What is intuition and how important is it?

[Heyo]

I think of intuition as ability to do something that you haven't been taught but know to do.

I may have explained that wrong. I don't think that intuition is something you have been taught, it is something you have experienced. If you've grown up with animals or observed them, you pick up on subtle signs in their body language, and you know if they are friendly or hostile. That's not something you've been taught, you've just observed it.

 

[Foxfyre]

I may have explained that wrong. I don't think that intuition is something you have been taught, it is something you have experienced. If you've grown up with animals or observed them, you pick up on subtle signs in their body language, and you know if they are friendly or hostile. That's not something you've been taught, you've just observed it.

And I see observing and learning as education, not intuition that allows you to do something you haven't been taught and have not previously observed. But obviously there could also be some overlap between those two things.

 

[Whateverist]

In my opinion intuition is something some people are gifted with and others not so much. I don't think it is something that can be acquired. You either have it or you don't.

Who knows but the author of the book I quote in the OP has a basic theory of why the two hemispheres of our brain (and that of every other creature with a brain or central neuronal mass) is divided down the middle. In the 70's there was a lot of pop psychology which came out of the famous split brain operations for people with such severe epilepsy that they would have to sever the connection between the two hemispheres to prevent the seizures from spreading unrelentingly. Back then they just made guesses about what functions each side was in charge of and everyone assumed the left side was most important because when that side suffered a lesion people lost the ability to speak.

But what the right side did wasn't as well understood. Turns out it is by far more important for making sense of the one's world. When that suffers a lesion people tend to see other people as robots with very little empathy. His theory is basically that the hemispheres evolved to attend to the world in different ways; basically the left hemisphere exists to attend narrowly to what is familiar to get what is already known to be important while the right hemisphere attends broadly to everything else. Broadly, the left side is for getting dinner, the right side is for avoiding becoming some other creature's dinner.

So the right side actually takes in much more of the world than the left but we are only aware of that through intuition. The left brain keeps an eye out for what is already known and of use. Some of us naturally come to value intuition which is helpful for creativity, problem solving and for getting the kind of big picture which can lead to breakthroughs in theory. Ideally you develop both. This video was my introduction to his ideas, though of course the books are far more developed.

 

[Madsaac]

I think intuition is a type of thinking, humans have various levels of thinking and intuition is one of them.

And like all things, it's different for all people because we are made from different genetics and have different experiences.

Its all natural and simply part of being human. All be it, a very complicated aspect of being human, how the brain works

 

[Whateverist]

I think of intuition as something along the lines of a 'gut feeling' or a 'hunch'. Like when people are playing poker. They don't know what cards they will draw, and they don't what their opponents have. They might look at their opponents, perhaps by their facial expressions or other behavioral quirks which might lead them to believe that they're bluffing.

This goes back to the comment about what Nietzsche said about the wisdom of the body. We are our body of course and in intuition we are tuning into the world more broadly than we do with our narrow beam of conscious attention which reflects what we prioritize with our left hemisphere for practical reasons. But if we are ever to make new connections in our understanding it will come by taking in the wider view of what the right hemisphere allows us to access. But we can never entirely commandeer and bring it under the narrow beam of conscious attention, leastwise we can only access a little at a time and the connections will often be missed.

But I see it the same way about poker, reading other people's expressions and mannerisms is a big part of the game. But to do it effectively we can't be going down a checklist. We need to take it in as a whole and that means intuitively.