Intuition

Have you ever had that feeling that you know certain things that you never knew about a second ago? like a whisper in you ear? could it be your gut talking? I've never been let down by my intuition, in fact I have a very good one. There are times where I wish it wasn't so conquering. I'm currently confused with two emotions on a certain situation...is it my gut telling me this or my wishful thinking? I think I'll go with my gut this time. to be continued...I will keep you updated. Anyway, If you are wondering why I'm saying "this time" it's simply because I put my intuition to test recently. To be honest, I didn't want to listen to it. I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt.play with fire or just prove myself right like a challenge.."aaaah HA! I told you Julie." wrong, wrong decision. I knew something was wrong with that person, I knew there was something off about them, I just couldn't put my finger on it. Instead of letting it go, I wanted to know what it was. Sure enough, my wings got burned. Although, it made me stronger as a person and I got the answer I needed and the response was clear like a marker on a paper: PERSON TO NOT BE TRUSTED. I've had a lot of experiences where I just knew this party was trouble, or maybe I should just call a cab...whatever it might be I wanted to learn more about intuitions and I found a pretty good article on it. To spare you the 3 pages long, here's the best of it. enjoy.

Gut Almighty Intuition really does come from the gut. It's also a kind of matching game based on experience. There are times when trusting your gut is the smartest move—and times you'd better think twice. By Carlin Flora, published on May 01, 2007 - last reviewed on June 21, 2011 Intuitions, or gut feelings, are sudden, strong judgments whose origin we can't immediately explain. Although they seem to emerge from an obscure inner force, they actually begin with a perception of something outside—a facial expression, a tone of voice, a visual inconsistency so fleeting you're not even aware you noticed.

 Experience is encoded in our brains as a web of fact and feeling. When a new experience calls up a similar pattern, it doesn't unleash just stored knowledge but also an emotional state of mind and a predisposition to respond in a certain way. Imagine meeting a date who reminds you of loved ones and also of the emotions you've felt toward those people. Suddenly you begin to fall for him or her. "Intuition," says Linhares, "can be described as 'almost immediate situation understanding' as opposed to 'immediate knowledge.' 

Understanding is filled with emotion. We don't obtain knowledge of love, danger, or joy; we feel them in a meaningful way." Encased in certainty, intuitions compel us to act in specific ways, and those who lack intuition are essentially cognitively paralyzed. Psychologist Antoine Bechara at the University of Southern California studied brain-damaged patients who could not form emotional intuitions when making a decision. They were left to decide purely via deliberate reasoning. "They ended up doing such a complicated analysis, factoring everything in, that it could take them hours to decide between two kinds of cereal," he says.

 It's time to declare an end to the battle between gut and mind—and to the belief that intuitions are parapsychological fluff. Better to explore how the internalized experiences from which gut feelings arise best interact with the deliberate calculations of the conscious mind. Many of us are sure we could never be deceived, and yet our gut instincts about people's veracity are usually off. "We don't pay enough attention to all the channels of communication, and we believe what we want to believe," says Maureen O'Sullivan, professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco. 

There are no set rules to follow in order to improve your fib-spotting—liars do not necessarily avoid eye contact, for example. But you can ask yourself questions, such as whether the person you are sizing up is deviating from his or her typical repertoire of behaviors. Though you may not reach wizard status, anyone can improve general interpersonal intuition. Simply put, if you are highly motivated to understand people, your intuitions about them will be better. Take Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science and computer science at Indiana University, who has spent his life trying, he says. After all, he creates models of the human mind. "I'm deeply curious about what makes people do certain things. I am somebody who spends a great deal of time trying to understand what the real reasons for their behavior are." Even so, Hofstadter emphasizes the importance of not prematurely closing your mind when it comes to intuitions about people and their motivations. "You have to test these cautiously. When you have confirmation—then you can make the daring leap," he says, whether it's telling your friend that you suspect she's getting divorced for the wrong reason or confronting your boyfriend about what you think are fabrications.

We've all heard stories of couples who "just knew" the moment they met that something serious was going to develop between them. (David Myers, professor of psychology at Hope College and the author of Intuition, had that feeling about a young woman as a teenager; they've been married for more than 40 years now.) The heart has reasons which reason does not know, said the philosopher Blaise Pascal. But maybe the "heart" is governed by the unconscious emotional pattern matching that produces intuitions. Bechara describes the phenomenon as an overall feeling that someone would be "good for you," perhaps even irrespective of passion. "It's tapping into your unconscious and triggering prior emotional experiences. We need to trust that this is a survival system that has evolved to our benefit," he says