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??