I had always thought of intuition as some mystical force that gives you guidance or an important answer when you least expect it. It just didn’t seem solid enough (at times) to follow. An idea or answer to a question would just pop into my brain and I just couldn’t see how that could be right. So I was watching another episode of “Brain Games” on NatGeo and they made an interesting comment about intuition.
“Intuition is your mind solving the problem so fast that you can’t count the steps it took to get you there.”
There was my problem. Because I couldn’t scrutinize every step, every problem solving technique I used to get there, I couldn’t trust it. Your brain is constantly doing behind-the-scenes work. It is an amazing piece of biological anatomy. Your brain can do more calculations in one millisecond than the fastest super computer can do in 40 minutes!
I actually wrote a short-story about a race of aliens harvesting humans to use their brains like computer chips. I wrote it two decades before the matrix used people for their energy (like batteries). But it’s interesting to see how we can be perceived as far more valuable at a basic level than we think.
Getting back to intuition, it is your brain working so fast with all your given resources that it gives you the answer. And we should learn to listen to it. We should cultivate it. I’m a huge advocate of what we can do to better ourselves through evolutionary techniques. Laying around, staring at a TV or phone screen is not one of them. But if you want your children’s children to be smarter than the average bear, trying enhancing your intuition. It’s more than just a gut “feeling”. It’s your brain working at light speed.
I found this great article on the web about things you can do to help understand and illuminate your own intuition.
Check it out:
Joseph "Peppi" Vecchio 