Intuition, Hunches & Gut Feelings

Intuition is not a special talent reserved for very special folks: You can learn to listen and understand what the deepest wisdom of your soul is telling you.

You can discover how you are wired to receive intuitive transmission by focusing on how your five senses reaches out to receive intuitive input from sounds, sights, smells, feelings, and tastes. In fact, the great majority of men and women have a variety of religious and spiritual beliefs. And each individual I have met through intuitive development training sessions and classes initially made contact with their intuitive voice through their extended senses.

See if you identify with one or more of these examples: Your intuition extends your hearing so you can hear what is really being said, beyond mere words. It just feels right. The senses do seem to trigger intuition. As I have watched people engage in experiential exercises, they seem to amplify one or another of the senses in order to retrieve the intuitive information. I had a stunning discovery of my own strong auditory nature, which I had always taken for granted.

Now I honor this dominant sense when I am stuck for a word or a sentence, quietly waiting until the words pour forth from my intuitive mind. The first step in cultivating your intuitive abilities is to become aware. The biggest lesson you can learn is to pay attention! Previous studies didn't actually measure intuition because researchers didn't really know how to quantify it, Pearson said.

The Brain and Intuition

Instead, these studies relied on information from questionnaires that asked people how they were feeling while they made decisions , which is more of a reflection of people's opinion of their intuition than an actual measurement of it, Pearson said. In the new research, however, Pearson and his colleagues came up with a series of experiments to determine whether people were using their intuition to help guide their decision making or judgment.

The researchers defined intuition as the influence of "nonconscious emotional information" from the body or the brain, such as an instinctual feeling or sensation. In the experiments, the researchers showed small groups of about 20 college students black-and-white images of dots moving around on one half of a computer screen. The researchers asked the students to decide whether the dots were generally moving to the left or to the right.

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As the participants made this decision, on the other side of the computer screen, they saw a bright, flashing square of color. But sometimes, the researchers embedded an image into the colorful square that was designed to trigger an emotional response from the participants.

For example, each image was aimed at eliciting either a positive emotion a puppy or a baby or a negative emotion a gun or a snake. However, the participants were not aware that they were being shown these emotional images because they flashed at speeds too fast to be consciously perceived.

These subliminal images were meant to simulate the type of information involved in intuition — they were brief, emotionally charged and subconsciously perceived. The results showed that when the participants were shown the positive subliminal images, they did better on the task: They were more accurate in determining which way the dots were moving.