Sunday, September 27, 2009
What I Learned
For a policy class I am taking, I have to read Sources of Power by... I don't remember and I'm too lazy to go look. But I learned something new, something that, for better or worse, expanded my world. I've always been interested in intuition and feel that I have a strong intuition about certain people, decisions or events. As it turns out, the book suggests intuition is an emotional response, not a "sixth sense" as people often like to attribute it to. It is an emotional response to the consequences of good or bad choices.
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3 comments:
I'd like to hear more about this. I too have strong intuition, but I don't really understand how it's an emotional response to good or bad choices. Care to elaborate?
Essentially, what the author was saying is that it is a biological function. A study was done with patients with brain injuries and it was found that they also had impaired intuition.
Intuition is an emotional response in that it is based upon your personal experience and patterns that you have learned within certain circumstances. They claim that patterns can be very subtle and we are constantly processing patterns in the environment in light of our experiences. So for instance, you might have a strong intuition that a person is trying to cheat you. This is because, although subtle, this experiences resembles another experience you have had in your past. Your feeling of mistrust is based on your past experiences. The emotional response comes to play when think about the consequences of doing business with this person. You don't trust them and the (subconscious) thought of making a bad choice causes you to feel uneasy. Conversely, if you sensed that someone had good business practices (ie: they matched prior experiences and patterns-- although you might not consciously process this) your intuition would tell you it is good to do business with them. The emotional response is a good feeling about the consequences of doing business with them. Does that make sense or is it just more confusing?
Makes sense. I'm not sure I totally agree, but I definitely understand now what he was trying to get at. Perhaps I disagree because of the spiritual component I'm used to relying upon. Is what I perceive as action of the Holy Spirit merely a biological response or is there room for the supernatural? Hmmmnn... This is perhaps where theology and logic have to take separate paths.
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