What Is Intuition?
Intuition is often hyped up as something mystical that only a few people possess. Some call it a gut feeling. Some call it a sixth sense. Others call it an evolutionary instinct. There is no precise definition that adequately explains intuition.
Intuition is something everybody has experienced. We have often been saved from making bad decisions because we had a feeling about something and chose to follow it. Over time, people began to believe that intuition is the universe guiding your hand. It’s your heart telling you what your mind was refusing to acknowledge. As if the mind were a stupid organ.
If it were merely a gut feeling, it couldn’t always be relied upon. Feelings are fleeting, and you often have no idea why they arise in the first place. That feeling in your gut is usually attributed to fear-based reactions. That’s where evolutionary instinct comes in. An anxious person will often react out of fear. Their reactions cannot always be trusted, and neither should their intuition.
There’s another way to look at it: that intuition is entirely psychological. Your past experiences have shaped your present decision-making framework, which guides your hand. What you call intuition is your bias, built upon years of mental conditioning. A person who has always received love conditionally may grow up believing they are unlovable and, consequently, develop low self-esteem.
Neither evolutionary instincts nor psychological experiences are free from the distortions of past experiences. So, what is the one thing that can rise above both and grow more refined as you move through life? The simple answer is intelligence.
Intelligence isn’t about what you know or how much you know. It’s about how well-structured everything is inside your head. Ultimately, intelligence is the most sophisticated pattern-matching algorithm in your mind. It takes every experience, every piece of information, and every sensation and uses them to form patterns that help you determine what to do when similar situations arise again.
Intuition is your pattern-matching algorithm telling you what is most likely to happen next or what the most likely explanation is for what you’re seeing. Often, you will be right. Sometimes, you will be wrong. It all depends on the quality of the structure inside your head.
Academic knowledge alone isn’t enough. You also need to marry it with reality to develop your own interpretations. That’s how patterns form. The better the quality of this internal structure, the better the patterns you recognise and the stronger your intuition becomes.
We often say that women have strong intuition about the men they date. It’s pattern matching at its best. They have heard things, observed things, and experienced things that have formed a pattern in their minds. Based on all the available inputs, something about the person seems suspicious. They may not be able to articulate exactly what it is, but their intuition tells them that something doesn’t add up.
So, if you want to strengthen your intuition, you need to filter your experiences and information, then build a sound interpretative framework on top of them. Organise your mind and thoughts as best you can, and you may realise that your intuition has become considerably sharper.