Brain and Intuition

Recently there seems to be an uptick of interest in the function of intuition. Many individuals have had an intuitive flash of insight or gut awareness of something that had not yet occurred—only to have that insight or gut awareness proven later on to be correct. The common belief has been that intuition was primarily a function of the brain or mind. How to explain what has happened, however, is a horse of a different color. What is intuition? There are many definitions floating around. An article published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine defines intuition as a process by which information that is normally outside the range of cognitive processes is immediately sensed and perceived in the body and mind as certainty of knowledge or feeling about the totality of a thing distant or yet to happen. This experience is very different from the processing of normal awareness that occurs incrementally. Intuition is a sense of the whole all at the same time. It can generate a positive sense of excitement or a negative sense of dread. More in the next blog.