When it comes to learning and cognitive performance intuitives can sometimes, especially during childhood or early life, be at a loss as to our own abilities. Are we smart? Are we dumb? Sometimes the solution to a problem will hit us instantly, but other times we end up making complete fools of ourselves trying to learn something that, to the next guy, seems to make plain and perfect sense.
Intuition is tricky business. It's hard to pin down. Carl Jung describes it as...
...that psychological function which transmits perceptions in an unconscious way. Everything, whether outer or inner objects or their associations, can be the object of this perception. Intuition has this peculiar quality: it is neither sensation, nor feeling, nor intellectual conclusion, although it may appear in any of these forms.
...but don’t fret, we’ll have a go at it ourselves.
Intuition and Sensing, the two observer functions, make up one of the four dichotomies of the MBTI model and decide how we perceive reality. One is concrete (Sensing) and one is abstract (Intuition). One deals in details (Sensing) and one in patterns (Intuition). One is future oriented (Intuition) and the other prefers the present or the past (Sensing).
To the sensor, perceiving the environment is all about the five senses and physical reality. Sensors are grounded in the concrete, in details, in hearing, touch, taste, sight and smell. No one builds a machine without its constituent parts... as they say. Sensors put the factual twos and twos together and explain the actual workings of the present and, preferably also, the past.
When intuitives make sense of the world we aim big. We don't want the trees, we want the forest. What is going on can never be as interesting as why it's going on. We want the abstract. The meaning. The patterns to predict the future. The value of individual details can never transcend their contribution to the whole and will, in and of themselves, never interest us unless actively serving to uncover whatever is going on "behind the scenes".
So... we know what it wants, but how does it work? Well, intuition looks for patterns. So far so good. But there's no way of doing that without paying attention to the details. The devil... sorry, the pattern is in there.
But didn't we just establish intuition to be completely unconcerned with details? Well, yes... consciously.
Whatever conscious question we might have and however blind our intuition might be to details in the realm of conscious thought, unconsciously it behaves quite differently. Unconsciously, intuition is all about the details, eagerly feeding each and every one of them to its perpetual post-processing machinery from which, if we are lucky, we can expect an answer.
It is this unconscious and sometimes time consuming process of intuitions that bestows upon us that sudden realisation, that "aha moment" when all the pieces suddenly fit and we’re able to see everything in a whole new light.
Needless to say, these moments are great. They can make an entire day, a life if you’re lucky (and smart). But sometimes they fall a bit short in the “aha department”.
It's not very surprising when you think about it... what are we really expecting from this process? However accurate the outcome, it’s never more than a guess. And sometimes not even that! If you're an intuitive, you're probably well aware of this by now.
So... can we really trust the guesswork of our intuitive process? Well, not blindly... but we can improve it and hopefully learn when to trust it.
Intuition is kind of like a machine learning algorithm. The more data you feed it, the more accurate it gets.
This, of course, has implications when it comes to learning new things and dealing with new situations. The more strongly you prefer intuition over sensing the worse you will be at coping with something completely new to you.
In a sense (pun not intended), every situation is new to the sensor. And it doesn’t scare them. They roll up their sleeves, dig into the details and figure it out. Real-time.
Intuitives are somewhat worse off here. If we haven’t experienced something similar, our intuitive process will turn up blank. We’ve no choice but to dive right in there with the sensors, right into the sea of details, even though we know we don’t swim as well.
But if we keep at it, if we keep feeding the algorithms - taking in new information, experiencing new things - somewhere down the line of experiential maturity the accuracy and speed of our intuitive process will overtake that of the sensor and bam(!)... the tables are turned. We’re no longer the ones trailing behind.
So, if the inconsistencies of your own abilities sometimes leave you baffled, no wonder! That’s just the way intuition works.
Intuition can do some pretty amazing things, but it's a sensor's world and, one might argue, for good reason. It makes sense that the majority of the population (more than 70% are sensors) haven’t got their head in the clouds and can actually handle the concrete, day to day activities that needs to be handled in order for society to keep running.
That said, intuitives can do perfectly well in this world provided we’ve been able to gather enough experience. Intuitives are late bloomers and when we bloom we sometimes bloom everyone else right out of the water! Remember, it’s never too late to start outshining those sensors!
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