Intuition--stories/tips for use?

Interesting! Intuitive experiences happen to me a lot. What are you researching this for?

Intuition

I gotta know! I was unaware there was a difference between intuition, hunch, gut feeling, precognition, insight, perception, dawn, suspicion, impression, or inkling. Please explain that one more time.

Well, I'm an engineer. I use physical, engineering intuition all the time. I suspect this isn't quite what you're looking for, so let me explain.

Suppose my boss comes to me and asks, "we're making such-and-such a part out of Material A. If we make it out of Material B, would it work?" I think a bit, and answer, "my intuition is that it wouldn't."

In this sense, "my intuition" is indeed a gut feeling, but it's *based* on something. I happen to know that Material B is stronger than Material A and has been used in similar parts in the past, so my boss's question isn't completely off-base. However, I also know that Material B is more brittle. And the part in question has to withstand shock loads. And there are some features of the part that make it prone to cracking.

So, taking all that into account, my gut feeling (not backed up by any calculations at all) is that Material B wouldn't work. I can articulate the *reasons* for my gut feeling (usually -- not always!), so in that sense this might not match your definition of "intuition." However, I can't tell you exactly why I think the negatives of Material B *outweigh* the positives.

Does that make sense? I can dredge up some specifics to answer your questions 1 and 2, but they're not going to be sexy (like I " had to do something that felt socially awkward or rude"), and I suspect that this isn't quite the definition of "intuition" you're looking for.

I've had quite a few odd things happen to me, although they've tapered off quite a bit. I think you have to be born 'tuned in' to that channel, or else you don't ever have anything happen to you. I seem to be tuned in, although not as good as I could be.

The oddest thing that ever happened to me was when I was about 11 or 12, I guess. One night, I had been just playing a game on the computer, when I felt like I was suffocating from the heat, although it wasn't even hot in the room. I got really jumpy, went downstairs, and was too edgy to stay still for a second for a few minutes, when out of nowhere, I cooled off, and felt fine again.

The next day at school, I found out one of the guys in my class had been nearly killed in a fire. It was cold out, and he'd tried to start a fire to warm up while he waited for his mom to get home, because he was locked out of the house. Tried to light the fire, didn't see a flame, started pouring a 5 gallon canister of gas onto it. The fire shot up the stream of gas and the tank he was holding blew up, he had something along the lines of 3rd degree burns over 60% of his body.

I was pretty freaked out, and ended up telling some of my friends about it, and it turned out most of them had something weird, either a dream or a similar heat wave type thing happen to me, although knowing those girls, they could've just been saying that to keep everyone interested.

My intuition seemed to be the strongest when I was 12-13, lots of weird things happened to me. One incident, I managed to get myself stabbed in the ankle with a pair of scissors. A kid in my class was a little displeased with me, I was swinging my feet and he tried swinging scissors at my feet to make me stop. Evidently, I should've stopped sooner.

Anyways, when I got home, the cut was pretty bad, and my dad was convinced I'd need stitches, (it was bloody deep and about a centimeter or two wide) and dragged me down to the hospital. I'm absolutely terrified of needles, and I thought I'd need stitches, but I got no twinge in my stomach, I wasn't even remotely scared. It turned out we were wrong, my ankle didn't need stitches, they didn't have to do anything with it.

My intuition is a bastard to rely on, but generally, my first impulse is right as long as I don't think about it. If I do, I get too confused about what the original gut feeling was, and that's that. If I'm about to head into a situation which could potentially go sour for me, and I'm completely calm, nothing happens. If it looks like it will go sour, I'll go apeshit doing whatever I can to stop it from going bad, and it never does.

I trust my intuition the most when it comes to other people. If first reaction is to not befriend a person, there's a good reason for it. More than a few times, I've met people and just thought to myself, 'no way, turn and walk the other way,' and ended up nearly or actually getting into physical fights with them. I never did anything to provoke them, I treated them decently enough but something usually happened to set them off.

Aquilegia said:

That is spooky. To me, at least, that’s more like ”sixth sense”, though. It’s not really explicable unless you consider other people’s brainwaves…or something.

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It almost seems to be that way for me, almost. I just seem to be tuned into them sometimes. I've had it go both ways before, once when I was constantly thinking about the book Christine, someone called me that. My real name ain't nowhere near Christine . . .

How would you describe the reaction? Is it more a thought or a physical feeling? I ask, because my intuition doesn't come as pangs in the solar plexus or hair standing on end, but as simple thoughts. I'm wondering, too, which is more common.

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For me, my stomach knots up, and I just feel really uncomfortable. I just get a feeling like I should leave, it's more of an uneasy 'get me out of here' feeling than thoughts.

Aquilegia said:

To Ideagirl:
I’m researching this primarily for a how-to article on 1) getting in touch with your intuition and 2) putting your intuition into practice (eg. getting people to believe your hunches) for an audience of young women.

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Ooh! If you haven't read this book, you MUST. A young woman I once met told me, and I quote, "That book saved my life." It's "The Gift of Fear" by Gaven de Becker. You'll be especially interested in the chapters entitled "The Technology of Intuition" and "Survival Signals." (By "technology" he just means the way intuition works--nothing to do with gadgets). De Becker is the survivor of a very rough, abusive childhood (example: as a kid, he saw his mother shoot his stepfather dead), which he thinks caused him to rely very much on his intuition: it was simply necessary in order to survive. Now he's a security consultant in LA, helping people learn to pay attention to both intuition and common sense in order to keep themselves safe. The woman I met who said it saved her life was being stalked by a dangerously psycho ex-boyfriend when she read it.

A woman I know who is a survivor of stranger-rape told me that she thinks one reason a lot of women feel weirdly guilty after being raped is that they had an intuition (e.g., don't trust this guy, don't stay here, etc.) and they ignored it. That was her experience: she had a feeling she should leave ASAP, but she talked herself out of it ("oh don't be silly" etc.), and within minutes she was raped. My intuitive experiences have, I'm pretty dang sure, saved me from rape (or worse) on more than one occasion. It's hard to be sure that you really avoided a danger, since by avoiding it you lost the ability to be sure it was going to happen, but I'm about as sure as I could be.

My intuition most often works in two ways: (1) a visceral sense about a person--very simply, I DON'T LIKE HIM or, conversely, I WANT TO TALK TO HIM. (My intuition doesn't only function to avoid bad things, but also to home in on people who end up becoming good friends or being otherwise important in my life.) This has nothing to do with a person's personality; it's just a visceral sense I get when I first see someone, even from a distance. And (2), a physical reaction: sometimes I just feel drawn in a particular direction (or pushed away from something) as if by a magnet, and on a few occasions my feet have basically taken over and "walked me" in a particular direction--I actually feel like a passenger on my own feet!!

For the feet thing, here's one of several examples. I used to live in one of the worst neighborhoods of Manchester, England--it's called Moss Side and it's famous for crime and drugs. Being insufficiently paranoid--I was only 18, after all--I sometimes would go out for walks by myself after dark. Not super late, but still. So I was walking down a deserted road two blocks from my house; I'd been on this street for a block or two without seeing a soul in any direction. The road was mainly little businesses, all of them closed since it was 8 or 9 PM and things close early in England. Very quiet, no one around, and no traffic, just parked cars along the curb. A few of the cars had tinted windows--those seem to be popular in ghettos, who knows why. Just as I was passing one of the cars, I heard a tiny click behind me and BURST into a run. There wasn't a single thought in my head--my feet just TOOK OFF and carried me across the street. Behind me I heard a man call after me--four men had jumped out of the car I'd just passed! The click I'd heard was the very first sound a door handle makes when someone starts opening a car door. These men, all young and ghetto-looking, had been sitting in total silence inside this tinted-window car for at least several minutes, as long as I'd been walking down that street. They jumped out the instant I passed, called to me, and started across the street towards me, but I was already too far away; I sprinted all the way home.

This is the kind of incident where you cannot be sure what the men's intentions were--but to put things in context, this was a neighborhood in which, in the space of eight months, my house got totally destroyed by burglars (in addition to taking valuables they pissed and shat everywhere, set clothes on fire, etc.); a 12-year-old was dragged off a streetcorner into a car and gang-raped; a nursing student on her way to morning classes was pulled into an alley and raped; and a woman walking down the street was hit on the head with a brick, dragged into a garage, and raped. All these things happened within about a six-block radius. So that, plus the odd behavior of the men, makes me inclined to think my wondrous, independently conscious feet saved me from something terrible!

Aquilegia said:

How would you describe the reaction? Is it more a thought or a physical feeling? I ask, because my intuition doesn't come as pangs in the solar plexus or hair standing on end, but as simple thoughts. I'm wondering, too, which is more common.

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I have these instinctive reactions to people too, and for me, it's usually in the form of emotions so basic, so almost primitive, that it's hard to say if they're emotions or physical sensations. They're both, really. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of the heart, maybe between it and the solar plexus. On a few occasions I've gotten this very basic, deep-set feeling that "I DO NOT LIKE THIS PERSON." It feels as simple as hunger, and as incapable of being changed: just as hunger won't go away unless you eat, this feeling--which is unpleasant, a sort of revulsion--will not diminish unless I physically get away from the person. That feeling, when strong, tends to mean the person is actually dangerous. When it's milder, more like a sense that I can't relax but have to remain on guard, it just means the person is fundamentally untrustworthy. And on the flipside, on several occasions I've felt a similarly basic, simple, unchangeable feeling that "I WANT TO TALK TO THIS PERSON." I really, really want to talk to them. This feeling happens instantly, when I first see them. Once it happened with a complete stranger on the street whom I could only see from behind! On every occasion, the person has become a very close friend or a lover, and I don't have casual lovers--it's always been something life-changing on some level.

Sometimes, too, I get phrases or images in my head that are associated with a particular person and come up every time I see or think about the person. I remember once meeting the Chairman of the Board of a company I'd just been hired by and seeing a house of cards every time I looked at him. He was a wealthy and apparently successful lawyer in a pinstriped suit, but for some reason he just made me think of a house of cards, and that, plus the fact that I felt slightly "on guard" as if I couldn't trust him, gave me the impression that there was something fragile about his life, like if one thing--one card--were moved, it would all collapse. The last I heard, about a year after I stopped working there, he just vanished one day--in the sense of running away, not being kidnapped--and left the swanky downtown law office that he founded in the lurch: salaries and bills unpaid, chaos. I never found out what exactly happened, but it certainly confirmed the impression I'd had.

Aquilegia said:

I think I’m defining intuition as rational thinking at a level that's so complex and incorporates so many different pieces of information that we may not be able to follow our own thought processes.

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You are going to love that Gavin de Becker book!

As I usually see the term intuition used (for example in Kiersey's personality type theory where I am classified as an Intuitive), being intuitive means relying on your subconscious sensitivity to patterns to evaluate the big picture for you rather than using a conscious, rational method which tends to be short-sighted and miss considering less-obvious factors. Probably the most obvious way one could show a character being intuitive would be to show them having a symbolic dream and analyzing the dream to discover a way in which their behavior or focus needs to change. Another example of intuition is when you see an object and know that the object is going to be important later, even if you're not sure exactly how the object will be used, because the object challenges an existing pattern you have noticed (like, a new person in town may disrupt any established pecking order).

Short story: We, my daughter & I were on our way home from shopping. We were about a mile and a half from the house when I heard an odd noise under the car. 'Normally' I would have kept going...it was only another mile & a half, but I got this strong feeling I needed to pull over. I turned the steering wheel to the right, the car started moving off the road & then my steering was gone. I had NO control over the car, other than to stop it. Something in the steering linkage had broken. I like to think of it as my guardian angle was looking after me.

Aquilegia said:

Funny. And strangely precise, too, that they should get exactly that word. Actually, I think you're more sensitive than those who just use intuition.

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I might be. I have had a few other weird things happen to me, and I had another incident where my mind might've been read not too long ago, maybe a year or two. For the longest time, I was convinced my house was haunted, because all sorts of weird things kept happening in February. At least twice, someone was with me when I heard something strange, and they heard it too.

Anyways, not long ago, my mom made an off handed mention of how my dad was going to have to move that urn in his shop somewhere else soon, and naturally, I nearly had a heart attack. It turns out he was supposed to spread the ashes of his uncle in the lake he loved fishing in, so naturally, I thought that maybe he was the ghost of the house, so I asked mom when he died. I was pretty much repeating over and over in my mind, 'say February,' and when she finally did say something, it was, "I think it was February."

I never did find out one way or the other whether he actually did die in February, or if she'd just picked up on what I was thinking, but it creeped the hell out of me. And, oddly enough, while my intuition is still more reliable in February, I haven't had anything strange happen at the house since I found out about the urn.

Aquilegia said:

No, that’s excellent! Thank you for your input. If I understand you correctly, you take many threads of information and weave them together into a theory using a process that you sometimes can and sometimes cannot follow step by step. Either way, as you say, this process is based on your knowledge of measurable things (the physical properties of given substances). Your skills have probably prevented more accidents than even you know.

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Yeah; that's a good way of summarizing it. I think of "intuition" as a subconscious utilization of knowledge and experience to form an overall impression. Nothing mysterious; nothing supernatural; just your brain working underneath the conscious level. I was actually going to bring up The Gift of Fear as an example, but ideagirl beat me to it. De Becker describes, I think, pretty much the same thing: there's real, physical cues in the environment that you react to when you become fearful. You might or might not be able to consciously identify them, but they're there.

Anyway, intuition is not normally something associated with engineering (which is, after all, relatively dry and formula-heavy). However, I had a professor who made a point of emphasizing the usefulness of "engineering intuition." It's easy to screw up a calculation or miss an important variable in an analysis. However, a good engineer will look at the final answer and think, "that's not right -- it doesn't match my intuition," and track down the discrepancy.

This professor encouraged us to calibrate our engineering intuition, starting with simple homework problems. In other words, think about the answer to the problem. Does it *seem* right? Too big? Too small? He'd also assign "what-if" problems: Do this calculation. Now, what if one of the quantities doubled? How would the answer change? The ability to understand simple homework problems isn't intuition, per se, but these little exercises honed students' intuition: if gut feeling didn't match the calculations, dig deeper to see which was wrong. A method of drawing out intuition, in other words.

Example: This is a relatively simple example, which has the advantage that I can, hopefully, explain everything involved. It's also perhaps atypical, in that everything involved can be easily explained. Anyway, the place I used to work made buoys that were dropped into the ocean. A typical buoy is a cylinder maybe 5" in diameter and three feet long, and contains some fragile electronic equipment, among other things. One concern when designing a buoy is the shock load on the electronics when the buoy hits the water (if you've ever jumped off the three meter board, you know what I mean).

Another group of engineers was working on a king-sized buoy, which was roughly two times as big in every dimension (10 inches in diameter by six feet long), and thus weighed about eight times as much (two times two times two, right?) On of those engineers dropped by my office and said, "the Navy captain in charge of this project is worried that the shock load on this buoy is going to be huge. It weighs eight times as much, so it'll make a huge splash, and have a huge shock." I thought a bit, and told him that my intuition was...

Hold it. Before I go on, what does your intuition say? Drop two objects into the water: one's twice as big in every dimension. How much bigger is the shock load -- the "slap" of the water on the object? The exact calculation is a little difficult, but not horribly so. In fact, I use this particular example as a class project in the class I teach. I ask students to run through the calculations, and tell me if the answer seems right to them. A fairly large number are surprised by the results.

My intuition was that, for the larger object, the shock load would be lower. Why? I had to think about that for a while, but it's because the force on the buoy making it slow down is related to the area (four times as big), while the tendency to keep going is related to the mass (eight times as big). The shock is roughly those two divided: 4/8 = 1/2. Thus the bigger the buoy should have roughly half the shock.

Postscript: The Navy Captain didn't believe my explaination; his incorrect intuition was too firmly entrenched. Big buoy = big splash = big shock. However, I had data from some earlier testing of a large buoy. The earlier testing was focused on another problem entirely, but we had, almost by accident, recorded the actual shock loading of an actual buoy as it actually hit water. I'd never even looked at the data before, but I dredged it up and plotted it out... and the shock load was almost exactly half of what it was for the smaller buoy.

Aquilegia said:

To TheNightTerror:

Strange. Well, I suppose it’s just right for Valentine’s day if you’re looking for a date.

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Ah, if only I could trust my intuition in my dating life. I should try that for next February, could be interesting.

By the way, I just remembered another thing that happened that I thought you might be interested in. It happened with my parents, though, but it could've been intuition showing up again. It happened quite a while ago, in '85, right after my grandfather died.

My parents were driving home fairly late after his funeral, and a little ways out of the city, out of nowhere, my father pulled over to clean the headlights off. My grandfather always told him to make sure they were clean, he made a mention of that to my mom when he pulled over. Then, not a few minutes after they got back on the road, they came across a jack knifed logging truck. There had been a vehicle behind them when they pulled over, and that vehicle had crashed into the truck, odds were they would've been caught up in the accident too if they hadn't stopped when they did.

Aquilegia said:

TheNightTerror, I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long to post a reply! I got a bit swamped with things (including some exhausting houseguests). I do appreciate your input and I didn’t mean to ignore you.

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Oh, hey, it's no big deal. As annoying as it can be, sometimes R/L has to come before the forums.

Thank you for the story. It does make you wonder, though, what about the poor person who did crash? Should they have ”known” or ”felt” something. Or are some things just luck (or lack thereof)?

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It could've been any number of reasons. Maybe the person did feel something was wrong, but just ignored it, or didn't believe in intuition. Or, maybe some people are just more "tuned in" than others, and the person who crashed wasn't enough to know something was going to happen.

Or, we could go with none of the people having any intuition, but my father being 'warned' by my grandfather to stop driving for a few minutes. But, that only applies if you believe in ghosts. My grandfather had killed himself, so if my parents had been killed on the way home from his funeral, it would've more or less been his fault. He could've somehow managed to communicate with my father and tell him to pull over so they wouldn't be hurt/killed over something he did. My father always drove like a maniac, it just doesn't seem like him to be responsible enough to worry about a thing like slightly dirty headlights.


I was just curious, have you looked at any fairly well known disasters or accidents to see if you can find reports of intuition being used to avoid being caught up in them? I'm mainly thinking of the Titanic, I did a ton of research on it back in the day, (I started before the movie came out, believe it or not) and I remembered there were a lot of people who avoided traveling on it for one reason or another.