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Intuition: The Sixth Sense?

I was going to put this in the standard 'Coincidences' thread, or perhaps equally-contentuously into a telepathy or remote sensing discussion, but: this time I feel the concept of intuition is a better fit.

A long-term acquaintance of mine (I see him no more that once a year at an annual event, he's now well into his 80s) spoke with me in quite a bit more detail regarding his life and personal history just over a month ago during what was a chance meeting.

In the normal course of events, I would definitely never have thought of him (nor met him) until August next year, but on Sunday night (48hrs ago) I suddenly had a very-strong mental image of him: I mean quite seriously, I intuitively did wonder "hmm...perhaps he has died?" (morbid, but inescapably possible)

Yesterday, I had a missed call on my mobile from an unknown number. It was from my old friend, saying he'd emailed me yesterday (on Sunday, to an old email address that I rarely check) and was wanting to talk about bequeathing me a framed print that he knew was of interest.

Beyond all unreasonable doubt: I knew with absolute certainty that this ancient old friend was either dead, in trouble, or wanting to talk with me. Thankfully it was the latter case...

I cannot over-emphasise how strong this impossible sense of intuition was: and just to be clear, he has never phoned or emailed me ever before (I mean since the inception of public email and mobile phones).

And since my gut was right overall about this, I'm also going to go with the proposition that this was a genuine case of accurate intuition, rather than telepathy (I knew something was definitely up: but no detail....I *still* haven't read the email yet)

Effectively what I somehow knew, is that I absolutely had to contact him back. Which I will do: tomorrow (well, today, it's already tomorrow).

And I may tell him that I intuited his email notifier...
 
I am a very strong believer in intuition and have had more instances of it occur where it has been 100% correct than I can remember. It can be an uncanny feeling, at times unsettling too when it's right, but also there can also be a sense of ease that all is well as a result of it. I'm not describing this very well, but I'm pleased that it happens to me on a regular basis.
 
I, too, have experienced remarkable instances of "intuition", and co-workers learned to trust my "intuition" regarding certain trends or outcomes in longer-term social and technical contexts. However ...

"Intuition" is something I don't consider a "sense" in the same way I might construe (e.g.) perceiving the impulse that jerked me out of sleep at the moment each of my parents died at some distance away.

Ermintruder's post above illustrates where the difference lies (to my mind). The evidentiary perceptions lay the groundwork for a hypothesis or conclusion reached without undeniable support from the evidence per se, but rather from an imagined scenario or course of events. In other words, intuition most clearly consists of making sense of what's perceived rather than capturing or recognizing the perceptions themselves. It involves a certain measure of imagination, foresight, and "connecting dots." It's mental rather than simply perceptual.

Whenever pressed for an explanation of my intuitive pronouncements, I find it only occasionally possible to relate my conclusions / predictions to some rational / logical chain of inference. My long-time explanation is that I "surf the contours of the situation", and I zero in on a conclusion via something more like proprioceptive navigation based on which way the contours tilt me and where my "surfing" leads me.
 
As a motorcyclist, I can think of two occasions where my "intuition" prevented an accident. In each case, I feel it is likely that the intuition was an emergent property of the combination of my conventional senses, my experience, and the unconscious part of my brain monitor my surroundings.

1) I was on a leisure ride in the countryside in Derbyshire. I approached a left hand bend with good lines of sight and a low hedge on the inside of the bend. I went a little wider and slower than usual and was able to stop when I was suddenly confronted with a metal sign that warned, "Slow down, hedge cutting." There was no hedge cutting going on at the time. I speculate that the unconscious part of my brain had noticed that the hedge was lower than others I had passed and slowed me down in case there was debris (rather than a metal sign) on the road.

2) I was on a busy motorway heading north on a 250 cc bike laden with camping gear: limited acceleration and limited breaking. I was in the right hand lane of 3 as I passed a 2 lane slip road. A car was on the left hand lane of the slip road, so there were 3 lanes between us. Traffic was dense. Without thinking, I slowed and a moment later, the car swerved across all three of the intervening lanes and cut in front of me. I speculate that I had unconsciously noticed that his position, speed, or some aspect of the "cadence" of his driving warned me that he was about to do something unusual.

I am a very analytical person (for 27 main reasons, which divide into 3 main categories...) and if anything I tend to overthink my riding, but on both these occasions, I reacted "instinctively" and before the threat materialised.

Humans are pattern recognising animals. We need to be because the environment is so huge and complex. You cannot walk across a field and notice every blade of grass in detail. However, long familiarity and experience may teach your brain to recognise what is "normal" and therefore identify anything abnormal which might suggest a hazard, such as a concealed predator.

This unconscious skill of pattern recognition may go wrong when we think too hard: we may fall into the traps of superstition, or confirmation bias. Indeed, we may think we have good intuition because we remember the times we inexplicably got it right and forget the times we equally inexplicably got it wrong.

However, while it remains below the level of conscious perception, it may be useful. This kind of intuition may encourage you to get up and walk out of a city centre pub shortly before trouble starts. It is not a premonition, but a reaction to tiny visual or auditory clues, changes in the volume and tone of conversations, people moving more purposefully than usual, or sitting more still than they were — that type of thing.

I see a similarity here to dowsing. In the case of dowsing, one theory is that it is a way of using a piece of equipment (twig, rods, pendulum) to signal an ideomotor response: a physical reaction to things that are detectable to the conventional senses, but are not consciously noticed.
 
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I, too, over the years learned to follow my intuition always. It has never made a great difference in an outcome, but usually makes things easier for me.

I have always relied on my "gut" instinct when meeting people and ones who I really don't like upon first meeting, have always shown to be untrustworthy for one reason or another. There not many people who I have a strong aversion to. And it has kept me safe.

My mom, on the other hand, believes everyone who can present a good image. She will think the person is great and I just shake my head because she doesn't seem to "feel" anything and believes whatever the person tells her.
 
I always used to put people into 3 categories.
There are those I feel comfortable, familiar with, on a similar wavelength.
Some I feel nothing in particular, but no threat.
A minority make me feel tense, on edge or sometimes even a sick feeling in their presence.
The first might become friends, the second acquaintances, the third turn out to be untrustworthy, and to be avoided.
 
I always used to put people into 3 categories.
There are those I feel comfortable, familiar with, on a similar wavelength.
Some I feel nothing in particular, but no threat.
A minority make me feel tense, on edge or sometimes even a sick feeling in their presence.
The first might become friends, the second acquaintances, the third turn out to be untrustworthy, and to be avoided.

I too know instantly whether or not I will be friends or not with someone. My wife and family have always considered me an excellent judge of character and have learnt that I am always right, even when it appears at first that I may not be.
 
...The evidentiary perceptions lay the groundwork for a hypothesis or conclusion reached without undeniable support from the evidence per se, but rather from an imagined scenario or course of events. In other words, intuition most clearly consists of making sense of what's perceived rather than capturing or recognizing the perceptions themselves. It involves a certain measure of imagination, foresight, and "connecting dots." It's mental rather than simply perceptual.

......Humans are pattern recognising animals. We need to be because the environment is so huge and complex. You cannot walk across a field and notice every blade of grass in detail. However, long familiarity and experience may teach your brain to recognise what is "normal" and therefore identify anything abnormal which might suggest a hazard, such as a concealed predator.....

.....However, while it remains below the level of conscious perception, it may be useful. This kind of intuition may encourage you to get up and walk out of a city centre pub shortly before trouble starts. It is not a premonition, but a reaction to tiny visual or auditory clues, changes in the volume and tone of conversations, people moving more purposefully than usual, or sitting more still than they were — that type of thing....

I, too, over the years learned to follow my intuition always. It has never made a great difference in an outcome, but usually makes things easier for me.

I have always relied on my "gut" instinct when meeting people and ones who I really don't like upon first meeting, have always shown to be untrustworthy for one reason or another. There not many people who I have a strong aversion to. And it has kept me safe.

My mom, on the other hand, believes everyone who can present a good image. She will think the person is great and I just shake my head because she doesn't seem to "feel" anything and believes whatever the person tells her.

I always used to put people into 3 categories.
There are those I feel comfortable, familiar with, on a similar wavelength.
Some I feel nothing in particular, but no threat.
A minority make me feel tense, on edge or sometimes even a sick feeling in their presence.
The first might become friends, the second acquaintances, the third turn out to be untrustworthy, and to be avoided.

I too know instantly whether or not I will be friends or not with someone. My wife and family have always considered me an excellent judge of character and have learnt that I am always right, even when it appears at first that I may not be.

Connecting all of the above quotes to summarise - and surmise that many people have developed, noticed and practised the 'art' of intuition conciously or not. I too believe that it can be taught (mentioned on page 1 of this thread).

I am hazarding guesses that my FMB fellows above:
  • are quite content to just quietly observe, and do it fairly often
  • like 'people watching' rather than phone watching
  • are good at catching small details or recognising faces
  • find they are good at 'reading' people individually or collectively - their characters, emotions, intentions and likely behaviours?
Am I right?

Or is my intuition entirely off on these? :)

I've also had the experience of meeting people who instantly set off my danger/bullshit/liar detector. I know they're not to be gotten close to. I've not been wrong yet, although I have ignored those feelings (and suffered as a result) when much younger - these days I pay attention to the 'mental warnings' and am surprised when others can't 'see' or 'feel' it. To me it's almost as if the person or situation is wearing a dayglo post-it note saying "caution/don't go there"

I'm wondering if, as quoted above, many of us can interpret the small indicators that collectively lead to a mental conclusion/feeling, and are good at learning from the situations we encounter?
 
I'm wondering if, as quoted above, many of us can interpret the small indicators that collectively lead to a mental conclusion/feeling, and are good at learning from the situations we encounter?

Yup, of course. After I meet someone, the minute they start telling me of their HUGE life achievements I know they're a tosser and most likely dishonest.

Last time this happened was with a new colleague who immediately began bragging that she was also studying for a history degree.

I asked some politely pertinent questions such as which of the several local universities she was attending and what period in history did she prefer - classical? Mediaeval? Modern? and received silence and blank looks. She'd picked on the wrong stooge.

Within weeks she was known to be stealing from work and customers and was eventually escorted off the premises by police. She's most likely banged up now.
 
I worked for many years in insurance claims, with 10 years specialising in fraud by individual domestic customers, rather than organised gangs. Having taken early retirement, I now work part time in a customer service environment where it is common for customers to "try it on". A common scenario is for a customer to buy an expensive piece of equipment for one particular job, then to try to return it as "faulty" or "unused and unwanted" for a refund when the job is finished.

Many of my colleagues are jaded and assume that every customer is trying it on unless proven otherwise. This leads to confirmation bias. I hear those colleagues saying, "Just as I thought!' or "I told you so!" far more often than I hear them say, "Oh, he was on the level after all." They no doubt believe that they have good intuition because they notice the times they were right and ignore the times they were wrong. I had colleagues with a similar attitude in my old fraud department.

I tend to work the opposite way, assuming that every customer is most likely to be honest until I have reason to think otherwise — but it is part of my job to look for clues that might suggest a reason to think otherwise.

Many years ago, as part of a training package I was designing for the fraud team, I came up with a simple ABC of behaviours to look out for. These behaviours suggest a risk that the customer is not being frank, but they do not prove it. They are no more than a warning that caution may be required, and further questions may have to be asked. You need to make allowances for the customer's state of mind. They may be angry about the issue that has given rise to the call or anxious that they may not get a fair hearing. There may be other things in their life such as domestic difficulties. Their behaviour on the phone may be influenced by their base levels of intelligence and education, their perception of their social status, and of course mental health issues.

Rather than listing specific clues (on the level of those body language books that say someone is lying if their eyes look up to the left (or is it the right) or if they touch their nose, I listed the behaviours according to their likely effect on the investigation. If I asked a customer a series of questions, their response might tend to (ABCDE):

Avoid answering the question, perhaps by talking about something else, or saying that they don't have the information to hand, or by asking a question back.

Bolstering (or Bull*****ing) in which you ask a simple question and they give you a long and excessively detailed account but paying little or no attention to the key point that the question was clearly intended to address.

Controlling the interview. They may say, "I'll answer questions about X, but not about Y," or "I can give you 10 minutes and that's all your getting," or "You'll have to ring me back after 7:00 tonight" (knowing that the office closes at 6:00.)

Disrupting the interview. "I'm not talking to you. Put me onto your manager." Talking at length about their general dissatisfaction with the company, previous problems they claim to have had, changing the subject suddenly, or changing the mood or tone of their answers without warning or apparent cause.

E is for "Enlisting" in which they try to enlist you as an ally. "Thanks, Mike, I've spoken to three other people and they were all rude, but you've been brilliant," or "Have you got kids yourself, Mike?" etc. Anything that singles you, the interviewer, out as their "new best friend".

I used to train colleagues to look out for behaviours fitting these categories in the hope that it would give them a structured way of assessing the risk of deception.

Earlier this week, in my new, non fraud, role, I had a phone call from a customer. His first sentence to me told me he was being dishonest. I knew immediately. I stepped back from my usual approach to the call, and created a situation in which he had to say more than he had intended. The answers to my questions were as I expected. I immediately knew I needed to investigate more thoroughly. He became aggressive and "cocky" but I stood my ground and eventually terminated the conversation in a "show of strength".

The next morning, I started my investigations and soon discovered that there was a whole lot of information he had sought to conceal from me. For a start, he was trying to get back his money for an expensive item but had not mentioned that his family had bought two of them a few days apart, in different names.

I rang him back when I had all my facts, and after a short display of bluster, he backed down and accepted my response like a lamb, thanking me as if I had been really helpful.

It was only late in this sequence that I remembered my old ABCDE rule and, retrospectively, I went back through the first call and spotted ABC and D — and of course in the second call, E.

Point is, it wasn't my "system" that spotted the risk. I spotted the risk from his first sentence to me, and identified the "ABCDE risk indicators" later. I think this is a form of intuition born of experience. When you "know what normal sounds like" (to paraphrase horrible business jargon!) then you immediately recognise that which is unusual.

This sort of intuition is probably impossible to quantify, because it is likely to be happening at a low level — a sort of background monitoring — throughout most of your waking life, but you only notice the dramatic examples where your intuition is right.

What I do think is that as soon as you start to analyse it, the intuition probably melts away because it is an unconscious (or subconscious?) thing. You meet someone and get a bad feeling about them, but if you start to wonder why, and rationalise it, that produces a much stronger signal which will drown out the faint signal of your intuition. That does not mean it does not exist, and we can easily see a mechanism for how it would work without having to postulate any new concepts or mechanisms. We are already aware that our brain does a lot of its work without conscious supervision by the mind. Examples:
  • Balance sports such as wind surfing, unicycling, skateboarding, etc. You may use your conscious mind to choose a route, but you let your brain do all the countless corrections and adjustments that allow you to balance and steer. If your mind gets in the way of your brain, you fall.
  • Hearing your own name in a noisy room. Like a smart speaker, part of your brain is monitoring everything that is audible, but ignoring most of it, except the conversation you are having, and anything (such as your name) which is directly relevant to you.
  • The parent who is busy, but notices the unusual noise (or silence) that may suggest that the children are in danger or doing something wrong.
It is therefore, to me at least, easy to see how the part of your brain that processes incoming information without reporting all the irrelevant stuff to your conscious mind (like the office workers who get a lot more done if the boss doesn't get involved!) will send an alert when something is out of the ordinary.

[Edited for clarity and to reduce the number of typos. No change to the meaning or structure.]
 
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I worked for many years in insurance claims, with 10 years specialising in fraud by individual domestic customers, rather than organised gangs. Having taken early retirement, I now work part time in a customer service environment where it is common for customers to "try it on". A common scenario is for a customer to buy an expensive piece of equipment for one particular job, then to try to return it as "faulty" or "unused and unwanted" for a refund when the job is finished.

Many of my colleagues are jaded and assume that every customer is trying it unless proven otherwise. This leads to confirmation bias. I hear those colleagues saying, "Just as I thought!' or "I told you so!" far more often than I hear them say, "Oh, he was on the level after all." They no doubt believe that they have good intuition because they notice the times they were right and ignore the times they were wrong. I had colleagues with a similar attitude in my old fraud department.

I tend to work the opposite way, assuming that every customer is most likely to be honest until I have reason to think otherwise — but it is part of my job to look for clues that might suggest a reason to think otherwise.

Many years ago, as part of a training package I was designing for the fraud team, I came up with a simple ABC of behaviours to look out for. These behaviours suggest a risk that the customer is not being frank, but they do not prove it. They are no more than a warning that caution may be required, and further questions may have to be asked. You need to make allowances for the customer's state of mind. They may be angry about the issue that has given rise to the call or anxious that they may not get a fair hearing. There may be other things in their life such as domestic difficulties. Their behaviour on the phone may be influenced by their base levels of intelligence and education, their perception of their social status, and of course mental health issues.

Rather than listing specific clues (on the level of those body language books that say someone is lying if their eyes look up to the left (or is it the right) or if they touch their nose) I listed the behaviours according to their likely effect on the investigation. If I asked a customer a series of questions, their response might tend to (ABCDE)

Avoid answering the question, perhaps by talking about something else, or saying that they don't have the information to hand, or by asking a question back.

Bolstering (or Bull*****ing) in which you ask a simple question and they give you a long and excessively detailed account but paying little or no attention to the key point that the question was clearly intended to address.

Controlling the interview. They may say, "I'll answer questions about X, but not about Y," or "I can give you 10 minutes and that's all your getting," or "You'll have to ring me back after 7:00 tonight" (knowing that the office closes at 6:00/

Disrupting the interview. "I'm not talking to you. Put me onto your manager." Talking at length about their general dissatisfaction with the company, previous problems they claim to have, changing the subject suddenly, changing the mood or tone of their answers without warning or apparent cause.

E is for "Enlisting" in which they try to enlist you as an ally. "Thanks, Mike, I've spoken to three other people and they were al rude, but you've been brilliant," or "Have you got kids yourself, Mike?" etc. Anything that singles you, the interviewer out as their "new best friend".

I used to train colleagues to look out for behaviours fitting these categories in the hope that it would give them a structured way of assessing the risk of deception.

Earlier this week, in my new, non fraud, role, I had a phone call from a customer. His first sentence to me told me he was being dishonest. I knew immediately. I stepped back from my usual approach to the call, and created a situation in which he had to say more than he had intended. The answers to my questions were as I expected. I immediately knew I needed to investigate more thoroughly. He became aggressive and "cocky" but I stood my ground and eventually terminated the conversation in a "show of strength".

The next morning, I started my investigations and soon discovered that there was a whole lot of information he had sought to conceal from me. For a start, he was trying to get back his money for an exensive item but had not mentioned that his family had bought two of them a few days apart, in different names.

I rang him back when I had all my facts, and after a short display of bluster, he backed down and accepted my response like a lamb, thanking me as if I had been really helpful.

It was only late in this sequence that I remembered my old ABCDE rule and, retrospectively, I went back through the first call and spotted ABC and D, and of course in the second call, E.

Point is, it wasn't my "system" that spotted the risk. I spotted the risk from his first sentence to me, and identified the "formal risk indicators" later. I think this is a form of intuition born of experience. When you "know what normal sounds like" (to paraphrase horrible business jargon!) then you immediately recognise that which is unusual.

This sort of intuition is probably impossible to quantify, because it is likely to be happening at a low level — a sort of background monitoring — most of your waking life, but you only notice the dramatic examples where your intuition is right.

What I do think is that as soon as you start to analyse it, the intuition probably melts away because it is an unconscious (or subconscious?) thing. You meet someone and get a bad feeling about them, but if you start to wonder why, and rationalise it, that is a much stronger signal which will drown out the faint signal of your intuition. That does not mean it does not exist, and we can easily see a mechanism for how it would work without having to postulate any new concepts or mechanisms. We are already aware that our brain does a lot of its work without conscious supervision by the mind. Examples:
  • Balance sports such as wind surfing, unicycling, skateboarding, etc. You may use your conscious mind to choose a route, but you let your brain do all the countless corrections and adjustments that allow you to balance and steer. If your mind gets in the way of your brain, you fall.
  • Hearing your own name in a noisy room. Like a smart speaker, part of your brain is monitoring everything that is audible, but ignoring most of it, except the conversation you are having, and anything (such as your name) which is directly relevant to you.
  • The parent who is busy, but notices the unusual noise (or silence) that may suggest that the children are in danger or doing something wrong.
It is therefore, to me at least, easy to see how the part of your brain that processes incoming information without reporting all the irrelevant stuff to your conscious mind (like the office workers who get a lot more done if the boss doesn't get involved!) will send an alert when something is out of the ordinary.

This has been highly interesting reading. Thanks for taking the time to share this Mike.
 
Yup, of course. After I meet someone, the minute they start telling me of their HUGE life achievements I know they're a tosser and most likely dishonest.

Last time this happened was with a new colleague who immediately began bragging that she was also studying for a history degree.

I asked some politely pertinent questions such as which of the several local universities she was attending and what period in history did she prefer - classical? Mediaeval? Modern? and received silence and blank looks. She'd picked on the wrong stooge.

Within weeks she was known to be stealing from work and customers and was eventually escorted off the premises by police. She's most likely banged up now.

It is astonishing to me that characters like your colleague don't realise that they are giving the game away as soon as they open their gob. I've come across a handful of such characters and find it difficult not to laugh at them.
 
My mom, on the other hand, believes everyone who can present a good image. She will think the person is great and I just shake my head because she doesn't seem to "feel" anything and believes whatever the person tells her.
My mother was the same as yours is, partly as a result of being born in the 1920's when the hierarchical system in the UK was still in full swing. She believed that anyone who was dressed nicely, spoke nicely and was polite, was legitimate. I only just managed to avoid her being scammed in a big way twice, after my father passed.
 
... We are already aware that our brain does a lot of its work without conscious supervision by the mind. Examples:
  • Balance sports such as wind surfing, unicycling, skateboarding, etc. You may use your conscious mind to choose a route, but you let your brain do all the countless corrections and adjustments that allow you to balance and steer. If your mind gets in the way of your brain, you fall.
  • Hearing your own name in a noisy room. Like a smart speaker, part of your brain is monitoring everything that is audible, but ignoring most of it, except the conversation you are having, and anything (such as your name) which is directly relevant to you.
  • The parent who is busy, but notices the unusual noise (or silence) that may suggest that the children are in danger or doing something wrong.

Exactly ... The "bandwidth" of perception and back-room cognition exceeds the bandwidth of consciously-apprehended perceptual stimuli. The conscious mind is focused (however imperfectly ... ) on only a portion of all the stimuli (including internal ones from imagination and thoughts) impinging on you. The capabilities we typically attribute to intuition don't lie outside our range of possible perceptions, but rather outside the scope of our current attention.

The balance sports analogy is a good fit for what I described as "surfing the contours of the situation." I consciously maintain a sort of "balance" by keeping key issues and themes in the foreground, but let the back-room processing produce the ongoing trace or storyline of where it leads me.

The name / noise / silence analogy is similarly apt in my experience. These and other examples relate to (what I personally construe as) a general sense of vaguely detecting "something's wrong with this picture." With me this sensation of something amiss or askew is as (figuratively) proprioceptive as my navigation - it's more like a scraping, friction, imbalance, or twisting that insinuates the course of indirectly-perceived inference isn't going smoothly.
 
@Mikefule , this almost exactly describes my :bs: meter. As soon as some opens his/her mouth and yaks about how wonderful, amazing etc someone (including themselves) is, I just listen and say nothing. People give away way more info about themselves this way.

[QUOTE="AnonyJoolz, post: 1895713, member: 51672
I am hazarding guesses that my FMB fellows above:
  • are quite content to just quietly observe, and do it fairly often
  • like 'people watching' rather than phone watching
  • are good at catching small details or recognising faces
  • find they are good at 'reading' people individually or collectively - their characters, emotions, intentions and likely behaviours?
Am I right?[/QUOTE]

Spot on with me
 
It is astonishing to me that characters like your colleague don't realise that they are giving the game away as soon as they open their gob. I've come across a handful of such characters and find it difficult not to laugh at them.

In a previous job there was such a colleague, a lad of 19 who reckoned he'd been in the Paras and, AND, climbed Everest, among other stupendous achievements. His arms were covered in tattoos and he had a partner/wife (can't remember which) and a young child. They all lived with her parents so this hard man and dauntless mountaineer couldn't even provide a roof over his family's heads.
 
Hearing my name mentioned in a conversation across the room is a great talent I have, though I've had to curb my automatic "What?" response as I've learned that the minute I respond, I'm often volunteered for something. Now I hide my spidey sense :cool:
 
I'm not sure if this fits, but I grew up in an incredibly abusive home, because of this, I am incredibly good at reading people, I often can't put my finger on what it is that kicks off my internal warnings but even if someone outwardly appears open and affable, chatting friendly with people I can still pick up the red flags, so far it hasn't steered me wrong. I've read articles on people with past prolonged abuse being able to do the same. Sometimes it's obvious to me, sometimes outwardly there should be no reason for it, I don't know how but my subconscious seems to pick up on the tiniest clues, rather than esp I think it's a super tuned danger pattern recognition thing.
 
Skrymr that is quite interesting. As a child I had to be very careful around my mother or else be hit for no apparent reason so I suppose that tended to make me wary.
I always remember a friendly smiling man , a travel agent that I had to deliver papers to from the bank where I was working.
Everyone liked him but I always felt uneasy when near him.
He later defrauded the bank of a lot of money.
 
Doesn't anyone have an anecdote about intuition that doesn't involve other people? I might find that more impressive, since other people do say a lot with non-verbal communication, even if they don't mean to.
 
Doesn't anyone have an anecdote about intuition that doesn't involve other people? I might find that more impressive, since other people do say a lot with non-verbal communication, even if they don't mean to.

Further upthread I gave one example:

<<1) I was on a leisure ride in the countryside in Derbyshire. I approached a left hand bend with good lines of sight and a low hedge on the inside of the bend. I went a little wider and slower than usual and was able to stop when I was suddenly confronted with a metal sign that warned, "Slow down, hedge cutting." There was no hedge cutting going on at the time. I speculate that the unconscious part of my brain had noticed that the hedge was lower than others I had passed and slowed me down in case there was debris (rather than a metal sign) on the road.>>

However, the theme of picking up on environmental clues and inferring danger without a process of conscious analysis is similar.

I speculate that what we call intuition is an evolutionary advantage:
  1. In a natural environment in prehistory, it would be impossible to consciously examine every tussock of grass and every bush and shrub, but a subconscious monitoring of patterns and exceptions might alert a person to the presence of a predator, poisonous snake, or enemy tribesman. Today, when we drive or ride on the public roads, our attention is seldom fully on the road ahead, but it is surprising how few accidents we have per mile travelled. Perhaps that is a manifestation of intuition.
  2. Mankind is a cultural and social species. Society developed as a protection from hazards in the environment. However, as society expanded, it became the hazardous environment. You cannot examine every face in a crowd, or listen to every conversation, but a subconscious monitoring of patterns and exceptions might alert a person to various physical and social hazards.
If there were a body of evidence supporting "intuition" in context where there were no possible subliminal clues, that would in fact be evidence of something very different, along the lines of precognition.

Examples:
  • Genuine example: I was unsurprised when Anthony Joshua lost his title to Ruiz. I am not a big boxing fan, but I follow the pre-fight interviews on the big fights and take a general interest. I couldn't put my finger on it, but there was something in AJ's manner that set off my alarm bell. Was this intuition? If so, at least there were visible and audible clues that my hind brain could process without conscious activity.
  • Made up example: If I had a sudden feeling, later shown to be correct, that a particular baseball team was going to win the league, this would either be a coincidence or some bizarre example of precognition. I have no knowledge of or interest in the subject at all, and am not exposed to coverage of the sport.
 
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