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HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS > INTUITION
Your intuition is your best friend and bodyguard, trust it !!
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PiJo:
Author's page : http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Scientific-Facts-About-Intuition-Developing-Intuition
The Science of Intuition: An Eye-Opening Guide to Your Sixth Sense
By Annie Murphy Paul
Human eyesight might seem straightforward: The eye receives images, the brain processes them. But we actually have two vision tracks—one conscious, the other intuitive—and as a result, the eye sees far more than we generally realize.
For instance, in a phenomenon known as blindsight, people who have gone blind because of brain damage can still navigate an obstacle course or identify emotion on a person's face, even though they can't consciously see it. Their intuitive vision track is receiving visual stimuli, even though their conscious vision track isn't; they know what's around them—they just don't know how they know.
Some people think of intuition as a mystical power.
Skeptics write it off as a matter of "lucky guesswork". But scientists who study the phenomenon say it's a very real ability that can be identified in lab experiments and visualized on brain scans.
Your Body
Research shows that our instincts often hit us first on a visceral level, telling us what we need to know well before our consciousness catches up. Here's what happens when your intuition gets physical.
Tune In : You may be able to better follow your heart (and your sweat glands) by practicing meditation. A 2005 study found that in meditators, brain regions associated with sensitivity to the body's signals and sensory processing had more gray matter. The greater the meditation experience, the more developed the brain regions.
Your Brain
Your powers of deduction, reason, and cognition are all important factors in your perception of the world. But your judgment is working even when you're not conscious of the gears turning—and even when you're not conscious, period.
Tune In : Focus, schmocus! Next time you're faced with a knotty problem, mull your options for a while, stop and concentrate on other things—then go with the first solution that comes to you. Pressing pause on your analysis gives your unconscious mind the bandwidth it needs to filter through the information and come up with the right answer.
Sleep On It
Images of things you encounter during the day (that puppy you pass on the street, the Caribbean cruise ad you see on TV) are stored in your brain, often playing out in a giant mash-up while you sleep (thus the dream where you're walking a beagle in Barbados). It's during the REM stage of sleep that your brain connects that instant replay to other relevant ideas. "REM sleep is good for problem solving and decision making because your brain is putting pieces together and trying out new alternatives," says Rebecca Spencer, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "You gain insights that wouldn't occur to you when you're awake." REM also activates the emotion area of the brain, so "things that are most important to you on a gut level are prioritized," Spencer says.
Deirdre Barrett, PhD, a professor at Harvard Medical School and author of The Committee of Sleep, studies the ways in which dreams themselves can yield practical insights. In one of her studies, more than one-third of the subjects reported that a dream about a problem guided them to a solution. "Dreams help us get unstuck from our waking mind-set," Barrett says. "They allow us to see solutions that aren't apparent to our logical, conscious minds."
Tune In : Don't lose sleep over a difficult decision; tuck in and let your intuition percolate. To help foster dreams, Barrett recommends "dream incubation": Write down a problem and think about it just before bed, then let your intuitive solution emerge with the morning sun.
From the August 2011 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.
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Author's page : http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/Understanding-Your-Intuition-Following-Your-Gut-Brain-Bugs_1
When Is Intuition NOT Intuition ?
By Annie Murphy Paul
Sometimes what feels like a gut feeling is actually a mental glitch. The reason: We were built to live on the African savanna, not for the urbanized, industrialized, mechanized world most of us inhabit. "Our brains run on what amounts to a 100,000-year-old operating system," says Dean Buonomano, PhD, a professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA and the author of "Brain Bugs : How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives".
The result? Our intellectual equipment has its flaws. For instance, we're more afraid of being killed by strangers (rough odds: one in 100,000) than by cars (one in 10,000) because our instinctive fears haven't caught up with the dangers of the 21st century.
Another example: If you could have $100 right now or $120 a month from now, which would you choose? Most people select the immediate cash because our ancient impulses steer us toward short-term gratification over long-term benefit.
An additional blind spot arises from the nature of our memory, which can cause us to confuse related concepts. Try this exercise, adapted from Brain Bugs:
Answer the first two questions below aloud, and then blurt out the first thing that pops into your mind in response to sentence 3:
What continent is Kenya in?
What are the two opposing colors in the game of chess?
Name any animal.
About 50 percent of people answer sentence 3 with an animal from Africa, and roughly 20 percent say "zebra." But when asked to name an animal out of the blue, less than 1 percent of people answer "zebra." The skewed responses are due to an unconscious phenomenon known as priming, in which thoughts of one concept spread to related concepts, making them more likely to be recalled.
When an unexpected answer or impulse seems to burble up inside, it could be a great hunch—or it could be one of these mental glitches.
By knowing the brain bugs most likely to trip you up, you'll be better equipped to tune them out.
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Author's page : http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Finding-Your-Inner-Voice-Developing-Intuition-Martha-Beck
How to Tune In to the Voice Within
Martha Beck explains how to ignore the racket and understand how you really feel.
By Martha Beck
This very day, two individuals are vying to be your personal adviser :
The first, whose name is Fang, dresses in immaculate business attire, carries a briefcase full of neatly organized folders, and answers all e-mails instantly, via BlackBerry. In a loud, clear, authoritative voice, Fang delivers strong opinions about how you should manage your time. Fang's résumé is impressive: fantastic education, experience to burn.
The other, whose name is Buddy, wears shorts, a tank top, and a rose tattoo. If you question the professionalism of this attire, Buddy just smiles. When you ask advice on a pressing matter, Buddy hugs you. There are almost no words on Buddy's résumé (the few that do appear are jokes and song lyrics), and in the margins, Buddy has doodled pictures of chipmunks.
Who will you hire to advise you?
Yeah, that's what I used to think, too.
Long, long ago, as a teenager, I gave the name Fang to my socially conscious, verbal, educated mind. Buddy was what I called a perverse, disobedient aspect of my being, who apparently never evolved logical semantics and simply does not understand How Things Are Done Around Here. Fang is wary and suspicious, while Buddy ignores all caution in the pursuit of appealing experiences, like a puppy on LSD. In high school, I vowed to let only Fang run my life. A couple of decades later, I noticed something surprising: Though I generally did listen to Fang, it was Buddy who was always right.
When clients tell me they need to find their "inner voice," I suspect they're already listening to one: a loud, logical, convincing Fang-voice that echoes parents, teachers, priests, and angry personal trainers. You have no problem hearing this voice; the problem is, its counsel rarely leads to fulfillment.
Yet you sense there's someone else knocking around in your psyche: someone whose counsel might make you happy—the kind of wise, primordial self I named Buddy. Unfortunately, Buddy is almost nonverbal, initially unimposing, and, from Fang's point of view, way too weird to trust. I believe one of the primary tasks of your life is to trust Buddy anyway. That means first learning to recognize true inner wisdom, and then opening yourself to its peculiar counsel.
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Author's page : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/19/the-habits-of-highly-intu_n_4958778.html
10 Things Highly Intuitive People Do Differently
By Carolyn Gregoire
Intuition is challenging to define, despite the huge role it plays in our everyday lives. Steve Jobs called it, for instance, “more powerful than intellect.” But however we put it into words, we all, well, intuitively know just what it is.
Pretty much everyone has experienced a gut feeling — that unconscious reasoning that propels us to do something without telling us why or how. But the nature of intuition has long eluded us, and has inspired centuries’ worth of research and inquiry in the fields of philosophy and psychology.
“I define intuition as the subtle knowing without ever having any idea why you know it,” Sophy Burnham, bestselling author of The Art of Intuition, tells The Huffington Post. “It’s different from thinking, it’s different from logic or analysis ... It’s a knowing without knowing.”
Our intuition is always there, whether we’re aware of it or not. As HuffPost President and Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington puts it in her upcoming book Thrive:
Even when we’re not at a fork in the road, wondering what to do and trying to hear that inner voice, our intuition is always there, always reading the situation, always trying to steer us the right way. But can we hear it? Are we paying attention? Are we living a life that keeps the pathway to our intuition unblocked? Feeding and nurturing our intuition, and living a life in which we can make use of its wisdom, is one key way to thrive, at work and in life.
Cognitive science is beginning to demystify the strong but sometimes inexplicable presence of unconscious reasoning in our lives and thought. Often dismissed as unscientific because of its connections to the psychic and paranormal, intuition isn’t just a bunch of hoo-ha about our “Spidey senses” — the U.S. military is even investigating the power of intuition, which has helped troops to make quick judgments during combat that ended up saving lives.
“There is a growing body of anecdotal evidence, combined with solid research efforts, that suggests intuition is a critical aspect of how we humans interact with our environment and how, ultimately, we make many of our decisions,” Ivy Estabrooke, a program manager at the Office of Naval Research, told the New York Times in 2012.
Here are 10 things that people in touch with their intuition do differently.
They listen to that inner voice.
“It’s very easy to dismiss intuition,” says Burnham. “But it’s a great gift that needs to be noticed.”
The No. 1 thing that distinguishes intuitive people is that they listen to, rather than ignore, the guidance of their intuitions and gut feelings.
“Everybody is connected to their intuition, but some people don’t pay attention to it as intuition,” Burnham say. “I have yet to meet a successful businessman that didn’t say, ‘I don’t know why I did that, it was just a hunch.’”
In order to make our best decisions, we need a balance of intuition — which serves to bridge the gap between instinct and reasoning — and rational thinking, according to Francis Cholle, author of The Intuitive Compass. But the cultural bias against following one’s instinct or intuition often leads to disregarding our hunches — to our own detriment.
“We don’t have to reject scientific logic in order to benefit from instinct,” says Cholle. “We can honor and call upon all of these tools, and we can seek balance. And by seeking this balance we will finally bring all of the resources of our brain into action.”
They take time for solitude.
If you want to get in touch with your intuition, a little time alone may be the most effective way. Just as solitude can help give rise to creative thinking, it can also help us connect to our deepest inner wisdom.
Intuitive people are often introverted, according to Burnham. But whether you’re an introvert or not, taking time for solitude can help you engage in deeper thought and reconnect with yourself.
“You have to be able to have a little bit of solitude; a little bit of silence,” she says. “In the middle of craziness ... you can’t recognize [intuition] above all of the noise of everyday life.”
They create.
“Creativity does its best work when it functions intuitively,” writes researcher and author Carla Woolf.
In fact, creative people are highly intuitive, explains Burnham, and just as you can increase your creativity through practice, you can boost your intuition. In fact, practicing one may build up the other.
They practice mindfulness (meditation).
Meditation and other mindfulness practices can be an excellent way to tap into your intuition. As the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute explains, “Mindfulness can help you filter out mental chatter, weigh your options objectively, tune into your intuition and ultimately make a decision that you can stand behind completely.”
Mindfulness can also connect you to your intuition by boosting self-knowledge. A 2013 study published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science showed that mindfulness — defined as “paying attention to one’s current experience in a non-judgmental way” — may help us to better understand our own personalities. And as Arianna Huffington notes in Thrive, increased intuition, compassion, creativity and peace are all wonderful side effects of meditating.
They observe everything.
“The first thing to do is notice — keep a little journal, and notice when odd things happen,” Burnham says. You’ll gain a keen sense for how often coincidences, surprising connections and on-the-dot intuitions occur in your daily life — in other words, you’ll start to tap into your intuition.
They listen to their bodies.
Intuitive people learn to tune into their bodies and heed their “gut feelings.”
If you’ve ever started feeling sick to your stomach when you knew something was wrong but couldn’t put your finger on what, you understand that intuitions can cause a physical sensation in the body. Our gut feelings are called gut feelings for a reason — research suggests that emotion and intuition are very much rooted in the “second brain” in the gut.
They connect deeply with others.
Mind reading may seem like the stuff of fantasy and pseudo-science, but it’s actually something we do everyday. It’s called empathic accuracy, a term in psychology that refers to the “seemingly magical ability to map someone’s mental terrain from their words, emotions and body language,” according to Psychology Today.
“When you see a spider crawling up someone’s leg, you feel a creepy sensation,” Marcia Reynolds writes in Psychology Today. “Similarly, when you observe someone reach out to a friend and they are pushed away, your brain registers the sensation of rejection. When you watch your team win or a couple embrace on television, you feel their emotions as if you are there. Social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment, disgust and lust can all be experienced by watching others.”
Tuning into your own emotions, and spending time both observing and listening to others face-to-face can help boost your powers of empathy, says Reynolds.
They pay attention to their dreams.
Burnham recommends paying attention to your dreams as a way to get in touch with your mind’s unconscious thinking processes. Both dreams and intuition spring from the unconscious, so you can begin to tap into this part of your mind by paying attention to your dreams.
“At night, when you’re dreaming, you’re receiving information from the unconscious or intuitive part of your brain,” says Burnham. “If you’re attuned to your dreams, you can get a lot of information about how to live your life.”
They enjoy plenty of down time.
Few things stifle intuition as easily as constant busyness, multitasking, connectivity to digital devices and stress and burnout. According to Huffington, we always have an intuitive sense about the people in our lives — on a deep level, we know the good ones from the “flatterers and dissemblers” — but we’re not always awake enough to our intuition to acknowledge the difference to ourselves. The problem is that we’re simply too busy.
“We always get warnings from our heart and our intuition when they appear,” she writes in Thrive. “But we are often too busy to notice.”
They mindfully let go of negative emotions.
Strong emotions — particularly negative ones — can cloud our intuition. Many of us know that we feel out of sorts or “not ourselves” when we’re upset, and it may be because we’re disconnected from our intuition.
“When you are very depressed, you may find your intuition fails,” says Burnham. “When you’re angry or in a heightened emotional state ... your intuition [can] fail you completely.”
The evidence isn’t just anecdotal: A 2013 study published in the journal Psychological Science showed that being in a positive mood boosted the ability to make intuitive judgments in a word game.
That’s not to say that intuitive people never get upset — but your intuition will fare better if you’re able to mindfully accept and let go of negative emotions for the most part, rather than suppressing or dwelling on them.
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