When ideas and judgments surface unbidden to offer sudden insights into people and problems, we describe them as intuition. Although we cannot always rationalize them, intuitions often carry a sense of conviction, suggesting they may be based on memory.
Intuition could be described as a mysterious phenomenon in daily use – our many and varied experiences of it range from a lucky guess in a quiz show to an apparent premonition or paranormal experience. Suppose, for example, a mother has a sudden sense of her son being in danger and then later finds that he was, at that moment, involved in a car accident. She might well interpret the event as evidence of a mysterious intuition at work. She would, of course, be disregarding the many times her flashes of anxiety proved groundless. But while we may question the authenticity of suspicions, the existence of intuition is not in doubt.
Rooted in empathy
Most of our more prosaic experiences of intuition are thought to be based on unconscious memory – skills, abilities, and perceptions that are not consciously accessed from memory, but that influence much of what we do. For example, one of the most common forms of intuition is empathy, a sense that we know how someone is feeling or even that we are sharing the sensation or emotion. Usually, we are unable to express how we are doing this or point to any obvious clues to the person’s emotional state: we are implicitly – rather than explicitly – recognizing cues.
An intense form of empathy underlies parental intuition, partly because parents learn to read the fine details of their children’s behavior but also because – either through imitation or inheritance – parents and children are likely to share similar forms of emotional expression. As Charles Darwin commented, some expressions of emotion are common to the whole of humanity, and our ability to recognize them in others may be innate.
Darwin observed the reactions of his six-month-old son when his nurse pretended to cry and reported: ‘I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly depressed … it seems to me that an innate feeling must have told him that the pretended crying of his nurse expressed grief, and this through the instinct of sympathy excited grief in him.’
Experience and expertise
As we gain experience in acting on our natural intuitions, they become further refined through mistakes and successes until we become experts in the activities that we practice the most. An experienced salesperson, for example, closes many more deals than a novice because he or she knows exactly when to apply the pressure, when to walk away, leaving the clients to their thoughts, and when to produce the contract and the pen. Similarly, an accomplished stand-up comedian knows how to ‘work’ the audience sitting in the half-darkness beyond the footlights and negotiate the risky territory between ‘dying’ on stage and bringing the house down. When asked, such experts may describe some con sci ous strategies that contribute to a successful performance, but much of the time, they will intuitively know what to do without knowing how or why they do it. Expert performance in any domain is likely to be a combination of conscious tactics that induce a feeling of being in control and intuitions based on implicit memory.
The Choice Between Fact Or Feeling
A couple of versions of the popular television quiz show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ revealed some interesting differences in the way women and men typically approach quiz questions. Given a question with four possible answers, several of the women sweetened, happy to base their choice on hunches that ‘just felt right, while their husbands were often reluctant to answer unless they knew the facts. Several couples left with half the sum they might have won because they had not acted on the woman’s intuition, which turned out to be correct.
The capacity for unconscious mercury does not differ between the sexes, so men and women should experience equal feelings of certainty and uncertainty about possible answers. Where they often seem to differ is in their willingness to rely on these feelings. Since Intuitions that are based on unconscious memory are often (although certainly not always) correct, it is possible but far from certain that women may be more successful gamblers in circumstances like these.
