“There is in us something wiser than our head.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 1
Most people believe that conscious thought, guided by reason, is the best tool we have to learn about the world and to solve life’s problems. Yet, as Schopenhauer reminds us, there is something within us that transcends the power of reason, and which operates beyond the limits of self-reflective thought, and this is intuition. In this video we explore the nature of this faculty, uncover its profound power and examine how social, political, and technological forces are undermining our intuitive capacities.
The psychologist Carl Jung held a life-long fascination with the power of intuition. Along with sensation, thinking, and feeling, Jung identified intuition as one of the primary ways to gain knowledge about the world. Jung defined the first three of these functions as follows:
“Sensation tells us that a thing is. Thinking tells us what that thing is, feeling tells us what it is worth to us.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 18)
Intuition, according to Jung, is a more mysterious function that is difficult to define. Many cultures call intuition our sixth sense and how it guides us to truth and knowledge is not fully understood. What we do know is that intuition operates below the threshold of conscious awareness and Jung sometimes refered to it as “perception by the unconscious”. Intuition, in other words, weaves together a lifetime of experiences, the embodied knowledge of our physical self, and the innate wisdom of our psyche, to produce insights that our conscious mind could never have reached by itself. Or as Jung wrote:
“Intuition is an unconscious process in that its result is the irruption into consciousness of an unconscious content, a sudden idea or “hunch.” It resembles a process of perception, but unlike the conscious activity of the senses and introspection the perception is unconscious.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 8
Or as William James put it:
“If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits.”
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Intuitive insights, when they arise from the unconscious, are not only recognized in the form of explicit thoughts but are often felt as bodily experiences. For example, the gut is intimately tied to intuition, hence why a common term for an intuitive insight is a gut feeling. This should not be surprising as the gut, which is often referred to as the second brain, contains 95% of the body’s serotonin and approximately 200 to 600 million neurons, more than in the brain of a dog. And as Iain McGilchrist notes: “most of the neural traffic is from the gut to the brain, not the other way round.” (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Our intuitive capacities serve many functions, for example intuition is crucial to the discovery of new truths and new ways of interacting with the world. In fact, most of the great scientific discoveries and world-changing inventions come from intuitive insights rather than conscious deliberation or explicit reasoning. Or as the great French mathematician Henri Poincare put it:
“It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.”
Henri Poincaré, Science and Method
Creativity is highly reliant on intuition. Many artists, writers, and musicians credit the power of intuition for their success. For example, the musician Neil Young claimed that his best songs were not a product of conscious thought but were a product of tapping into his intuitive mind, or as he explains:
“When I write a song, it starts with a feeling. I can hear something in my head or feel it in my heart. It may be I just picked up the guitar and mindlessly started playing. That’s the way a lot of songs begin. When you do that, you are not thinking. Thinking is the worst thing for writing a song. So you just start playing and something new comes out. Where does it come from? Who cares? Just keep it and go with it.”
Neil Young, Costco Connection Interview
The use of intuition, however, goes far beyond creativity and the discovery of new truths. Rather our intuitive capacities are constantly at work in shaping our day-to-day experience. For example, intuition is crucial to social interaction. We consciously register only a small fraction of other people’s body language, vocal tone, and facial expressions. Most of what we apprehend socially is the result of unconscious processing and hence our first impressions as to whether we like or dislike someone, trust or distrust them, are primarily intuitive judgments. Or as McGilchrist writes:
“. . .impressions of other people are often surprisingly accurate even when formed on the basis of very brief exposures, through ‘very subtle, almost imperceptible, nonverbal cues … so subtle that they are neither encoded nor decoded at an intentional, conscious level of awareness.’”
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things
