Ways of Knowing

1. Sense perception2. Language3. Reason 4. Emotion

How old is this statue?How old is this statue?

A) 345 B.BB) 123 B.CC) 45 A.D.D) 679 A.D.

DO NW

D NOW

Is there really such a thing as maternal instincts or a mother’s intuition?

Is there really a thing such as intuition?

Provide real life examples.

Intuition

Intuition can be described as “a rapid cognition” “or “a speedy mental process.”

Intuition is a kind of speedy cognition that

relies upon the capacity to read signals, clues and patterns, often based on previous experience.

Intuition is different from logical analysis because intuition does not include deliberate logical reasoning.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains intuitive thinking as “perception-like, rapid, and effortless....”

Intuition is a rapid cognition that is beyond the conscious understanding and is often described as a quick emotional reaction or “gut feeling” or a “snap judgment.”

The line between intuition ( rapid cognition) on the one hand and instinct, fantasy, impulse, and mystical revelations on the other has been poorly drawn by our culture.

Therefore, intuition has been the subject of

study in psychology, as well as a topic of interest in the supernatural.

“There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world…

Can you think of a great example when your gut feeling or intuition about something turned up to be correct?

Intuition and Scientific Knowledge

Think about the great foundational myths of physics.

They all take this same basic form: somebody has an intuitive leap, and then spends a great deal of time doing the hard work necessary to support it.

Intuition and Scientific Knowledge

Isaac Newton supposedly had a flash of insight about gravity while sitting under an apple tree. He spent the next twenty years inventing calculus to make it work.

Einstein had a great insight about objects in free fall in 1907 or so. He spent the next eight years turning that insight into General Relativity (learning a whole bunch of new mathematics in the process).

“Rapid cognition is the sort of snap decision-making performed without thinking about how one is thinking, faster and often more correctly than the logical part of the brain can manage.”

Physicians and other professionals

successfully rely on intuition to make rapid decisions in time-restricted environments.

The key to successful decision making is to know when to trust your intuition and when to be wary of it.”

Blink

Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 book, Blink, begins with a story about an ancient Greek statue known as a kouros, that was offered to the Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.

The curators believed the kouros to be genuine, and, relying on scientific tests of its authenticity, they bought it for nearly $10-million.

Blink

The former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art said his first reaction was "fresh"—as in, too fresh-looking to be so old.

A Greek archaeologist "saw the statue and immediately felt cold."

After the intuitive judgments of several people, a fresh set of tests revealed that the statue was a fake.

Failure of Intuition

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 2002 for his work with the late Amos Tversky that showed how people often rely on intuitive trial and error rather than rational analysis, and how this often leads us to make decisions that are systematically biased and suboptimal (not the highest quality.)…

A mother’s intuition

Most mothers just know when something isn't right with their children, even when they hear countless assurances from doctors, teachers and sometimes even fathers, that everything is fine.

 So what is this thing called mother's

intuition and how does it work?

"The minute you become pregnant, something changes," Naclerio says. "Maybe that sounds too mystical, but you just know."

A mother’s intuition

When Kimberly Naclerio's first-born was only 10 days old, something just didn't seem right to her.

Her parents and husband, however, assured her the baby was fine and told Naclerio she was just a worried new mother.

"I talked about it and tried to rationalize it to myself, but the feeling didn't leave," says Naclerio, a clinical social worker in Westport who works with children and adolescents.

As soon as she could, she took her baby to the doctor. Her son, it turned out, had jaundice.

 

Psychology

Many psychologists understand intuition as an unconscious thought process, rapid cognitions that take place outside of awareness based on information that we learned experientially without even realizing we were learning it.

"I think we absorb facts constantly," says Kim Horner, a Wilton mother of two.

"Every time I do my kids' laundry, I see a grass stain, a tear the things that are not significant, not things I really think about."

But when it comes time to make decisions, all that unconscious knowledge adds up and gives her a gut-level feeling about what to do.

Should she let her 3-year-old go to the birthday party even though she feels a funny little tickle on the back of her neck when she thinks about it?

That tickle, from Horner's perspective, was the accumulation of everything she had previously absorbed about her children's temperaments and behavior patterns from having such an intimate relationship with them.

And it turns out she wasn't so off base -- the party ended with the kids fighting.

Pure Consciousness?

But some psychologists say the thinking process -- even the unconscious thinking process -- doesn't quite capture what intuition feels like.

It's that gut certainty or sixth sense. Victor Shamas, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Arizona, sees intuition as coming from a non-rational, internal guidance system we all have from birth.

Pure Consciousness?

Back in the 1990s, a friend of Shamas' was pregnant. He asked if she had had a sonogram and knew the baby's gender. Yes, she said, she knew she was having a boy. But no, she hadn't had a sonogram; she'd had a dream.

Shamas approached his rational, scientifically disciplined colleagues, wondering whether they thought the friend could possibly know. Given there are just two options, they gave her a 50-50 chance.

Shamas, however, decided to design a research study to see how accurately pregnant women could predict the gender of their unborn children, and it turned out they could do it more than 70 percent of the time, based on either a dream or some gut feeling they couldn't explain.

“What thought process would a woman go through to reason out the gender of her baby?" Shamas asks.

"Intuition goes beyond normal reasoning

and perceptual processes." It is pure consciousness without the intervening mental process of thinking. "It's inherently mysterious."