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| Category: Continuing Education |
Date published: June 21, 2007 |
When was the last Gut Reaction you followed? Some folks get scared of their feelings, and run back to logical analysis before they act. Yet, intuition (gut feelings) is Homo sapiens most ancient form of intelligence. It came way before deductive thinking to solve problems.
You are here because your savannah living ancestors were not removed from the gene pool by natural selection or as a tasty meal by a predator, right?
Before we got a Neocortex, humans lived or died by our Reptilian (instincts) complex, and later by the addition of the Limbic (emotional) system. All decisions including when to migrate, following the alpha male or challenging him for leadership, even what to eat or ignore, were decided by our Gut and Feelings.
Teddy Roosevelt said, Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. When all you have is a Reptilian brain, make it work for you and your progeny. When we have access to all worldly knowledge at your fingertips, do we make better decisions?
Benefits
When we look around at civilization we are convinced we see the work of our left (thinking) brain in science and logic. If you study the 4th century C.B.E Greeks, Einstein, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you discover their monumental ideas emanated from their intuition, not linear, orderly reason.
We are convinced by what reaches our consciousness (left hemisphere), and ignore and distrust what is nonconscious, our right hemisphere. Intuition is right brained knowledge and is suspect.
Please Take Notice: our left brain, the one with the public relations staff, can process up to 60 bits of information per second. The non-verbal hemisphere without publicity runs 11 million bits of info per second. Who is the boss of you?
Our ancestors needed fast answers without access to Google, before they smell the foul breath of the Big Cat and felt teeth biting into their windpipe. No time for conscious thinking, even if they possessed it.
Speech
Consciousness is new, starting around 540,000 years old. Only after our Neocortex did we gain speech, about 250,000 years ago. We split from apes about 5 million years ago and slapped King Kong into zoos we built. Speech gave birth to writing and reading only about 6,200 years ago. We are the new kid on the block.
The use of both hemispheres, though acknowledging only our left-brain, improved our eyes, hand dexterity and decision making. We became a techno-psycho-motor personality by continuing to use intuition (gut reaction) together with logic and reason.
It is a fact that left-brain intelligence processing became dominant at the expense of intuition. Today we are 95% left-brain. However, fight-or-flight, and dangerous experiences veto our left-brain in favor of our original survival instincts.
Has Homo sapiens adapted to the environment or vice-versa? Where there was wide rivers, we created bridges; a landmass of forests has given way to vertical urban areas. Oh yeah, Pithecanthropus erectus (our savannah ancestors) is 4.5 million years old. Thinking in the last quarter of a million years is a newbie.
Conscious
We are alert, vertical and coping about 16 hours daily. During sleep, daydreaming and meditation, our intuition creeps out from conscious silence to activity. There are ways to excite the benefits of nonconsciousness, yet it is vital to protect concentration, attention and focused thinking. We have filters, censors and gatekeepers to protect our left-brain and its thinking process. Modern man does not set great store by his deductive reasoning; he/she relies on habit, custom (memes) and the TV culture. You do not have to be intimately acquainted with the Meaning of Life, or your Purpose in the universe, in order to cope successfully in civilized society.
If you were required to fix the engine of your car to be eligible to drive to work and back, there would be two-hundred million more pedestrians. Civilization is the great equalizer for those without hard knowledge. Good, more time to learn. Teddy R also said, I am part of everything I read.
Last Roosevelt quote, No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort. Was he suggesting great ideas were based on intuition? The more your core knowledge and your experiences, study and observation, the greater your intuition coming from your right-brain.
Hunch
How do you decide between choices? Who to hire? Which firm to use for advertising? Should you structure your organization this way or that? Benny Franklin wrote a program back in the 1770s called Prudential Algebra to make logical choices. It required listing the pros and cons, maybe weighting each, and counting up your reasons.
Are you decisions logic based or highly influenced by your feelings? If you are part of the 99%, you choose emotionally and justify yourself with reasons. The ancient Greeks screamed out, Eureka, (I found it), we call it the Aha moment. Don't you get that certain internal confirmation when you know the answer?
Do you denigrate intuition by calling it flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants? Is your hunch required to get started; to decide if the project turns you on? How about at a dividing point of no return? How do you decide?
When you are done with the fruits of your (team's) labors, is the result what you predicted? Serendipity: accidental discovery of something fortunate, particularly when searching for something totally different.
Your computer was created to be a fancy adding machine. The Internet was developed for government agencies to communicate. Our intuition is still the caldron for unexpected results.
Endwords
Is there a schema to improve your intuition? What move your right-hemisphere into action and temporary dominance? We suggest life-long-learning to improve your core knowledge. Speed Reading, using your peripheral vision to read and remember, three books, articles and reports in the time your competitors can hardly finish one, leads to greater intuitive skills.
See ya,
copyright 2007,
H. Bernard Wechsler,
hbw@speedlearning.org
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