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excerpt from chapter on Intuitive Intelligence

Understanding Intuitive Intelligence

In this chapter, a model for intuitive decision-making will be presented that intends to assist the reader in learning to choose and make decisions in times of information overload. This model is called Intuitive Intelligence. Intuitive Intelligence primarily expands from two different frameworks; the naturalistic decision making (NDM) model and the mind-boggling research relating to noetic science and nonlocal intuition. While the NDM framework focuses primarily “on the way people build expertise and apply it to cognitive functions such as judgment and decision making,”[i] noetic science uses rigorous scientific methods “to study the nature of direct inner knowing and the boundaries between the subjective and the objective.”[ii]

By combining the NDM model with the research relating to noetic science, Intuitive Intelligence is designed to both use the idea that intuitive perception is based on an individual’s unconscious mind accessing information from prior experiences and the ability to recognize various patterns, as in NDM, as well as the human possibility to intuitively perceive information from a distant or future source, as has been demonstrated in the field of noetic science.[iii] [iv] [v] Thus, Intuitive Intelligence intends to teach the practitioner how to use intuition to access one’s direct inner knowing, which is the actual meaning of the Greek word noetikus.[vi]

However, before deepening our knowledge about intuition, we will examine how intuition is related to animal and human instincts. Like all animals in the animal kingdom, we as mammals possess instincts. Yet as humans, most people no longer have fine-tuned instincts due to a large dependence on receiving information from language and machines. Therefore, let us take a moment to understand a bit more about instincts and how we can recapture our inherent ability to instinctually respond to our experiences.