Some people sense things and anticipate events. Especially events sparked by human action. A candidate has a perfect résumé and education profile for the job, but you sense something doesn’t quite match. The suspect tells agents how the heist unfolded, but they perceive the story is odd. Trained yogis can exit meditation at a precise given time without a timekeeper. Kung fu and Judo masters display dexterity in their movements that is almost hard to believe. You most likely have already met people who are good at “guessing” future events and numbers, and who can “read” people accurately. They are all intuitive people.
Intuition is often dismissed by professional people, especially those with many years of formal education. Years of training on pure rationality, logic, empiricism, and models tend to suppress confidence in perceptions captured by the basic senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Even those with high intuitive perception end up hiding it or learn to distrust their skills, as their peers tend to disregard such source of knowledge as too subjective to be credible. Oftentimes, intuitive people feel misunderstood and stop sharing their insight, as they cannot explain it themselves.
But intuition is not a supernatural, mystic superpower. Modern neuroscience can explain a phenomenon more common than we think. Pattern recognition at the subconscious level is the key to intuition. It’s not magic or metaphysical; it’s the rapid, unconscious processing of patterns, emotions, and past experiences. It also indicates that information processing and decision-making do not happen only in the brain. The billions of neurons in the digestive system, the array of hormones in our bodies, and the muscle automatism of learnt movements and emotional reactions might compose a wider system of information processing that runs in parallel with the rational, conscious mind.
The above hypothesis is not new. Neuroscientists are accumulating compelling evidence that memory is distributed across multiple locations in the body, and that most individual decisions are, in fact, unconscious. This is good news. Rationality is slow. Emotion and instinct are fast. Some people are better equipped than others. But as we better understand them, we can learn to use and trust these human superpowers for information-gathering and decision-making.
The Unconscious Skill 