Understanding Intuition
1st Edition
A Journey In and Out of Science
Description
Understanding Intuition: A Journey In and Out of Science explores the biological and cognitive mechanisms that account for intuition, and examines the first-person experience. The book integrates both scientific and personal perspectives on this important yet elusive mental capacity. It uses specific encounters to illustrate that intuition is enhanced when we can attend to the subtle aspects of our inner experiences, such as bodily sensations, images, and differing kinds of intuitive evaluative feelings, all of which may emerge no further than on the fringe of awareness. This awareness of subtle inner experiences helps forge a more fluid exchange between the unconscious and conscious minds, and allows readers to calibrate their own intuitions.
Over the course of the book, readers will gain a deeper appreciation and respect for the unconscious mind and its potential sophistication, and even its potential wisdom. Understanding Intuition is a timely and critical resource for students and researchers in psychology, cognitive science, theology, women’s studies, and neuroscience.
Key Features
- Stresses the powerful influence of the unconscious mind and its important adaptive role
- Frames intuition as significant and novel unconscious insight
- Presents a systematic framework for understanding different kinds of intuition
- Examines the emotional underpinnings of intuition, giving special emphasis to the role of somatic feelings and their derivatives
Readership
Students and researchers in psychology, cognitive science, theology, women’s studies, and neuroscience
Table of Contents
- Some Basic Questions
2. Implicit Learning
3. Intuitive Cognition
4. The Brain and Perception
5. Emotion and Cognition
6. Mental Imagery, Imagination, and Intuition
7. The Importance of Embodied Experience and Imagery in Intuition
8. A Feeling for the Truth
9. Who Are We?
Details
- No. of pages:
- 242
- Language:
- English
- Copyright:
- © Academic Press 2018
- Published:
- 16th January 2018
- Imprint:
- Academic Press
- eBook ISBN:
- 9780128141090
- Paperback ISBN:
- 9780128141083
About the Author
Lois Isenman
Lois Isenman received her PhD in Cell Biology from the University of California, San Francisco in 1980. She worked for many years as a researcher in Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley and at Harvard and Tufts Universities. During this time, she became aware that her cognitive style was strongly biased towards intuition, and she eventually became interested in exploring what intuition means as well as its role in scientific endeavor. As a Science Fellow at the former Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College in 1994-95, she began having some unusual intuitive experiences about intuition itself. A few years later she began working on intuition full time as a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center of Brandeis University. Her works brings together the Cognitive Science that likely accounts for intuition with foundational first-person experiences of intuition.
Affiliations and Expertise
Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University (Waltham), MA, USA
Reviews
"In Understanding Intuition, Lois Isenman offers a gate into the too-rarely seen clarity and scope of our own minds. The invitation is to let go of what we just think we know, and in doing so, to open ourselves up to an entirely different way of knowing." --Koun Franz Deputy Editor, Buddhadarma
"This wide-ranging and important book on the science of intuition is scholarly yet accessible, rigorous yet personal. By expertly weaving together ideas and findings from psychology, neuroscience and spirituality, it represents a synthesis on the topic of intuition that goes notably beyond what has been published before in a single volume." -- Dr. Oliver Robinson, author of Paths Between Head and Heart: Exploring the Harmonies of Science and Spirituality
"Intuition is an under-appreciated human faculty whose unconscious learning, memory, and response cues are never-the-less invaluable. Not only does intuition underlie the genius of creative discovery, in art, math, and science, but also this faculty guides each one of us through the vicissitudes of daily life. In contrast with rote learning and conscious deliberation, intuition is especially useful, if not necessary, in a current cultural milieu of continual change and information overload. Isenman’s book, Understanding Intuition, is a masterpiece that brings together the latest research trends in cognitive and affective neuroscience, while examining intuition in terms of bottom-up and emergent implicit processes from the perspective of nonlinear dynamics. This book is well-researched, well-organized, and highly readable, as Isenman walks the reader through definitions and conceptualizations that are otherwise nonverbal, ineffable, and seemingly inexplicable." -- Terry Marks-Tarlow, PhD, author of Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy and Awakening Clinical Intuition
"Lois Isenman describes an inner access point that bridges the structure of our Subjective reality with the Objectivity of received Intuitive perceptions. She is moving us toward our next levels of consciousness." -- Helen Palmer, Academic psychologist and Author of The Enneagram
"A rich, nuanced and scholarly work, Understanding Intuition takes on a vital but little discussed aspect of scientific, artistic and interpersonal creativity, culminating in a stirring final chapter that looks at the human spirit and our collective future. Weaving skillfully between the rational and the intuitive, Isenman’s work itself reflects its subject. Jonas Salk, a renowned synthesizer of intuition and reason, would stand and applaud." -- Jonathan D. Salk, M.D. Co-author with Jonas Salk of A New Reality: Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine
"Moving back and forth between personal experiences of intuition and the scientific evidence describing the processes involved, Intuition’s Journey surveys the intelligence of the unconscious, where decisions are made about a half second before our conscious mind is aware of having decided. Isenman takes us into this world where our intuitions originate in a knowing that is “unconscious” insofar as it escapes our notice, even as it guides the flow of our mental associations." - John Ryan Haule, Ph.D.
