Study Measures Intuition, Shows It Can Boost Accuracy of Decision-Making

From: EPOCH TIMES
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By Tara MacIsaac
16 June 2016 16:56


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www.theepochtimes.com...
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Intuition can help people make decisions more quickly, accurately, and confidently, according to a study by researchers at the University of New South Wales, published in May in the journal Psychological Science.
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To create a non-conscious emotional stimulus, the researchers flashed subliminal images. A colored square appeared briefly next to the dots. Sometimes it was just a colored square. Sometimes, an image flashed in it so quickly it could not be consciously perceived. The image was meant to elicit either a positive or negative emotion (it may have been a baby or a snake, for example).
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Invention occurs as a constructive act. . . . The really valuable factor is intuition. --Albert Einstein

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When shown positive images, they performed better on making the non-emotional decision. Not only did they feel better about their decision, they were also more accurate.
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It seems like a reasonably well designed study, to me.
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And, the inferences and interpretations are logical and consistent with the design of the experiment and the results reported.
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It's quite plausible that emotional content of a particular type could bolster the accuracy and efficacy of intuition.
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"Intuition was "defined as occurring when, 'non-conscious emotions . . . bias concurrent non-emotional behavior.' "
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That's a tolerable operational definition. I don't know that it's the only one or even the best one but it's reasonable for the experiment done.
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Certainly 'non-conscious' is a crucial aspect of intuition. However, if the process, experience of intuition is 100% non-conscious, how much does it really influence? The experiment seems to indicate a fair amount. I'd like to see additional experiments of different designs to try and tease out all the factors involved.
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You actually make your decisions/evaluations of things before you are aware of it. After some post-processing and time-line alteration to make the story fit together, it arrives in your 'consciousness' about a half second later.

At which point, your much less capable 'story telling' mind starts trying to second guess your primary mentality.

That's why you often have that feeling that you knew the right answer but chose the wrong one etc. You DID know. But the post-processing 'self awareness' engine looked over the solution and chose a bad alternate.

At one point, a small test group in the Army was working to train people to not do that. It's teachable, but not consistently.

a reply to: Bedlam

I've been only slightly aware of that research.

Could you elaborate with some specific examples and maybe a link or 3, please?

It sounds fascinating.

It sounds like it would be, basically, affirming of the OP research, right?

With a strong enough intuition and well developed imagination you can sometimes predict future events to a high degree of accuracy in dreams.

originally posted by: BO XIAN
a reply to: Bedlam

I've been only slightly aware of that research.

Could you elaborate with some specific examples and maybe a link or 3, please?

Which part?

It sounds like it would be, basically, affirming of the OP research, right?

To some extent, self-awareness is a fairy tale we tell ourselves. Or so it seems. The 'real you' happens in bits and pieces that's assembled into a seamless-looking whole a split second later. It makes sense, too, since you've got various chunks of brain that are doing complex computations, it's not reasonable that they all do it at the same rate. So your perception of things that seems to be all lined up and simultaneous can't possibly be true.

originally posted by: Bedlam
You actually make your decisions/evaluations of things before you are aware of it. After some post-processing and time-line alteration to make the story fit together, it arrives in your 'consciousness' about a half second later.

I keep looking into this and find the conclusions to the research quite lacking. It appears to be more of an assumption based on results setup in very specific sets of circumstances. I find the extrapolation to be not so logical.

Basically, there are different types of decisions, and we act differently depending on which kind of situation occurs. With some situations, there is little time to consciously process, so we use shortcuts, and it follows as you say. In other situations, we have the time to consciously process, and it doesn't follow that we take this same shortcut to act before consciously processing. It depends.

a reply to: pl3bscheese

Consider your two main senses - isn't it amazing that processing sight and hearing takes the exact same time? And that all the little sub-processes in processing visual input - and there are a number of them - all take the same exact time as well.

It all comes in in chunks, and it's all lined up for you. After the fact.

eta: Yes - you've got several facets to your persona. The one that you consider 'you' is doing a lot of second-guessing. The decisions are generally poor, and slow. It's better for pondering information after the fact and planning future actions.

a reply to: Bedlam

That makes no sense at all.

originally posted by: pl3bscheese
a reply to: Bedlam

That makes no sense at all.

Sure it does. Consider - when you are learning a new task, you involve this verbal thinking persona you see as yourself. You will be clumsy, wooden, and slow at it until you 'master it', however, at that point it's no longer being done by your reflective persona, the task has been learned and is being carried out at your primary level.

Here's you a fairly simple experiment: pour a very full cup of liquid, so that it's near the brim. This is an old task that as an adult you have transferred to your base level processing. Walk with it. Fairly fast. You will probably not spill any.

Retrace your path, looking at the cup and thinking about walking with it. Now, you will spill it, or you won't be able to go as fast, or both. Why? It's been transferred to your verbal level. Which sucks at that sort of thing.

eta: it's quite possible for some people to learn to perceive the different chunks of 'mind' that's running in their head. I think some people don't integrate them very well and thus do you get 'multiple personalities' and possibly 'schizophrenia'. You can learn a better way of doing it, and it can be really useful at times, albeit a sort of parlor trick. One way is an old martial arts technique called 'no mind', which isn't right at all - it's more of 'co-operative mindfulness' wherein you learn to create, manage and dispatch chunks of primary mind tasks from your verbal level without getting in their way.

etaa: You also see this sort of thing being done when you see people doing somewhat complex physical acts at outlandish rates, or with unusual accuracy. Examples might include Zen archery, the trick where you remove a semi-auto from someone's hand before they can fire it, that guy that can accurately fire a sidearm so fast you can barely see it move, and 'Zen rifle fire' which is somewhat analogous to Zen archery.

You can't do these things from your verbal level. It's too slow, and the time re-alignment that's going on #s with your timing. So you plot out what you want to have happen, plan for a few simple alternatives, and turn it over to your primary mind to deal with. The Zen archer isn't concentrating on the target. In fact, if you ask, they're thinking about something totally irrelevant. The shot just happens. When I'm Zen shooting, I get into roughly the right position, identify the target, plan for an alternate in case something happens, and...let go. I don't think about correcting my rifle cant, or slowing my breathing, or heartrate, or feeling the wind on my cheek or whatever. I take one deep breath, and blow out my concerns with the breath, then just...drift. I can hear the spotter calling corrections, but I don't hear it. I'm thinking about clouds or some damned thing. And the rifle fires. I never recalled squeezing the trigger

It's also what's behind the old adage (and it IS one, despite being in a movie) "Aim small, miss small". By filling your verbal/top level with irrelevant detail, you get out of the way for your primary mind to get the job done. It's easier to teach but not as good as 'Zen fire', although it's sort of the same trick.

a reply to: Bedlam

No, it doesn't and it hurts to even wonder how people can be so incredibly far off and still think they're onto something.

Look at this source, and please tell me you can understand how over the top bizarre the reasoning is that's presented here. I would expect this to come up as satire to show just how stupid scientists are becoming and how they are researching things that are obvious, coming to stupid conclusions, and then going on to show a million ways in which the results are being misinterpreted, yet keeping to the same conclusion.

Your reasoning makes no sense... at all. None. We're not making poor decisions, we're making the bulk of our decisions consciously, and these have profound impacts on our lives, they help to form beliefs that effect the trajectory of our lives. It matters not if you choose to hide this behind a feeling that it's mere "persona". The reality is a tiny fraction of decisions happen where we make the decision in a vacuum of non-thought, and create the story afterwards. The majority of decisions are impacted by conscious thought after and before the event.

I don't see how that article can be so incredibly illogical and off the mark, and remain blind-sighted the whole way through. I guess that's what it takes to reach the conclusion they do? I'm in no way a religious person, but the reasoning that these people use is just so far off base it hurts to hear, man. It hurts!

a reply to: Bedlam

THANKS for your elaborations.

I'll have to ponder a lot more .

I'm somewhat familiar with the Atlantic article . . . Thanks @pl3bscheese.

I find such experimental findings fascinating but not conclusive, to me.

I'm not sure how much extrapolating the results really support when transferring the findings to normal daily life of most people.

I'm NOT a predestination sort of no free-will person. That's exceedingly illogical, to me.

At the VERY LEAST, it seems certain to me that God has set up a context wherein

OUR CHOICES

--ARE TRUE CHOICES WITH TRUE CONSEQUENCES.

--LOVE IS POSSIBLE THEREFROM. WE ARE NOT ALL ROBOTS.

--YET WE NEITHER HAVE 100% FREE-WILL NOR 100% DETERMINISM. God also has HIS free-will interventions in our lives.

Sometimes, some of this sort of research sounds like an extremely tiny slice of reality of the brain's functioning that appears to be significant but doesn't really quite make that grade to true significance.

And, of course, none of such research has any way to even begin, as far as I know, to integrate the spirit and the spirit's interactions with the brain within each person . . . much less adding in outside spiritual influences--God's and otherwise.

Bedlam, one of the things I was hoping for in an elaboration and clarification was a fairly concise summary of the 3-5 most important such findings and examples of each and the implications of each.

Thanks thanks y'all. I love this sort of dialogue.

Cheers.

originally posted by: pl3bscheese

I don't see how that article can be so incredibly illogical and off the mark, and remain blind-sighted the whole way through. I guess that's what it takes to reach the conclusion they do? I'm in no way a religious person, but the reasoning that these people use is just so far off base it hurts to hear, man. It hurts!

You may not agree with it, but there's a lot of evidence that's the way it works. And that makes sense if you start thinking about it.

I understand that it can be a bit alarming. You think you are the captain until you look below decks and find that the boat is being steered and propelled by a lot of machinery that only loosely obeys you, and that not all the time.

I think I was maybe 12 when it dawned on me that neurons were quite slow, overall, and that, say, visual perception was going to take quite a bit of time compared to electronics. Instead of microseconds, it was going to take milliseconds, at times hundreds of milliseconds for each layer of neurons to make an assessment and fire or not fire. And that processing edges, motion, object identification and the like would take quite a few layers, even with massive parallelism. But to ME, it seemed as if everything was happening in real time, at the instant it happened. How could both of these things be true?

And the sounds and visuals always lined up perfectly. But what is the likelihood of THAT? If it takes several hundred milliseconds for me to perceive a visual event, after it's been run through who knows how many subprocessing steps, then what's the likelihood that I will process sound at the same rate? The amount of brain involved there is much less. The sound SHOULD seem to come first. Yet it doesn't. And again, it seems to happen in real time. But it can't be.

And it dawned on me that it's a fake. You THINK you're seeing and hearing in real time. But the part of you that thinks that is always more than a half second behind the curve. You're built to think you are seeing, hearing, feeling in real time. You are not, and can't be.

In a similar fashion, in order for you to decide things faster, most of the 'what do I do' processing is happening in real time with the visual and auditory processing, and is boiled down to a number of simple decisions that are ready to implement by the time you think you thought of it. Because if not, you'd be way behind the time curve if you didn't start until the senses all reported in and were time aligned for you.

That part of you that thinks verbally and is great for hammering out the symbolism of James Joyce or thinking about futures trading or whatnot is not great for real time thought. And that's why you spill coffee if you stare at the cup and think about the dynamics of carrying it whilst walking.

It gets worse - your visual perception is also a pile of fakery designed to present your verbal mind with a seamless fiction of what it thinks is there, with distractions minimized.

I've really come to put a lot of faith in my intuition, which I just often refer to as the subconscious - though that term is rather non-specific (the subconscious englobes much and I am not sure how to specify the parts which come into play with intution).

I liked the term proposed above for the "storytelling" part of the mind - that is exactly what I experience. That is the part writing this. Basically, I am always looking backward and trying to percieve and pull together patterns - to explain what happened, and why. Look at cause- effect possibilities, test them out, see what holds up as reliable.

I often cite a experiment I saw on a documentary in which a person with their skull opened for a surgery had electrodes placed in various parts of the brain. While another person chatted with her, a third would send a small charge through the electrodes. When a charge was sent to the part of the brain that controls laughter, she laughed.

She was asked why she laughed, and you could see her suddenly reflect in a second on what just happened. She tracked the moment, what she had heard, felt, ....her eyes flitted through the same movement she had been doing when the charge was sent, and she came to the conclusion that the laughter erupted right when her eyes were focused on a fork in front of her on the table.

She told the interviewer she laughed because she saw the fork, and forks are funny. She couldn't explain why - they just "are" she said.

Her storytelling mind had done it's work.

Furthermore, months later, they checked back with her and she was still bursting out with laughter everytime she saw a fork!

So the storytelling conscious mind is not ONLY a journalist-observer spinning out history, as it does so, it is influencing the future as well.....

I have certain exercises I use to work on allowing my intuition to work for me, because it isn't always easy to push aside the conscious . It sounds silly, but Sudoku are one of those. If I slip into global fuzzy vision (something I learn with horses, it means just not being focused on anything in particular, just wide open receptive) I suddenly see where numbers go. If I am looking at them one after the other, trying to calculate, think, I get stuck.

I sometimes start with the fuzzy vision and start filling in numbers, but it is like my conscious mind gets excited and starts delving in and the process screws up. So I use this to practice letting the intuition take hold as long as possible.

My son is a math and physics major, and he sort of pisses us off because he doesn't do a lot of studying, in terms of time spent. Each time he has big exams we tell him he will not pass if he doesn't study. He doesn't hardly at all, and he still passes very well (proving us wrong).

So I became curious as to how he does this. We talked about it and he said he understands that he works through his subconscious. Thinking and trying to hard becomes an obstacle for him. He says he has to "keep it light" to succeed. He said when he starts to "think too hard" while working on a paper, he puts it down, walks away and plays guitar for a while. It might be only ten minutes, but it gets the thinker to back off again.

I think what he is describing is like my Sudoku practice, in which keeping a light mind and gentle focus is the key.

a reply to: BO XIAN

THAT will involve me taking time to dig it out for presentation. At the moment, I'm kicking back with coffee and contemplating whether to get a shower, do laundry, clean the kitchen, or blow an hour watching the next 'Game of Thrones', I never saw any of them until last week. It's actually not awful. Although there's a lot of 'why didn't you just call the cops" faults. If I were Ned Stark, for example, if Cersei said "you win, or you die", I'd probably have whacked her head off and said "ok", then gone and visited Joffrey. Ah, well.

And then I've got some papers to read, one from UToronto on diddling AES that someone brought up in another thread. I have a long standing project that I haven't had time to work on for a bit, and want to see if that is relevant.

I do have three days off (a veritable vacation) and will try to dredge up some research. There was a particularly interesting experiment or two that illustrate how your mind 'fills in the gaps'.

BTW, have you ever experienced a sound in your bedroom showing up in a dream sequence as part of the dream? And wondered if somehow you 'knew' the thing was going to happen beforehand, so that it could be incorporated into the dream?

It's all part of the same thing.

eta: I don't see it as a 'no free will' thing. More of a 'your mind isn't one homogeneous wad' thing.

a reply to: Bedlam

What you are saying makes perfect sense to me.
I spend little time as verbal me..
people think I'm spaced out, but I'm zoned in.

some people call it being in a flow state.
it's that same thing when you play basketball and you just know all your shots re going in.. you just feel it rather than think it. you the you that is ego is hardly there. it's almost just automatic.

Zen.

I can go there with music quite readily. entertain the complex thought pattern guy and the base guy just does it all so effectively.. IT feels good and I'm all of those guys..

my reaction time is WAY faster when the thinking me is not driving the car. so fast I can't drop anything. as soon as something slides off a left hand a right hand is right in place.

I think its freaking amazingly cool we can do both..

I'm very intuitive and I think it relates to me not favoring my ego in brain functions as much as say average humans.

and to go a little nutty..
when I meditated too hard and met god..
my ego spoke for me but who was I???
I was the subconscious or super conscious or something..
but I watched my ego react to it or to me not sure..
was interesting as hell

a reply to: Bedlam

that last thing you said about dreams..

Sometimes I wonder if something right when I'm about to wake up.... Travels.... back in time..

to create a 3 hour dream all based on whatever woke me up..
but I don't think it's like that.. I just think time is slippery for ego and especially ego wrapped in subconscious..

Time/perception/reality/freewill..
complicated, but not unnavicagable. (whatever that word should be)

freewill still stands but ego gets second at bat.. I wonder why ego even came up sometimes, but then I realize we are apex predator for a reason. it's all useful..

I'm a little weird in that i prefer to use words like consciousness and God rather than ego and subconscious. but I think the meanings correlate and its only my ego preference to call the other part.. the part I feel is truly me..

god.

a reply to: Bedlam

No rush. Not sure I'm asking for that much trouble. I think you should be able to do what I'm asking off the top of your head, except for the links.

MUCH APPRECIATED ANYWAY.

I've had interesting bits with some few dreams. Probably so with sounds. Can't say for certain.

thanks

a reply to: Bluesma

Fascinating. I think I had to get that way about pottery.

Certainly I was that way with teaching. I tried to make happen in the classroom experiences that illustrated the chapter. I stayed pretty well read-up. And I did an excessive amount of administrivia feedback every class session. Otherwise, I did not prepare lectures much at all.

I hated canned repeated stuff and never gave the students that, per se.

I just went through the things I thought should be emphasized in the text chapter in an illustrative, role playing, example etc. sort of way.

I sat the students in a horseshoe where they were no more than 3 deep and moved around the room--more or less in their faces--fairly constantly.

They persistently said they learned far more in my classes; that my classes were the only fun classes etc. etc. and gave me the highest of student evals.

I don't think that would have been near the case if I wasn't routinely in a kind of "flow" mode.

Any real gambler will tell you this is tried and true!

The best decisions are visceral and quick.

a reply to: pl3bscheese

Hi.

I actually am a pretty firm believer that a large fraction of decisions happen where we make the decision in a vacuum of non-thought, and create the story afterwards... starting in our childhood. People are just unaware of themselves. People just think they are making decisions when they are not... they're just being set up in a way. By our environment, genes, past experiences, and etc. We're all just being programmed. Literally.

I don't know anything about the research or evidence but I'd like to get into it really one day.

Cool dialogue going on here.