It is a widely presumed phenomenon: women’s intuition, some way that women know things, sense things and understand things in ways that transcend fact-gathering.
The hunch, the premonition, the phone that rings with a call from a friend whom you were about to call — is there something extrasensory to them, or do people just have a tendency to endow coincidences with meaning?
The idea that came to you out of the blue, the solution to a problem that bears no relation to any solution you have come up with before — where do they come from?
And when it comes to intuition, do women have something special?
Scientifically, intuition is by its nature difficult to study because whatever is happening is happening on a subconscious level.
“When intuition is correct, the reason is that the person had the knowledge, or the pieces of knowledge, to begin with, but just did not consciously connect these pieces together,” said Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and education at the University of Chicago and an expert on creativity.
“The connection happened just below the threshold of consciousness.”
But this is a hypothesis, he said. “You can’t prove it because (the pieces of knowledge) are below the threshold of awareness.”
There is research being done on intuition by parapsychologists, who study extrasensory phenomena. But their work has never been accepted by mainstream science.
Despite strong differences of opinion on how intuition works, there are none on its existence.
“Everybody agrees that there are some people who seem to be able to come to conclusions, to insights, without knowing how they got there,” Csikszentmihalyi said.
Major accomplishments achieved through intuition are legend. Albert Einstein’s breakthrough insight into general relativity simply came to him, unbidden. Edwin Land visualized the technology of his revolutionary instant camera in an hour.
“Many of the greatest scientists have used intuition in their scientific work,” said physicist and writer Alan Lightman, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studies scientific imagination.
A number of business writers argue that intuition is a crucial skill in the business world, where a hunch that people might like personal computers made Steve Jobs a fortune.
“The traditional ways of business aren’t working anymore,” said Richard Contino, a business lawyer and author of “Trust Your Gut!” (Amacom), a new guide to using intuition in business.
“You have to think of more creative ways to survive. And creativity and intuition go hand in hand.”
The male-dominated business world’s interest in an ability traditionally ascribed to women amuses Brenda Dunne, manager of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory. The lab studies the interaction between human consciousness and machines, and also “remote viewing,” or the ability of people to describe locations without seeing them.
“It was called women’s intuition until men had it; then it was good business sense,” she said dryly.
Intuition is, essentially, knowing something without knowing how you know it.
That broad definition leaves plenty of room for all the permutations of intuition cited by those who study it — gut instincts about people, creative inspiration, problem-solving, premonitions and clairvoyance.
“It is an ability we have as human beings to make a decision without having complete information,” said Nancy Rosanoff, author of “The Intuition Workout” (Aslan) and a speaker and consultant on how to develop and use intuition.
“We know a lot more than we think we know,” she said. “Our analytic way of knowing is just one way of knowing things.”
Left out of the definitions is the explanation. Where do these ideas and feelings come from?
“There are two theories about intuition,” said Rosanoff. “One, that it’s fast thinking — that our mind holds all sorts of information, and our intuitive mind pulls it together.
“And two, that it’s something else — that on some level, we’re really all connected to each other and that intuition functions on that level where we’re all connected.”
Lightman said that flashes of intuition can look like some sort of paranormal event.
“When most people, both scientists and artists, have tried to reconstruct the thought processes leading up to some brilliant insight they have had, they are unable to do so,” he said. “The process seems to remain in the subterranean depths of the subconscious mind.
“It seems mystical, because our conscious selves are detached from our unconscious selves,” he said. “But I don’t think it requires a supernatural element.”
Weston Agor, professor of public administration at the University of Texas at El Paso and the author of three books on intuition in decision-making, considers it a kind of instinct.
“We have neurological imprints just like birds’ homing patterns,” he said. “A child prodigy who sits down and plays the piano didn’t learn how to do that.”
Parapsychologist Dean Radin, director of the Consciousness Research Lab at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is studying the “something else” that cannot be explained logically.
In an attempt to prove that people can predict the future, he tested subjects’ physical responses to either pleasant or alarming photographs — both before and after they viewed them.
After they saw shocking photographs of autopsies or erotica, their pulse rates dropped, their skin conductivity increased and their pupils dilated.
But some showed these physical changes as long as five seconds before they saw the upsetting pictures, Radin said, as if they could somehow sense what they were about to see.
Women showed more ability to do so than men, he said, possibly because they showed more of an emotional response to the pictures after seeing them.
“There was a correlation between how strongly you responded (after seeing the) picture and how you responded before,” he said. “It’s as though you’re somehow bumping up against your own future emotional response.”
He cannot explain how this works. And the study was of only 30 subjects who viewed a few more than 1,000 pictures. Results were based on a pooled average of their responses.
Such studies are no more likely to convince mainstream science than the controversial “remote viewing” program conducted by the U.S. Defense Department, which spent nearly $20 million over 20 years to learn if people could “see” intelligence targets with their minds.
That experiment, in which Radin participated as a researcher for SRI International, a California defense contractor, ignited enormous debate over its methodology. A report commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency produced conflicting conclusions by different analysts as to whether remote viewing worked.
Whatever the explanation of intuition, it has an impressive history, said Doris Shallcross, the recently retired director of the graduate program in creativity at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
“Intuition is referred to a lot in history among the ancient cultures,” said Shallcross, co-author of “Intuition: An Inner Way of Knowing” (Bearly Limited).
“This inner knowledge, which is the way I refer to it, was valued as much as the outer knowledge. Seers and oracles were among the highest members of any tribe.
“It’s traced back through Plato and Aristotle, both of whom talked about intuition being the most important aspect of one’s ability to learn — to be able to trust your inner knowledge.”
In modern times, psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote about the collective unconscious, a common human pool of knowledge independent of personal knowledge or experience.
Even with this pedigree, Shallcross said, intuition struggles for respect.
Colleagues have told her that they made up logical thinking processes to account for their new ideas, when in fact the ideas simply popped into their heads.
“People think it’s flaky to admit that you had a dream, or to say, `I was in the bathtub and it occurred to me,’ ” she said. “But those circles are opening up a little bit.”
Contino said he has seen business people who mention how they feel about an idea — usually women — dismissed by business people demanding data — usually men.
“They say, `Forget your feelings; just tell me the facts,’ ” he said.
But he said he has made better business decisions by trusting his feelings about, say, a potential business partner than by looking at a resume. Much of the business world may look askance at intuition, he said, but entrepreneurs swear by it.
And he thinks that the folklore is right in crediting women with an intuitive edge.
“Women are better at using their intuition than men,” he said. “Men have been socialized out of it. They’ve been forced in business to take an analytical, left-brain approach to analyzing things.”
Agor thinks women’s intuition is such an advantage in the business world that women should promote it as a career enhancer.
“They ought to market it in their interviews,” he said.
“It’s nothing other than folklore,” argued Richard Broughton, director of the Institute for Parapsychology of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, N.C.
“Women are more willing to talk about what they call intuitions; men are not. That doesn’t mean men are less likely to act on them.”
Csikszentmihalyi thinks the idea of women’s intuition is most applicable to relationships.
“Women probably have a lot more information about human relations than men do simply because they pay more attention,” he said. “They are more able to come up with hunches about interpersonal relationship because they have that information.”
And even if precognition has yet to be scientifically proven, it is widely accepted. Rosanoff cannot count the anecdotes she has heard about accurate premonitions on everything from a credit candidate’s trustworthiness to an imminent phone call from mom.
One woman told her that a nagging feeling 15 years earlier that she should see a doctor led to a mammogram that diagnosed early breast cancer.
Radin said that the ability to accurately predict danger is so accepted — and respected — by police that they even have a name for it: The Blue Sense.
Csikszentmihalyi has an anecdote of his own:
“We had a friend when I was little who was a mining engineer,” he said. “He would go to the mine every day. One morning he woke up and had this real bad dream about something happening in the mine.
“He told his wife that he had this bad premonition. His wife convinced him to stay home. So he stayed in his living room, sitting on the sofa, reading. And a big painting on the wall behind him fell, hit him on the temple, and he died.”
