What’s behind intuition? Busting the myth about ‘activating’ it
When I was a kid, I was rolled over by a car when crossing a road in front of my old school’s main gate. I was about ten, and the workers that knocked me out took me immediately to the Clinic Hospital - I was murmuring it while trying to remember the multiplication table of number 7, which was the most difficult for me.
Once in the hospital, my mother, who worked as a nurse just a few floors above the ER gate, was waiting for me when the car arrived. How could this be possible? How did my mother know I was up to arrive?
Recently, there have been spaces where people like to discuss the notion of intuition and how to ‘activate’ it, just in case it represents a benefit in front of life. Of course, it would: imagine we just could know in advance what will happen shortly - an idea that has been gone through in films such as Minority Report. A society that can advance facts could react quicker and smarter, for example, in front of disasters such as the one that recently occurred in Valencia. Due to the fatal DANA and the consequent misery response of the local government, hundreds of deaths could be prevented.
If we look at each of us, it would be awesome to detect fast, or by nose, how things are or what will happen to better understand them or make better decisions. Intuition is intuitive per se: we understand something because we are clear of what it is, just like an epiphany. It works as well as a prediction, but we are not clear about the brain structure or what is behind it, despite trying to understand it! But wait, and please connect your curious eyes to the following: neuroscience has come over the topic in the last decade to shed some light on the prospect.
Do we have a clear idea of what intuition is?
Intuition can be approached from a cognitive view, which means, in some way, looking at how brain function works. In fact, in the 60s, Nobel prize winner Roger W. Sperry developed research with Michael Gazzaniga that led to one of the most prevalent theories explaining intuition: the split of hemispheres [1].
But that did not explain that much. We knew intuition may be located in one hemisphere but not in the other one. Great. This is why, until now, some people refer to themselves as left or right-handed.
The split brain model. Thankfully taken from the text of Shaina Rozen, at Work Life.
Research in 2013 using techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging revisited this idea and found no evidence that one brain hemisphere was more ‘active’ than the other. What they did was a smart approach: they measured their brain activity while resting, then swiped back the images, and after that, they measured again. They found some kind of lateralisation of some brain regions - some areas belonging to some local networks seem more prominent in one or the other hemisphere - but that was not compatible with saying one hemisphere is more predominant than the other as a whole [2].
Although being a leap that pointed out the phenomenon of intuition in the flourishing research of the brain, the fact is that we still need an explanation of
What it is;
What is useful for, and
How can we enhance it or take advantage? Just because that’s what we do with brain function, isn’t it?
I would like to point out that my intuitive idea about intuition relies on the fact that it is about experience. For example, you know that your brother is in love with comic books. —>You secretly steal one of them from his shelf. —>You read it while sipping a glass of orange juice in your bed.—> Balls the cat jumps out in the bed and spills the orange juice over your pyjama and the comic book. Then you intuitively know your brother will be mad at you, even if he’s not there at the moment to react in any given way and immediately. That’s why I think it comes from experience: the experience that your brother is angry when you take one of his comic books and ruin it.
For the Oxford English Dictionary, intuition is "the ability to understand or know something immediately, without conscious reasoning."
And where in the brain would you look for something settled on the informed judgement of facts – i.e. my brother gets angry when I take their comic books –? Yes, in the frontal cortex, where all the big stuff happens [3]. If we knew where intuition is, we could manipulate it!!! For example, with a magnet or a device that can electromagnetically potentiate brain function. For now, the field is still under development. More research would be great to know more about it. We’ll probably gain insight by settling on a good definition of what intuition is and what is not. Let me launch a bomb at the end of this paragraph: what if it is not in the brain but something coming from outside the body, where we are all connected? Why not?
But for sure, we still cannot ‘activate’ it. Maybe one could barely rely on it if it worked in the past, which may be only available for highly clear minds. For the rest of us, we should just beware of relying always on intuition.
A quick tip to take home is that intuition comes fast to mind, while other thoughts come slower and are more diffuse. My remaining question is whether what my mother had in his mind during my accident was intuition or something even more mysterious and further complex.
Yes, mystery is one of my favourite words. If intuition is intuitive, the mystery is mysterious itself.
To know more
1. Sperry RW. Hemisphere disconnection and unity in conscious awareness. Am Psychol. 1968 Oct;23(10):723-33. doi: 10.1037/h0026839. PMID: 5682831.
2. Volz KG, von Cramon DY. What neuroscience can tell about intuitive processes in the context of perceptual discovery. J Cogn Neurosci. 2006 Dec;18(12):2077-87. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2006.18.12.2077. PMID: 17129192.
3. Zander T, Öllinger M, Volz KG. Intuition and Insight: Two Processes That Build on Each Other or Fundamentally Differ? Front Psychol. 2016 Sep 13;7:1395. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01395. PMID: 27679592; PMCID: PMC5020639.
