Intuition: Its Powers and Perils

Rating:
Summary: Intuition: Friend or Foe?
Review: A critical part of social intelligence is what psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer term emotional intelligence - the ability to perceive, express, understand, and manage emotions. Emotionally intelligent people are self-aware. ~David Myers

Intuition is often defined as "knowing something without rational thought." It can be your danger radar (an apprehensive feeling), help you create a new recipe or even help you play the piano. Creative types often tap into and trust intuition. Since women tend to use the right side of their brain more than men, this might explain why women tend to be especially intuitive.

Apparently Intuition also has a risky side. David Myers draws on classic and contemporary cognitive science to show us why intuition can provide us with creative insights or can be dangerously misleading. Apparently we fall prey to memory construction and we can misjudge our future feelings and behavior.

David delves into three main areas:

The Powers of Intuition
The Perils of Intuition
Practical Intuition

I love David Myer's intelligent writing style and how he makes the complex completely understandable. I was fascinated by his explanation of left vs. right brain and was amused by the C.S. Lewis quote about cats.

If you have any interest in experiments, you will be in science heaven in this book. I also enjoyed the little experiment you can try with words on page 58. I didn't agree with the experiment on page 70 because I truly believe women's moods do follow cycles although I'm quite willing to agree that passions can infiltrate our intuitions and that in general "we see things as we are." I also questioned the findings after the subliminal self-help experiment because I have found that they work for me.

David Myers presents practical examples from the real world all while appealing to your analytical self. He explains how we have two kinds of memory and two levels of attitudes. It seems to me that one is leading us in a moment-by-moment dance with life while the other is almost like music that subconsciously leads the dance steps. Parts of this memory explanation helped me to understand why I sometimes read a book, go to sleep and then awaken and my mind is already writing the review. Since the mind keeps working while we sleep it is helpful to remember dreams.

If you have any interest in healing, you might find chapter nine to be quite enlightening. This chapter includes information on EMDR, SAD and Therapeutic touch. I think it might work in some cases purely because it is calming and nurturing and we do heal faster when we feel that someone is concerned about our health. Experiments are interesting, but personal experience might convince us otherwise.

David also delves into psychic intuition, although he shows a lot of skepticism because he is working from a scientific premise. He discusses the issue of "evidence for the divine within us" but states that we are not exactly omniscient, omnipresent or omnipotent. I am not sure that the "god in me" is exactly "that type" of god. I think it means that I am able to create my world and have god-like powers in various areas of my existence.

There have been times when I've guessed cash register receipts before the cashier told me the bill. How did that happen? I've had friends who completed my sentences and I've thought words that were then said by a friend just before I was going to say them. There is definitely another level of awareness that reaches beyond scientific explanation. Or is this explained by intuition itself? Was my mind secretly calculating all the prices while
I was shopping? This has intrigued me because you can't make those types of things happen. Why do they happen?

Recently a friend was looking at a number while on the phone and I said the number. So, we had a good laugh. I also hear/see words at the same time and sometimes they make up sentences and this particular friend has the ability to analyze and make sense of things I don't yet understand. They are living on a higher level and I'm acting more like a receiver, while they are able to comprehend the meanings. It is fascinating to me. It is always intriguing to watch invisible forces at work.

It is interesting that in this particular book you will find some images from The Art of Optical Illusions. When I reviewed the book back in October, 2000 I had a feeling that David Myers and Al Seckel might have some similar interests and did a bit of networking. Al Seckel is one of the world's leading authorities on illusions and designs interactive illusion and perception galleries for science museums. I had a feeling that a drawing from Al Seckel's book was going to appear in this book on intuition. How is that for being intuitive? ;)

You may also be interested in reading: The Intuitive Way: A guide to Living from Inner Wisdom by Penney Peirce. Deepak Chopra also has some interesting ideas on this subject in his book: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success because he encourages you to pay attention to how your body is processing information when making decisions.

I love the part of intuition that gives you shivers. It seems you can almost figure out who is going to win on American Idol by who gives you the most shivers. LaToya's voice really gave me quite a few shivers so I'll keep paying attention. Maybe that is intuition or maybe it is just an appreciation for beauty. Still there does seem to be some correlation.

Ironically, the more intuitive you are, the more you might disagree with some of the scientific data in this book. Overall it is an excellent read, but not much is left to chance and the unexplained is after all, mostly unexplainable.

Why do all the books I'm reading one after the other mention "Luke Skywalker?"

~TheRebeccaReview.com

Rating:
Summary: Question your assumptions.
Review: A lot of pop-psy books fall into the habit of reviewing basic information on the topic before getting to the meat of the book, which ends up being one or two chapters. Intuition is not like that at all. I felt there to be astounding information throughout the entire book. Some of the results of studies recounted in Intuition will make you give your "hunches" and degree of certainty a second thought next time. Some of what we believe just doesn't make sense - like fears of getting bitten by a shark or being in a plane crash; we should apparently worry more about slipping in the bathroom.

The reference list is huge and has given me a great jumping off point to find out more information on specific topics covered.

Rating:
Summary: Long on data, short on theory
Review: In Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, author David Myers provides an overview of the unconscious operations of the human mind.

He begins by arguing that we have two parallel systems operating in our day to day lives, the conscious/rational system and the unconscious/intuitive system. The former is slow and deliberate, the latter is fast and sometimes inaccurate. He then details may of the ways in which our intuition proves incorrect in areas like geography, personal memories, individual competence, and foly physics. Myers ends the book with a long chapter about our intuition in medicine, job interviews, risk, and gambling.

Throughout the book, Myers repeats a theme popular since Tversky and Khanneman's papers in the 1970s: the human mind has predictable biases and innaccuracies on a host of logical puzzles and laboratory tests. As such, the book is basically a 249 page review article of the evidence against human rationality. While many of his examples are fascinating, there is no overall theory or mechanism given to account for this irrationality.

To take one example he uses, imagine a ball dropped from a plane. Most people intuitively feel that the ball should fall straight down, rather than along the correct parabolic path to the earth. Myers takes this as evidence of a faulted folk-physics. Unfortunately, despite this fault, people have no problem catching balls falling from great heights. Is it possible that our intuition is in fact robust and accurate within the domains where it is used, and only incorrect in the unusual situations of the laboratory? Myers only casually addresses this, but his evidence on competence developing at certain tasks and jobs indicates that this might be the case.

I would recommend this book to anyone trying to access the primary literature on human rationality and its shortcomings. It is a nice overview. Those attempting to understand how intuition is used by humans in everyday situations, that is, a theory of intuition, will have to keep looking. I recommend Gerd Gigerenzer's book, Adaptive Thinking, as an excellent starting point.

Rating:
Summary: A good introductory book
Review: Intuition has many forms with many results, both good and bad for decision makers who rely on their intuitions. This book, as promised in the title -- Intuition: its power and peril -- lays out a very readable survey of the scientific psychological research on intuition. This is more like an undergraduate survey course than an in-depth discussion of what intuition is and how it can be improved and used more profitably to produce better results in our decision making. On the whole, however, an interesting book worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: What we know but dont know we know affects more than we know
Review: Intuition is a hot topic. Today there are lots of trainers, coaches, consultants, and authors advocating the powers of intuition. 'Don't be too rational, trust you intuition!', they say. But how well-informed are these people about what intuition really is? To what extent can you rely on your intuition and to what extent should you be skeptical? In this book, David Myers, a well-known writer on psychology, explains what is known about intuition.

WE KNOW MORE THAN WE KNOW WE KNOW
What is it anyway? David Myers explains that intuition is our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason. In contrast, deliberte thinking is reasoning-like, critical, and anlytic. So there are two levels of thinking:
1. DELIBERATE THINKING: this level of thinking is conscious and analytical. It is very valuable because it helps us to focus on what is really important and protects us from having to think about everything at once. It is as it where the mind's executive desk.
2. INTUITION: this unconscious level is automatic. It seems, inside our minds there are processing systems that work without us knowing it. To use a metafor by David Myers: we effortlessly delegate most of our thinking and decisions making to the masses of cognitive workers busily at work in our minds's basement. These processes enables us, for instance, to recognize instantly, among thousands of humans, someone we have not seen in five years. We do know, but we don't know how we know.

WHAT WE KNOW, BUT DON'T KNOW WE KNOW, AFFECTS MORE THAN WE KNOW
Both ways of knowing are present within each person. Often they support eachother, sometimes they lead to conflicting conclusions. One thing is important: we tend to underrate how much of our actions are guided by unconsicous thinking. A vast proportion of our behavior is under control of unconscious perception and information processing. This 'automaticity of being' helps us through most of the situations we encounter (you type without consciously knowing where exactly the letters on your keyboard are; you'd have to 'ask your fingers` to know where they are). What's more, it is even so that we can process and be influenced by unattended information (for instance you had not noticed someone talking at a party until s/he mentioned your name, then you suddenly noticed this). Furthermore, we sometimes unconsciously continue processing information regarding problems (after having stopped trying to remember a name, we sometimes 'suddenly` remember it).

WE DON'T SEE THINGS AS THEY ARE, WE SEE THINGS AS WE ARE
Intuition is powerful and important and often it will pay to 'listen to your heart`. But intuition also often errs. An important example is that our theories and assumptions distort our perceptions and interpretations. For instance if we hold a stereotype about a certain category of people, we unknowingly tend to selectively perceive what they do. We tend to notice information that confirms the stereotype more readily than other information. This way, we tend to see our beliefs confirmed. Other examples of unrealistic intuition are: 1) hindsight bias ('I knew it all along'), 2) self-serving bias (accepting more responsibility for succeses that for failures), 3) overconfidence bias (we tend to intuitively assume that the way we perceive the world, so it is).

CONCLUSION
This is a great book for anyone interested in psychology and intuition. The material is presented very pleasantly and clearly. David Myers describes many interesting experiments that certainly will challenge your intuition (for instance some eye-opening experiments by the recent Nobel price winner psychologist Daniel Kahneman). Often these experiments will surprise you. Special attention is payed to the role of intuition in specific contexts like sports, investment, therapy, interviewing and risk taking. Psychology is still an interesting subject. This book is a clear reminder of that. ...

Rating:
Summary: Excellent overview of intuition, decision making and risk
Review: Myers brings together a lot of research into a very readable book about "knowing."

Myers explains to some degree how we know...and why we are likely to be correct. This is well documented although perhaps not as thorough as Sources of Power or Strangers Unto Ourselves by Wilson. Nevertheless there is plenty of meat here.

Then he talks in much greater detail about how and when our intuition is likely to fail us. This is much more enjoyable reading and thorough in scope.

Myers gives a significant amount of attention to ESP, psychic intuition and gambling, all of which are evenly presented and well thought out.

If you have an interest in decision making, intuition, risk, and how we "think" this is a brilliant introduction.

Rating:
Summary: One has to wonder....
Review: One has to wonder just how much "intuition" this author has... There is more to intuition than rationality and "intuition" as a word has become like the word "love". A lot of people use it, but how many really understand it?
In my opinion... a simple example... Gambling is not based on true intuition, indeed is a gross misuse and "understanding" of the true ability of intuition. A "wishful thinking" scenario if I may. A "gee I wish I could do that" kind of thing. There are just some things some people cannot do. Or cannot do well. That's what makes us all important.
Careful of an analytical author debunking intuitiveness.... a cat cannot understand fully what it is like to be a dog.... the same holds with people who write analytically about a subject that is not analytical in true form.

Rating:
Summary: One has to wonder....
Review: One has to wonder just how much "intuition" this author has... There is more to intuition than rationality and "intuition" as a word has become like the word "love". A lot of people use it, but how many really understand it?
In my opinion... a simple example... Gambling is not based on true intuition, indeed is a gross misuse and "understanding" of the true ability of intuition. A "wishful thinking" scenario if I may. A "gee I wish I could do that" kind of thing. There are just some things some people cannot do. Or cannot do well. That's what makes us all important.
Careful of an analytical author debunking intuitiveness.... a cat cannot understand fully what it is like to be a dog.... the same holds with people who write analytically about a subject that is not analytical in true form.

Rating:
Summary: Simpy fascinating
Review: This is a book that will make you think and will challenge many of your perceptions. It's written in a clear, concise and entertaining style; Myers makes certain difficult concepts very understandable by using examples, logic and humor. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Simpy fascinating
Review: This is a book that will make you think and will challenge many of your perceptions. It's written in a clear, concise and entertaining style; Myers makes certain difficult concepts very understandable by using examples, logic and humor. Highly recommended!