subconscious is busy comparing their handshake, smile, eye contact, body language, etc. with our massive database of meeting other people, and then draws a conclusion. This is all done in a split second.
The decision to drive home by a different route for no obvious reason which resulted in our missing a bad accident was probably not the result of the incredible sixth sense or good luck as we thought it was. While leaving the office that night and walking to the car our senses were picking up many external cues which our subconscious processed – the weather, a snippet of a radio announcement from a passing car, a glimpse of a newspaper headline, the unusually heavy traffic – all of which were compared to our previous driving experience. Our brain subconsciously recognized that driving conditions on our usual route were likely to be hazardous and best avoided, so we chose a different route.
Although research is ongoing into how often intuition makes a better judgement than a reasoned conscious decision, and while some people seem to be naturally more intuitive than others, we can all benefit from listening to our inner voice of instinct. For as we have seen intuition is not a random feeling or hocus-pocus but an incredible subconscious burst of logical thinking.
How to make the best of your intuition
Here are a few tips:
1. Trust in your intuition. It is your subconscious mind helping out your conscious mind by processing information at phenomenal speed. Trust it and go with it. Experienced chess players don’t play just by analysing the pieces and logically working out moves. They hold thousands of patterns of chess moves in their subconscious and rely on the subconscious providing the right move. Have faith in your intuition so that if, for example, you are interviewing candidates for a job, look at their qualifications, listen to what they have to say at the interview, and harness your ‘gut feeling’ as to who is the best person for the job.
I sit on adoption panels whose purpose is to assess and approve those who want to adopt. Prospective adopters will have spent over two years being thoroughly vetted and assessed by a social worker; coming before the panel is the final hurdle before being approved and then adopting a child who needs a home. Recently, one couple who came before a panel I was sitting on seemed ideal candidates. They were in their early thirties, had a stable relationship, were aware of the issues facing adopted children and gave all the right answers to the questions the panel put to them. As is usual practice, they were asked to leave the room while the panel discussed their application. The panel consisted of ten, and eight of my colleagues were in favour of approving the couple, but I and one other person had reservations. For reasons we couldn’t properly explain my colleague and I felt the couple weren’t as committed as they appeared. We deliberated for half an hour (not unusual for an adoption panel) and my colleague and I were finally persuaded to go with the majority view – that the couple should be allowed to adopt.
Just as the chairperson was about to call the couple back into the room and tell them the good news, a knock sounded on the door. The couple’s social worker appeared, looking very embarrassed. She said she was very sorry but the couple had decided to withdraw their application as they had decided to try for a child of their own through IVF (in vitro fertilization). She was as shocked as anyone, as she had spent two years working with and assessing the couple and had had no doubt as to their commitment. Clearly my colleague and I, using our previous experience, had picked up non-verbal cues about the couple’s lack of commitment, though we couldn’t have said what these were.
2. Go with your first response. If you are faced with a decision, whether it is which dish to choose from a menu at a restaurant, which dress, sofa or car to buy, or which of two equally appealing job offers you should accept, then go with your first response. This choice will have been made as a result of previous experience and information which your brain has processed and stored. Intuition won’t always provide a solution when you are faced with a decision and often you will have to plough through conscious reasoning before you can make the decision, but when intuition obligingly provides you with the answer, take it and be grateful: your subconscious has saved you a lot of work.
3. Be creative. It is thought that intuition comes from the right side of the brain, which is where creativity flourishes. As I have already mentioned, creative people tend to be more intuitive, but the rest of us can catch up. To help strengthen your intuition, try new creative pastimes – writing, painting, dancing (alone if you don’t feel like joining a class or going clubbing), acting, landscaping your garden, redesigning a room, listening to music or better still playing a musical instrument. Anything that lifts you out of conscious thought to feel rather than think is creative and will develop your intuition.
4. Sleep on it. Sleep can encourage intuition. However, interpreting dreams should be treated with caution. There are many books claiming to interpret dreams but generally dreams are nature’s way of dealing with life experience – the subconscious cleansing the psyche ready for the next day. The answer to a problem may come in a dream but is more likely to come the following day after a good night’s sleep. The expression ‘I’ll sleep on it’ has real meaning, for often a solution that had perversely escaped us one day miraculously appears the next morning. It seems that while we sleep our subconscious mind processes information, forms ideas and makes decisions. Also the semi-awake state – as you drift into sleep or slowly surface from it – is a time when ideas are freed from the subconscious. If it is not practical for you to take the time to ‘sleep on it’, then try simply relaxing (with your eyes closed if possible) and letting your mind float free. Not only will this recharge your energy levels but it will open the pathway from your conscious mind to your subconscious. If an idea or solution pops into your mind while you are in this relaxed state, give it serious consideration, for it is likely to be a flash of insight.
Einstein summed up the relationship between conscious reasoning and intuition beautifully: The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift. So make the most of your mind on all levels, for it is truly a complex and wondrous gift.