Intuition: learning without awareness

Synopsis: [You might view the earlier post “Intuition: comfort with ambiguity” before this.] The insight is quick, bypassing logic. The survival of the species through adversity proves its effectiveness.

Intuition allows a direct cognitive understanding and operates at many levels - physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

Immediate knowledge

It’s a far superior source of knowing than logical reason – and far more rapid. The insight bypasses analytic logic.

Intuition is defined as:

Immediate knowledge, as in perception or consciousness, distinguished from "mediate" knowledge, as in logical reasoning.

For example, we know that black is not white, or that a square peg won’t fit a round hole. But we can’t explain how we know so we call it a hunch, a gut feeling, or even luck.

Best practice?

Following ‘best practice’ became important in organizational life to preserve continuity and sameness. But global change has turned the world into a village increasing the heterogeneity that people now have to work with.

Society and the business organization need to relate to diverse people, in constituent demographic groups and customers. Among differences of age, culture, religion, and nationality, ‘tunnel’ vision and single-file progressions appear not to work too well.

It then becomes difficult to determine whether the erstwhile best practice can be relied on in new circumstances.

Adaptive behaviour

Theorists argue that instinctual reasoning was the only available daily intelligence that helped people in ancient times deal with the unknown.

In the uncertain circumstances they lived in, responses had to be instantaneous. Too many predators were about and there was no time to ponder laboriously over logical choice. They needed to correctly interpret sounds and movements to be able to survive.

Distilled knowledge

Experiential learning made unconditioned reflexes conditioned behaviour. These behaviour patterns, free of hesitation and doubt, eventually stored in memory as adaptive instincts.

In time they distilled as our intuition. The rapid route of thinking activates stored procedural knowledge, and quite unconsciously, we’re able to perform.

Feeling for order

Intuition is the “root” of all discoveries. Many noted scientists and Nobel Prize winners acknowledge knowing the answers before, working out the problems later. Said Einstein:

There is no logical way to the discovery of elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by the feeling for order lying behind appearance.

Intuition has a more global role to play in social intelligence, because people are far more unpredictable than things. It’s said that it takes less intelligence to land a man on the moon than it does to resolve the conflict of a married couple!

The learning

The ability to intuit is now considered innate. It represents our learning without awareness. Centred on person or thing, the ‘picture’ is built from elements obtained from generalized explorations on a wide horizon.

This real form of knowledge is critical for effective decision-making. It works through our emotions to provide the crucial understanding. The survival of species proves its effectiveness.

Comments/opinions anyone??

Intuition: comfort with ambiguity

Synopsis: Intuitive thinking has been considered relationship-based, ‘female type’ thinking. Women may be more adept at multitasking, looking beyond the obvious and in managing a variety of situations.


With discovery of two hemispheres in the brain in the twentieth century, functional dualism was theorized along gender lines.

The dual modes

The logic mode of the left hemisphere was perceived as the rational ‘masculine’ consciousness, task-based and academically brilliant.

The insight mode of the right hemisphere was looked upon as the intuitive ‘feminine’ consciousness that is relationship-based.

Feminine competency?

Insight bases on divergent thinking and inductive logic. But whether intuition (or rationality) is intrinsic to gender is still debated.

For example, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was mediocre academically. Yet he possessed "a zigzag lightning of the brain" that was universally admired.

Again, Indian littérateur Rabindranath Tagore went on to be a Nobel laureate, and two sovereign countries, India and Bangladesh have adopted his compositions as their national anthems. He created a university although he himself avoided formal schooling.

The non-rational way

Intuition or instinct isn’t irrational, but rather a non-rational, holistic way of thinking that forms the big picture from only a few dots.

The involvement with home, family and social connections could make women more adept at looking beyond the obvious, multitasking and managing a variety of situations at the same time.

So they appear more comfortable with ambiguity, better at decoding emotional messages, in nonverbal sensitivity, and in communicative verbal skills.

Stress responses

Unknown variables raise new levels of incompetence in people and performance falters. The resultant stress can cause unthinking responses, like:

• Panic is thinking too little, losing touch with situation and context and operating by some remote instinct to simply survive.
• Choking is thinking too much, losing touch with instinct and becoming tentative, approaching the job like a beginner, second-guessing oneself.
  

Stress conditions generally include emotional outpourings of fear and anger. They do also lead to irrational behaviours.

Hence ‘emotions’ have become connotatively associated - although it’s more accurate to equate ‘stress’ with ‘irrational’.

Systemic discomfort

Rationalism faces uncertainty in handling unknown variables. In interpersonal issues, motivation, and teamwork conflicts arise, producing hesitation, vacillation and emotional stress. The process of adaptation requires new learning.

But stress confuses the mind and shuts off reasoning. The decisional strategies adopted are reactive and only to alleviate the systemic discomfort.

People forced to think on their feet in uncertain circumstances might gamble on certain solutions working for them. Or they may become too overwhelmed by situation and context to make informed choices. They may also avoid taking a decision altogether by procrastinating or passing the buck.

Intuition rediscovered

An effective decision then seems a lucky strike. In a world of rapid change, multitasking and social skills have become keys requisite of ability because resources, including time, are now limited.

In its quest for the competitive edge, enterprise latched onto social intelligence as key in the global interactive process. Intuition, the “feminine” side of mind, has thus been rediscovered.

Cont’d 2…learning without awareness

Rationalism: problems with change

Synopsis: [You might view the earlier post “Rationalism: the base on reason” before this.] The focus became active, even aggressive control of the environment. However, as the globalization of business transcended international boundaries, serious inadequacies of the traditional ‘masculine’ leadership began to show up.

Rationalism meant that other (disruptive) influences had to be prevented from invading logical reasoning. Behaviourally, there was resistance to change, hence the focus on active, even aggressive control.

Sharpening the mind

The cone of consciousness trained the mind to think deeply about one thing at a time, avoiding all ‘interference’ that intuition might provide. The attempt was to separate fantasy from reality.

To sharpen the mind, anything to do with ‘instinct’ was thus consciously, consistently blocked out of the thinking process.

Techno-intelligence

The index of intelligence then was based on mathematics and verbal language. This assumption still holds in academic circles it originated in.

The orderly, systematized, familiar world – as closed systems – has been instrumental in advancements of science and technology.

The use of tools, the development of language helped people to adapt to the environment and act upon it.

The idea soon became that the environment too was controllable, and subject to man’s will. The goal was set of mastering the universe for a secure, stable and predictable ambience.

One-tracked excellence

Oral and written traditions alone would allow the transfer of information. The belief became that one-tracked pursuit of excellence leads to superior intelligence and thereby superior decision-making and problem solving.

Rationality was meant to have been as effective in corporate circles as it was in the academics, and within limits of social homogeneity, it can be so for sometime.

Effects of time

However, problems arise with time.

As the globalization of business transcends international boundaries, the dependence on rationality in transnational mergers and acquisitions ends in disaster.

Time ensures that nothing ever remains the same. Every society also sees change evolving at various different levels, including education and work for women and minorities, and rising diversity in society and the workplace.

Inadequacies

Thence, against serious environmental challenges, inadequacies of the traditional ‘masculine’ leadership begin to show up.

Under the rule of rationality, social development doesn’t keep pace with the advancements of technology. Consistently logical, speech-promoted intelligence fails in diverse social interactions. In unfamiliar situation and context, one-tracked thinking, decision-making and problem solving proves ineffective.

By the turn of the millennium it became clear that rational analytical thinking moves ponderously, and arrives too late for a 24-hour global marketplace.

Comments/opinions anyone??

Rationalism: the base on reason

Synopsis: By the seventeenth century BC, the mind of man ruled over matter, which otherwise operated by emotions and instincts. Women were viewed as predisposed to this “irrational”, i.e., emotions, instincts, and fancies.


The word 'rational' has been used to describe numerous theories, especially those concerned with truth, reason and knowledge, including those religious and philosophical.

Consistent logic

Rationality refers to a particular way of thinking.

It has been defined as:

The quality of being consistent with or based on logic; the belief or principle that actions and opinions should be based on reason rather than on emotion or religion; the kind of thinking we would all want to do, if we were aware of our own best interests, in order to achieve our goals.

Dominating life

In the fifth and sixth centuries BC, Greek philosophers decided that more than the gods, the mind of man dominated life.

By the seventeenth century, the idea of dualism was adopted, where mind and body were perceived as split horizontally, separate and independent of each other.

Rationality became the key feature separating humans from animals, and the way to go to achieve life goals.

Mind, accounting for thought naturally ruled over matter, which otherwise operated by emotions and instincts.

The irrational

Anything empirically unexplainable, unverifiable, was attributed to luck or blessings of the gods. Instincts or intuition was considered irrational and concerned with mere physical survival progressively alien to man's regulated world.

Deductive reasoning through analyses of accumulated data gradually became the canon of cognitive ability – “rationalism” in the dominant image of man.

Connotations

Hence, man was said to be rational.

But women, concentrated on child-raising and family life and generally kept away from other more "cerebral" activities, were viewed as predisposed to this “irrational”, i.e., emotions, instincts, and fancies, seen as evolutionary vestiges.

The words thus imbibed connotative associations with gender.

Cont’d 2…problems with change

Effective decisions: the cutting edge

Synopsis: [You might view the earlier post “ Effective decisions: the intelligent ability” before this.] Thinking, when assisted by emotions, leads to better choosing. The intuitive mind, with its innate ‘trigger’ of emotion, makes the tough choices come right.


People tend to distrust emotions believing them to be irrational outpourings that create stress and disrupt proceedings.

Better judgement

But, being unemotional and at the other end of the continuum, is just as disruptive.

In fact, among the many crucial cross-cultural associations, mergers and acquisitions that happened over the last decade or so, at least two-thirds turned out failures.

Not because financial or logical analyses were off the mark, but as a matter of ignorance about culture and emotion. Thinking, when assisted by emotions, leads to better judgement. Passion (another word for emotion) introduces the cutting edge to cognition.



Generalizing

How do emotions really act? First, they help to identify things, generalizing understanding between different centres of the brain.

Experiments with the “split brain” (separated left and right brain hemispheres) showed that even subtle shades of emotion generated in the right hemisphere by a stimulus known only to it, can get across to help the isolated left hemisphere ‘guess’ the nature of what it could be.

Reduce overload

Researchers at the University of Waterloo explained that positive and negative emotions actually reduce the pressure of information overload in complex social situations.

Emotions signal what one really cares about. Pleasure or excitement about a particular action proves that its possible outcomes are genuinely important.

Negative emotions also help to narrow down alternatives in option selections. Action processes associated with strong negative emotional feelings will be rejected at the outset, reducing the burden of computation.

The emotional base ensures that the decisions and their goals are inherently significant.

Speed scans


Thence, in our decision-making processes, emotions slash the:

• number of alternatives evaluated
• time taken for considering each.
  

In uncertain or threatening situations in our evolutionary past, speed scans or quick environmental surveys ensured survival. Our intuitive mind carries the ability forward to the present day.

The intuitive trigger

Our intuition is thus critical to our decisions in adapting to unknown or unfamiliar situations and contexts.

The quick grasp of a problem and its implications by this rapid route of thinking helps us understand and assess issues, decide between options and then act upon the right selection.

The intuitive mind, with its innate ‘trigger’ of emotion, helps make the tough choices come right.

Comments/Opinions Anyone??

Effective decisions: the intelligent ability

Synopsis: The common assumption is that important decisions need the most rationality. But being stuck on ‘logic’ doesn’t guarantee the best choice.


Decisions, important or unimportant, are made throughout the day. The common assumption is that the more important they are, the most rationality is need.

So smart, so dumb

But ‘common assumption’ may be wrong. Psychologists noticed that an academically brilliant politician persistently made whopping errors in functional social relations.

How could somebody so smart be so dumb? Their answer – his ‘intelligence’ lacked the requisite emotional quotient for effective social interactions.

Another intelligence

In other words, being stuck on logic doesn’t guarantee the best choice. Astute decision-making must include ‘intelligence’ of another kind – emotional.

This is defined as the ability to:

• perceive, appraise and express emotions accurately
• access and generate feelings to facilitate cognitive activities
• understand emotion-relevant concepts and use emotion-relevant language
• manage one's own emotions
• manage emotions of others
  

And in the process one promotes growth, wellbeing, and functional social relations between self and others. This, the highly intelligent individual was quite unable to do, and hence his political career sank.

Findings of choice

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam went so far as to hypothesize that routine issues need conscious thought, but those that are vital don’t.

The hypothesis was confirmed in four studies, in the laboratory and also among actual shoppers, on simple and complex consumer purchase choices.

From their experimental findings, the researchers concluded that:

Simple choices…indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but choices in complex matters … should be left to unconscious thought.

Go with gut

That is, quite in reverse to common assumption, unimportant decisions (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) can be thought about rationally.

But important decisions (such as between different houses or different cars) need the assistance of emotions, and inputs from the intuitive mind.

Bottom line – for effective decision-making, it’s better to tune in to gut feelings.

Cont’d 2…the cutting edge