Intuition

Golan Trevise, Isaac Asimov’s protagonist in his two outstanding science-fiction novels Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth (the fourth and fifth of the Foundation series), was distinguished by a special characteristic: he had an uncanny ability to arrive at correct long-range decisions, apparently only by using his intuition. And this trait made him very sought-after by others with differing agendas. Another character, John Strapp, in the 1953 sci-fi short story Time is the Traitor by Alfred Bester, actually made a living giving out intuitively-derived decisions that he had built up an impressive track record on for their accuracy. The question that I’m posing is simply this: is this a real phenomenon, or just the product of some people’s imaginations?

You may have heard the proposition that there is a tendency for people to divert travel from places or vehicles for various reasons, only to find out later that catastrophic accidents had occurred that would have killed them had they not changed their plans. For example, it has been said the on the Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center had much fewer people in it than was normally the case. The factual basis for this is blurry, to say the least. But I do remember, in the days immediately following the terrorist attack on the towers, that the figures given in the media on the estimated dead and missing were much, much higher than the finally-arrived-at figures (by the thousands). The gist of this is that some people apparently have an intuitive sense that allows them to survive in this manner. My parents, for example, relished telling the story of their experience driving one night down a very foggy, lonely, unfamiliar central Florida country road. Suddenly my mother (to-be) yelled at my father (to-be), “Stop!!!”, and he slammed on the brakes. And a train suddenly went thundering by, just a few feet in front of their car! If that was a true example of intuition, then I suppose that I have a definite personal stake in this issue (to-be or not to-be, that is the question)!

If you accept the notion that there is something called “intuition” that enables people, in varying degrees, according to their talents, to foresee dangers (and opportunities) without any apparent clues, then that still leaves open a question: how is this so? Some would say that intuition is a paranormal ability that is psychic in nature, like clairvoyance. As a matter of fact, with some, “intuitive” is considered to be a synonym for “psychic”. Others (like me), on the other hand, don’t think that this is a necessary explanation. I believe that most of our mental processing takes place unconsciously, with decisions and solutions often seeming to pop out of nowhere, as if by magic. And I believe that we can take in subtle clues from our surroundings that we may not process consciously, but nevertheless have entered our subliminal awareness. The real mystery is when complicated strings of cause-and effect events transpire to produce actions that can only be explained as coincidental or “collectively” intuitive. But even here, I believe that we sometimes short-change the power of the natural human mind when we jump off and try to explain things through paranormal conjectures.