Some examples of intuition at work
All right, I suppose that it’s time for an example or two of what I’ve been on about.
First, let’s take the example of the people not getting on trains. A study in 1960 of train crashes over a 5 year period (1950-55) showed that on most days when there were accidents, the number of passengers on the train was significantly less than usual. In one case the average was 65 passengers, and on the day of the crash there were only 9. This seems to point out that there were a lot of people avoiding those trains in one way or another.
Then there’s the Titanic. A very dramatic and well-known disaster. But what is less well-known is that she sailed with only 58% of her total capacity of passengers. Many people cried off in the weeks prior to her sailing.
What about Aberfan? In 1966, this small Welsh village suffered a huge loss when a hill of coal waste slid down and buried the school. 28 adults and 116 children were killed.
It was found that for two weeks prior to the accident people had feelings of depression, feelings of gasping or choking, children running and screaming, coal dust and black clouds.
It seems that there are many people with the ability to know something in advance, even if they are not able to make that knowledge clear, or understand it fully. This is what intuition often is.
These examples also make it clear that areas such as precognition and premonition are also somehow related to intuition. Perhaps they are merely different aspects of the same thing.
Maybe intuition is much bigger than we think.
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Hi Nigel,
Great post.
I’ve noticed a lot of lazy thinking and misinformation when it comes to INTUITION.
The New Age community are particularly quick to credit
INTUITION to explain what is often INSTINCT.
Here’s how I see the difference…
My dictionary defines INSTINCT as “a natural or innate impulse, inclination, or tendency.” So what the dictionary is implying is that INSTINCT is both NATURAL and INNATE (a function of the intellect).
INSTINCT is not supernatural in any way. It’s just your
unconscious mind rapidly computing millions of variables in the blink of an eye; what Malcolm Gladwell calls thinking without thinking’ in his book “Blink”.
INTUITION, on the other hand, could be thought of as ‘knowing without knowing’. My dictionary defines it as “the direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process.” In other words, INTUITION does NOT involve any conscious mental process.
So, we can loosely distinguish INSTINCT as a NATURAL process of rapid thought and INTUITION as a SUPERNATURAL process of knowing.
Any comments?
Bruce Muzik
I agree. There’s a lot of lazy thinking around and it applies to this area just as much as anywhere else.
However, I am not so sure I would classify intuition as supernatural. I would tend to place it entirely in the natural category as I believe it is something we all have access to as it is part of who and what we naturally are. I do, though, understand the difference you are making in your post.
I think it does boil down in some ways to how we think of ‘being human’. There’s far more to it than mere anatomy adn physiology and it doesn’t have to include the spiritual. I really do believe we operate at way below our possible efficiency as humans and , if we could combine both the rational and intuitive aspects of ourselves (and develop the latter), we would surprise ourselves a whole lot more!
Thanks for your comment.