Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

In David S. Myers’ first chapter of his book, Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, he explains intuition as not only the ability to have a ‘gut feeling’ about something, but also is the underlying workings of the brain and the unconscious. He explains the differences of knowledge, and goes to further show the reader his points using past experiments as examples.

Myers first explains about intuition and what the qualms are about it. Basically, as Myers shows metaphorically, our intuition is similar to that of little servants making our body work without our need to be fully present to instruct it. For example, we do not need to tell our eyes to blink every so many seconds, we do not need to tell our fingers to move across the keyboard when typing words, we don’t need to consciously spell out every word in our vocabulary when typing, the words just come out naturally. If we had to consciously think about each process, I’m not sure we would survive considering Myers’ next point.

Myers explains that we also can only fully attend to one thing at a time. We cannot, from Myers’ example, move our right leg in a counterclockwise circular motion at the same time writing the number 3 (page 24). However, just because we cannot fully attend to each activity, that does not mean that our little servants aren’t still attending to the other stimuli around us. The cocktail party phenomenon, for example, shows that although we are attending to only one conversation at a time, if we hear our name called, just once, our little servants recognize the familiar and tell us to turn our attention there (page 25). If we, shown by these examples, could not attend to more than one thing fully, we would not be able to even breathe, let alone walk!

In yet another point of this chapter, Myers explains the difference between the left and right hemispheres of our brain and how, although the rest of our paired organs have the same functions, they act separately and differently. In explaining split-brained patients, Myers shows us further that our little servants are constantly at work in taking in our perceptions. The example Myers’ shows us is the experiment in which the patient is asked to look at a dot and two words are shown on each side of the dot. HE*ART. A person that has all the ‘cables’ attached would see ‘he’ and ‘art’ or ‘heart’ when asked to recall what they saw. The split-brained person would say that they only saw ‘art’ while pointing to ‘he’. The gesture is the right hemisphere’s attempt to communicate its perception, but because the left hemisphere is the main communication part of the brain, the patient says ‘art’ (page 19).

By first showing how our ‘little servants’ help us to live, we can now understand a little bit more where some of our knowledge comes from, even if we don’t know when and where we acquired it. This is the difference Myers speaks of between implicit and explicit knowledge. He shows us, through stroke patients and others with amnesia-like problems, how we can know something but not remember where we learned it. A person “can remember how to do something—called implicit memory (or procedural memory)(page22).” However, they can also not declare that they know it, this is explicit memory (or declarative memory).

Lastly, Myers uses past experiments to show how our ‘gut feeling’ alters our perception even with ‘invisible’ or unperceived features. In one experiment, Myers explains that when “subliminally flashed emotionally positive scenes (such as kittens or a romantic couple) or negative scenes (such as a werewolf or a dead body) an instant before” seeing slides of people, participants rated the slides accordingly. After the pleasant subliminal flashes (perceived as a flash of light), the slides were rated more positively. After the negative subliminal flashes (also perceived as a flash of light), the slides were rated more negatively (page 27). But the participants never really perceived the subliminal flash! Apparently, even though they did not attend to it, the stimulus was still perceived by their ‘little servants’.

Myers does an excellent job at explaining how intuition is more than just our ‘gut feeling’. It is also the process by which we go through everyday life, how we survive. It is the implicit and explicit memory, it is the ‘little servants’ processing the outside information so that we don’t have to.