Intuition

our unconscious mind has many hidden talents

Have you noticed how when you meet someone new, you have a gut feeling about them long before you can explain your reasons? Like really quickly, perhaps within a second even. This instant response makes sense when you think about it, because your ancestors had to decide friend or foe the instant they met a stranger. Reading someone quickly could make the difference between whether or not they survived.

We’re able to do that thanks to nerves between our eyes and ears and the brain’s emotional centres which bypass the cortex. So you jump at a strange sound, leaving the decision about whether the sound’s dangerous for later. We react emotionally in milliseconds, long before the conscious brain has had the time to interpret a potential threat.

We now know that our unconscious mind has many hidden talents like that. And that thinking and memory operate on two levels. Conscious thoughts are only part of the story, because unconscious and automatic processing accounts for most of our knowledge. We now know that we know much more than we know we know!

But the idea that much of our everyday thinking lies outside conscious awareness can be difficult to accept. Because it feels like our conscious mind is the boss. That’s wrong. Like when you’re walking along you don’t think at all about keeping your balance. Deep beneath your conscious awareness your subconscious is busily managing your legs to keep you on track. And if you see someone you know, you’ll happily smile a greeting without breaking stride. It’s like we have two minds. One for conscious awareness, the other for everything else, like walking.

Which means that our minds process information two ways. The conscious mind is logical, analyses every situation and selects the most rational decision. While our unconscious mind is intuitive, full of emotion and the here-and-now.

Intuition’s advantage is its quick decisions, such as assessing the potential threat from a stranger. It can feel like a hunch. Or the truth. A mental image, a solution to a problem, or a feelings of closeness to God. There may be physical sensations, such as tingly skin or a heavy stomach. It’s really your brain on autopilot, processing information outside of your awareness. Like when you’re walking somewhere, get lost in thought and find yourself arriving without knowing how you got there. You were navigating and avoiding the traffic, so obviously your brain was processing incoming information. You just weren’t aware of it.

But that effortless feeling of truth is often wrong. Like the gambler who believes he can control dice by how he throws them, even though the result’s actually pure chance.

Intuitions shape our anxieties, impressions and relationships. They influence the president’s judgements, a gambler’s bets and a CEO’s decisions. People often place an enormous amount of faith on their intuitions, even against all the available evidence. Like the coach who plays a second string player because he has a hunch he’ll do well. But how much trust should you put in them?

Well, you should be careful. Like people overestimate how much happier buying something will make them feel. Our intuition seems to be: ‘we want, we get, we’re happy’. Reality’s more complex. Even winning the lottery has less effect than most people imagine. And once you’re above the basic minimum, more possessions rarely make people happier.

But intuition IS important. It feeds our creativity, love and spirituality. Highly successful individuals make better use of their intuition than those who are less successful. And creative artists and craftsmen, who give free rein to fantasies and imagination, are also very intuitive.

But while it works well in some areas, it can lead us astray in others. Because it’s not very good at spotting flaws in the evidence. So our ancestors intuitively believed that the sun was circling the Earth. It took scientific observations to prove them wrong. We think dramatic and newsworthy events are more common than they are. We’re over-impressed by coincidences because we don’t notice the times when they fail to occur. We worry that people notice our appearance, behaviour and emotions much more than they actually do. So chances are you don’t like public speaking, because you think your nervousness is obvious. But it isn’t. And you think your spouse is picking up your subtle hints. No they’re not!

Mind you, conscious thinking, the ability to reflect on ourselves and our behaviour and to plan ahead, also has its drawbacks too. Because it’s easy to get stuck. To become obsessed with past events, or paralysed by fears about the future.

So intuition can be very valuable. Although we often disregard our intuitive gut-reactions to fall in with others’ judgements. That’s often a mistake. Just because you don’t know why you feel the way you do, doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

Like if you’re thinking of starting a business. What is it that makes you feel you’ll succeed? Usually it’s just something you know you have to do, because your intuition tells you so. OK, there’s loads of information around about how others have gone about it. Books, the internet and so on. But there are just so many aspects to starting a business that sometimes your feelings won’t make sense even to you. You just know it’s what you want to do.

In fact things often work like that in complex decisions. So the best way to tackle difficult choices isn’t always to think deeply about them. That works for simple decisions. But in more complex situations, it’s often better not to think at all! Because your conscious brain can only process a certain amount of information at a time. Which means that it loses the big picture when things get complicated. While your unconscious brain is constantly turning over all the information and sifting out the best options in the background, even though you’re unaware of it. So your unconscious mind’s more important than you think. Which is why experts somehow seem to make snap decisions that turn out to be correct. Like doctors for example. They have a wealth of knowledge, but don’t need to consciously work through it all to make an accurate judgement.

But that doesn’t mean that going purely on impulse is a good idea either. Especially about life-changing choices such as who you should marry. So a good plan is to carefully gather information, mull things over, and then relax and stop thinking about it. And then your intuition will make the best possible decision for you.