Is intuition your reasoning? by Namrata Narayan

Is Intuition your Reasoning? A colloquium paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the Pre Diploma Presentation

Faculty Guide – Prof. Ranjana Dani Industry Guide – Mrs. Madhavi Gadkari

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Prof. Ranjana Dani, Mrs.Madhavi Gadkari, Mrs.Aruna Narayan, Mr.Hemant Apte, Mr.Rahul Bhajekar, Mr.Rajendra Tamhane, Mrs.Surekha Ghogale, Mr.Sunil Kenkarey, Mr.Rajiv Savant, Mr.Rajesh Narvekar, Mrs.SUJATA LAD, Ms.Namita Parikh for their valuable inputs and recommendations.

Early Genesis of Intuition

Intuition, Imagination, Instinct

Case Studies

Intuition and Logic

Intuition and Reasoning

Intuition in Design

Bibliography

I have always struggled with words to explain my work. I have had to mostly go back and forth to explain my work and articulate it. I realize that there is something within me that allows me to make decisions with the information gathered registering somewhere in my mind. I have come to give that thought a chance and most times it has seemed to work well enough.

What is this understanding that we come to learn, trust, believe without immediate logical reasoning to back it up? Through my paper that follows I would like to talk about the role of intuition in our everyday lives and if intuition is your way of reasoning

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To trace back the early genesis of intuition, I would like to introduce the theory put forth by Carl Jung.

Carl Jung is one of the most important, most complex, and most controversial psychological theorists. Jungian psychology focuses on establishing and fostering the relationship between conscious and unconscious processes. Dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the psyche enrich the person, and Jung believed that without this dialogue, unconscious processes could weaken and even jeopardize the personality. Jung developed the concept of individuation, his term for a process of personal development that involves establishing a connection between the ego and the self. The ego is the center of consciousness; the self is the center of the total psyche, including both the conscious and the unconscious. They are aspects of a single system and there is a constant interplay between the two. Individuation is the process of developing wholeness by integrating all the various parts of the psyche. Jung found that individuals could be characterized as either primarily inward-oriented or primarily outward-oriented. Extroversion and Introversion are two complementary attitudes towards the world. Everyone uses both attitudes but one is more developed than the other. The introvert is more comfortable with the inner world of thoughts and feelings. The extrovert feels more at home with the world of objects and other people. There is also a balance between conscious and unconscious emphases on these qualities:

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If you take an extrovert you will find his unconscious has an introverted quality, because all the extroverted qualities are played out in his consciousness and the introverted are left in the unconscious. Introversion and extroversion are suitable at various times and are mutually exclusive. Neither one is better than the other. The ideal is to be flexible and to adopt whichever attitude is more appropriate in a given situation-to operate in terms of a dynamic balance between the two and not develop a fixed, rigid way of responding to the world.1

Jung found that different people think, feel, and experience the world in fundamentally different ways. He identified four fundamental psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Thinking and feeling are alternative ways of forming judgments and making decisions Thinking is concerned with objective truth, judgment, and impersonal analysis. Thinking asks the question "What does this mean?" Consistency and abstract principles are highly valued. They are the greatest planners but tend to hold onto their theories even when confronted with new and contradictory ideas. Feeling is focused on value. It may include judgments of good vs. bad and right vs. wrong (as opposed to decision making according to the criteria of logic or efficiency, as in thinking). Feeling asks the question "What value does this have?" Jung classified sensation and intuition together as ways of gathering information, as distinct form of making decisions.

1 Carl Jung Theory - Ref - Institute of Transpersonal Psychology

Sensation refers to a focus on direct sense experience, perception of details, and concrete facts: what one can see, touch, and smell. Sensation asks the question “What exactly am I perceiving?” Intuition is a way of comprehending perceptions in terms of possibilities, past experience, future goals, and unconscious processes Intuition asks the question "What might happen, what is possible?" The implications of experience are more important to intuitives than the actual experience itself. Strongly intuitive people add meaning to their perceptions so rapidly that they often cannot separate their interpretations from the raw sensory data. Intuitives integrate new information quickly, automatically relating past experience and relevant information to immediate experience. Because it often includes unconscious material, intuitive thinking appears to proceed by leaps and bounds. One's function type indicates the relative strengths and weaknesses and the style of activity one tends to prefer. His theory is especially useful in helping us understand social relationships; it describes how people perceive in alternate ways and use different criteria in acting and making judgments. For example, intuitive-feeling speakers will not have the same logical, tightly organized, and detailed lecture style as thinking-sensation lecturers. The talks of the former are more likely to ramble, to include stories, and to give the sense of a subject by approaching it from many different angles, rather than by developing it systematically. According to Jung, the unconscious because of its nature cannot be known and thus must be described in relationship to consciousness. . Consciousness, he believes, theoretically has no limit.

Jung also speaks about the archetypes, which is one of his most difficult concepts. Archetypes are inherited predispositions to respond to the world in certain ways. The archetypes themselves are forms, without content of their own, that serve to organize or channel psychological material. They are somewhat like dry stream beds whose shape determines the characteristics of a river once water begins flowing through them. The archetypes are carriers of energy. When an archetype is activated, it generally unlocks a tremendous amount of energy. All creativity has an archetypal element. The archetypes include â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Ego is the center of consciousness and provides a sense of consistency and direction in our conscious lives. It tends to oppose whatever might threaten this fragile consistency of consciousness and tries to convince us that we must always consciously plan and analyze our experiences. The Persona is the appearance we present to the world. It is the character we assume-through it, we relate to others. The persona includes our social roles, the kind of clothes we choose to wear, and our individual styles of expressing ourselves. The Shadow is an archetypal form that serves as the focus for material that has been repressed from consciousness; its contents include those tendencies desires and memories that are rejected by the individual as incompatible with the persona and contrary to social standards and ideals. The Self is the archetype of centeredness. It is the union of the conscious and the unconscious that embodies the harmony and balance of the various opposing elements of the psyche. Symbols have a very complex meaning because it defies reason; it always presupposes a lot of meanings that can't be comprehended ill a single logical concept. The symbol has a future.

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Dreams "The general function of dreams," Jung wrote, "is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium." This in depth analysis by Jung classifies people into different types.

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There are however various other closely related terms, which I would like to clearly define: Intuition, imagination, and instinct These are three words; three concepts that people find it difficult to distinguish between. I will clarify the differences between the three, starting with understanding instinct. Your instincts are your genetic survival drives. Every creature, large or small, that has a nervous system has instincts, as it is a basic survival tool for any living creature. They do not require any intelligence, and they don’t involve any kind of inspired guidance. Instincts are nothing more than the basic drives wired into your physiology. Your imagination is something completely different. It is a creative tool that is driven by your conscious and subconscious mind in response to your desires and intentions. Your imagination has the ability to craft visions towards the manifestation of your reality. While driven by your physical mind, the imaginative process uses many of the same inner senses as your intuition does as it evokes into being new worlds and possibilities. Your imagination is directed by your will, and is a powerful tool in the conscious creation process. Using your imagination as a gateway or portal, inspiration can also flow and bring forth great acts of creativity. Your imagination and inspiration are like twin bridges to your intuition. When you use your imagination to visualize a place within your mind, you create an ideal internal space from which you can access and interact with your intuitive self, receiving insights and information from your

subconscious mind and from your Higher Self. This means that your imagination is a flexible tool and passageway on the road to your intuitive development. The environments and situations you invoke in your imagination serve as a backdrop and foundation for your intuitive practices. For example, imagination is key to success in guided visualization. It sets the scene and creates an appropriate setting from which you can open yourself to higher vibrations and receive insights and impressions through your inner intuitive senses. Intuition is a kind of knowing and understanding that relies upon the capacity to read signals, clues and patterns, often based on previous experience. We expect the doctor with several decades of experience to make such intuitive judgments with more skill when diagnosing a patient than an intern just starting out, but we would also expect that doctor to temper the understandings flowing from intuition with medical and scientific knowledge.

Intuition is an indefinite concept. We all have come across people whom we consider intuitive. There are a lot of people who do not believe in the idea of intuition, but in logic and reasoning, of which reasoning again is largely intuitive, which I shall throw light on later in the paper.

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Case studies A questionnaire was sent out to various people from various age groups. The Questions asked wereWhat does intuition mean to you? Any examples/incidents where you have used intuition? Has your experience in your field made you more intuitive? How much of and when do you use Intuition or logic or reasoning with people, situations, making decisions? Do you believe in/rely on your intuition?

What is intuition to you?’ ‘Intuition means harnessing one's sixth sense in real time’ ‘You just "know" ‘Intuition is like a compass, which guides you through your life in a direction. (Right or wrong direction is debatable)’ ‘It is a latent force, which takes over in decision-making in a conscious state of true awareness. For me it requires either being truly in the moment or else removed from it completely and viewing it from the outside.’ ‘Intuition to me is the ability to know or to do things, which are beyond normal capacity of the senses. This phenomenon cannot be explained rationally or logically. It is the faculty by which the sub-conscious mind functions.’

‘Intuition to me is when my heart and when my impulsive mind asks me not to listen to my logical mind and tells me to go ahead with the sudden desire to do or to react to a situation, for which there seems to be no logical explanation.’ ‘It means to me the voice of my soul.’ ‘For me, it is doing or taking decisions without an immediate logical reasoning to it. It is the power or energy within us which has most answers assimilated over a period of time. It’s the decision that you take after this that gives u peace.’

An interesting answer given when asked, does intuition play a part in your professional decisions? ‘As an architect and designer, while attempting unconventional designs which would work and create the "aha" factor, despite all odds- this had much more to do with imagination though. As a developmental professional, I rely a lot on intuition for formulating strategies, rather than using objective decision-making tools. I tend to let my decisions be guided more on keen observation of human behavioral patterns which I internalize for allowing ideas to flow and formulate. This is not easy in the corporate world, as decision makers and other stake holders always look for objective and tangible facts leading up to a decision. However, there are several examples of how intuition has helped launch some of the best and most successful brands in the world. The most vivid example of intuition in my life has been in my career change. I had a feeling it was what I was looking for and it worked! It opened doors which I did not imagine would even exist, given my education and training.’

‘Our work/thinking/creation being liked by others is our connection with others in ways that are not explicit. Aesthetic abilities are irrational and void of sensory perception, a sense that is beyond the conscious understanding.’ How much of and when do you use Intuition or logic or reasoning with people, situations, making decisions?

‘Cannot be put in black and white, but its like a mother's instinct. The gut feeling; whether positive or negative does have a flavor of intuition.’

‘No, but it has made me trust fact more! Sometimes intuition is plain wrong.’

‘First logic and all reasoning, then ultimately intuition before action.’

‘Since I deal with the difficult task of having to induce behavior change in communities for adopting a better quality of life, this question is very relevant. Logic and reasoning is very well defined by the science of development and this can be scripted for effective communication. But what really works is a look, a touch, a shared cup of tea in a broken saucer in a village in the back of beyond, which does the trick. On the other hand if one has to present the same case to a Ford Foundation, it has to be fitted into a " Logical Framework Analysis" if you were to hope for any form of funding to deal with the actual problem. So it's a bit of both.’

‘Intuition, logic, reasoning do not go together.... either u have an intuition OR u logic and reason...not necessary your intuitions r logic or reasoning based.... anyways, with me I believe

intuitions r always there but the subconscious mind shoves in reasoning and questioning when it comes to making decisions’

‘Logic and reasoning which constitute the 'conscious mind' is something we must use all the time in all the situations/ decisions whatsoever. But since intuition does not belong to the conscious mind it cannot be used as and when you want. To be intuitive one must be able to go beyond the conscious mind, beyond thoughts and thereafter one must be able to access the subconscious mind, which has the wisdom of its own.’

‘I am quite an impulsive guy, or so I was. Now with my beard growing grey but not my hair as yet, I prefer to reason with myself rather than going with my impulses. If I do that now, I might cause myself some serious damage…but as you know ‘old habits die hard’.’

‘Always, whenever I have to do any financial deals, most of the time logic does not help, I use intuitions.’

Logic and Intuition

Logic and intuition are considered at the two ends of a spectrum. There is a large section of people out there who completely disregard the concept or idea of intuition. True, that not all intuition-based decisions are necessarily ‘right’ however, in my opinion there are not strictly bound by worldly rules. Logic on the other hand, to large extent is beneficial [where facts are

concerned]. There is no doubt about its success rate. However what most people do not realize is that logic has its own limitation, the fact that is at its core based on a certain model or a theory. Intuition though influenced by our various experiences, is not bound to anything.

Today’ s world, highly values the logical mind, after all, how often do you hear, "I'll think about it,"? In fact, we have become so obsessed with thinking that it seems our minds have difficulty turning off. How many people do you know need some kind of white noise ? The TV or some other device must be playing constantly. This is in an effort to quite their noisy mind. Once the mind starts, it is difficult to stop. Eastern cultures understand this and actually coined a phrase, which describes the incessant mind chatter called "Monkey Mind”, term meaning "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable.

I would like to put forth an example of the great physicist and scientist Albert Einstein. "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." Albert Einstein.

Einstein knew that if he flaunted his intuitive side he was likely to lose credit with his peers, so he guarded this aspect of himself. However, some of his most brilliant moments came while zoning out in the bathtub, sometimes for hours actually forgetting he was submerged in water. (biographical source.) His greatest epiphanies likely came while he was in an altered state of consciousness or a meditative state, only he may not have verbalized it quite like that.

For Einstein, insight did not come from logic or mathematics. It came, as it does for artists, from intuition and inspiration. As he told one friend, "When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge." 2 Elaborating, he added, "All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration.... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason." Thus, his famous statement that, for creative work in science, "Imagination is more important than knowledge"

Einstein's autobiographical notes reflect the same thought: "I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part without the use of symbols, and, furthermore, largely unconsciously". Elsewhere he wrote even more baldly "no scientist thinks in equations". Einstein only employed words or other symbols (presumably mathematical) -- in what he explicitly called a secondary translation step -- after he was able to solve his problems through the formal manipulation of internally imagined images, feelings, and architectures. "I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards," he wrote (Biographical source). Einstein expanded on this theme in a letter to fellow mathematician Jacques Hadamard, writing that " the words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities, which seem to serve, as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images, which can be 'voluntarily' reproduced and 2 Published on March 31, 2010 by Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein in Imagine That!

combined.... The above-mentioned elements are, in my case of visual and some of a muscular type.... Conventional words or other signs [presumably mathematical ones] have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will" In other interviews, he attributed his scientific insight and intuition mainly to music. "If I were not a physicist," he once said, "I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.... I get most joy in life out of music”. His son, Hans, amplified what Einstein meant by recounting that "whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties" After playing piano, his sister Maja said, he would get up saying, "There, now I've got it”. Something in the music would guide his thoughts in new and creative directions.

But how, then, did art differ from science for Einstein? Surprisingly, it wasn't the content of an idea, or its subject, that determined whether something was art or science, but how the idea was expressed. "If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose constructions are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art" Einstein himself worked intuitively and expressed himself logically. That's why he said that great scientists were also artists. But what do we students typically get, especially in school and college? We get math without music. We get science without images, feelings and intuition. We get knowledge without imagination.

Einstein’s quote on intuition being sacred gift justifies how there is so much more than we can actually do or we are capable of doing. Its only when u move out of those structures formed in your mind, can you really start experiencing what we should be actually. It is like music, a melody where the beats build up and reach a crescendo, which is probably like having a flash of intuition, only the build up, the process is our unconscious. We need to le go of the constant rambling in our heads. Why do people say it strikes just like that? Probably because when the other noises bound by the outer elements give up or quieten down that you allow or make space for this voice to be heard. It is like the wise old man in your mind. And he is not going to shout what he really thinks. He has heard you, assimilated all that you have heard from all your senses and he would speak only when the noise quitens down. We spend hours and hours reasoning over various situations and conditions. We use logic to reason things out in minds. Interestingly reasoning is actually mostly intuitive.

Reasoning and Intuition

Reasoning is often thought of as being the exact opposite of intuitions. A typical example of intuition is the first impression we form when we meet someone new. It comes spontaneously and quickly to mind and, in many cases, we can't quite pinpoint why we think that this guy is nice while this one is likely to be a jerk. By contrast when people think of reasoning they think of, say, solving math problems in the classroom: a slow, effortful, conscious process.

Both of them are usually characterized by a list of traits. Intuitions are supposed to be fast, effortless, unconscious, with little reliance on working memory and prone to mistakes and biases. Reasoning is supposed to be slow, effortful, conscious, with a crucial reliance on working memory and able to correct the mistakes and biases of intuitions.

For example, imagine that you had to characterize memory. You can think of the conscious, strenuous exercise of trying to remember a long string of random numbers. Or you can think of the automatic recollection of how to go to your house or what your name is. Most intuitions can be made to be conscious, effortful, taxing on working memory: reading if you try to decipher some very poor handwriting, visual search if you're looking for a particular face in a large crowd, etc. Yet the basic, simple form of the intuition is what we should focus on: it is the mechanism that makes the more effortful version possible. For example, Mohit and Sneha disagree about the movie they should see tonight. Sneha says: "Last week you picked the movie, so this week it's my turn." Mohit replies: "Fair enough, your turn to pick." This exchange is quite trivial, but it still requires reasoning. Sneha has to be able to find a reason for why she should be the one deciding which movie to see. Mohit has to be able to evaluate this reason and decide it's good enough that he should concede the point. Looking at this minimal sample of reasoning, we realize that it is in fact very much like an intuition. It happens very quickly: neither Sneha nor Mohit needs to stop for a few minutes to ponder upon the strength of "Last week you picked the movie, so this week it's my turn." It doesn't take much effort or working memory to garner such an argument, and even less to

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evaluate it. Importantly, people don't really know why this argument is persuasive. It relies on intuitions of fairness that we can't easily make explicit. Even though the reason is consciously processed, they way it is processed is kept under the hood. Reasoning relies on a set of intuitions: reasoning taps into intuitions about what is a good reason to accept a given conclusion. We have an intuition that if Mohit has picked the movie last week, Sneha can use that as a reason to pick the movie this week. Obviously, we also have intuitions about what is not a good argument. The 'meme' "your argument is invalid," illustrated below works because it is a "super stimulus," an extreme form of a normal stimulus, an absolutely ludicrous argument taping into our intuitions for merely poor arguments. Here as well, recognizing that the argument is absurd is fast, effortless and hard to explain by anything deeper than "it has nothing to do with anything."3

3 Published on August 17, 2011 by Hugo Mercier in Social by Design

When people reason on their own, reasoning can indeed by slow and effortful. But when they argue, finding and evaluating reasons comes very spontaneously-sometimes, all too spontaneously: we can all think of cases in which we kept arguing long after we should have given up. This difference is no accident. If reasoning comes much more easily in the context of a discussion, it's simply because it is designed to work in such a context, and not when we engage in private ratiocination.

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Intuition and design

So where does intuition fit in, in something like design, which it is purely human centric? The answer is partly provided by none other than Steve Jobs who says that Western Rationalist approach is an acquired trait and is much revered today. However it is Intuition that is an inherent human quality and one we have forgotten how to use. In India, he says, one finds great many examples of use of Intuition all across but especially in rural areas.

In the olden days and even today in large parts of rural India, solutions to various problems or situations come ‘just like that’. Even in the remotest of villages their idea of matchboxes is completely different. On the coasts in India, when fishermen move out in the sea, they ‘just know’ where the best catch is? It is another thing that fishing has now largely become mechanized, the ill effects of which can be seen. Psychologist Richard Nisbett, summarized in his 2003 book The Geography of Thought. Whereas Westerners tend to think “analytically,” Easterners think more “holistically.”

Today, intuition is recognized largely as a part of any design learning it comes from years of experience and learning. Most times we rely on intuition and personal style to a large degree after assimilating all facts and figures.

“Our ability to make good judgments is holistic in character, and arises from repeated confrontations with real things: comprehensive entities that are grasped all at once, in a manner that may be incapable of explicit articulation.” Nigel Cross is Emeritus Professor of Design Studies.

Like any other service industry, you do need to sell your design. This many times involves coming up with vague theories of how certain elements work and some just do not. There is no logic really behind it. Michael Beirut a partner at the design firm Pentagram aptly describes this, “In discussing design work with their clients, designers are direct about the functional parts of their solutions and obfuscate like mad about the intuitive parts, having learned early on that telling the simple truth — ‘I don’t know, I just like it that way’ — simply won’t do. So into this vacuum rushes the bullshit: theories about the symbolic qualities of colors or typefaces; improvable claims about the historical inevitability of certain shapes, fanciful forced marriages of arbitrary design elements to hard-headed business goals.” How often do we see ourselves doing this? 4

Donald Schön makes two arguments in relation to the question of intuition. First of all, he acknowledges that every designer are engaged in deep internal processes of reflection and decision making that can be seen as intuitive since they are not fully possible to externalize. He also constantly advocates reflection as a tool to engage critically in what constitutes the elements and processes of design thinking. Building your expertise is a matter of training your 4 Nathan Sinsabaugh - Design: Design Thinking

intuition. "Training" your intuition can be done by expanding your design repertoire through constant critical examination of your own thinking and acting as a designer. For me, intuition should be challenged by rational approaches to design but without requiring all aspects of the process to become externalized. Intuition can be respected as a core part of design thinking without making it a black box that is not possible to develop and is only a matter of talent. Any designer can develop their competence by doing both, that is, engaging in constant effort to develop their design intuition and to engage in efforts to find more developed and systematic ways to improve the design process.

Paula Scher, a partner at the design firm Pentagram says, “ My work is play and I play while I design. I even looked it up the dictionary to make sure that I actually do that and the technical meaning number one is engaging in a child like activity and two gambling, and I realize I do both while designing. I am both a kid and gambling with time. And if your not then there is something inherently wrong with the structure of the situation you’re in as a designer. ”

She goes on to elaborate that most things that we see are solemn and not serious. Being solemn is easy, being serious is hard. “Children almost always begin by being serious which is what makes them so entertaining when compared to adults as a class. Adults on the other hand are solemn. It is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, but is more comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is commonplace. Jogging which is commonplace and widely accepted as good for you is solemn, poker is serious. Washington D.C is solemn and New York is serious.”. This however she says, makes no point about quality.

She goes on to say, “ Solemn design is often very important and effective design. Solemn design is usually correct and is accepted by appropriate audiences. This is what right thinking designers and all clients are striving for. Serious design or serious play is something else. For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidently or incidentally, it can be achieved out of innocence or arrogance or selfishness, sometimes out of carelessness. But mostly it is achieved out of those crazy parts of human behavior that don’t really make any sense. Serious design is imperfect. It is filled with the kind of craft flaws that comes with the being one the first of its kind. Serious design is also quite unsuccessful from a solemn point of view. That is because the art of serious play is about, invention, change, and rebellion, not perfection. Perfection happens during solemn play.”

Maybe we should all strive towards achieving some serious design rather than just trying to perfect something that is already done. Not easy considering that we are constantly forced towards perfection.

My entire paper proves that intuition is an inherent human quality. This paper has most definitely broadened my understanding of intuition. At the end of this paper I don’t really think I can categorize exactly what is intuition or quantify it. It is my way of reasoning and thinking. The process of writing this paper has only made me believe in it more. Most of my doubts on intuition vs logic, the role it has to play in design has further strengthened my belief in it. Where does this understanding take me next will be interesting.? In the final analysis one may ask Is intuition your reasoning? For me, the answer is Yes. Intuition is my reasoning.

Do a lot of my decisions come from what ‘I feel’? Yes they most certainly do.

I think Intuition has very little to do with Education, Intellect or Intelligence. It requires a simple, uncluttered, sensitive, compassionate, flexible open outlook unbound by rules and ‘shoulds’ and should ‘nots.’

Its only fitting that I end the essay by traversing back in time where it all really begins; our childhood; where the mind is clean as a slate, unformed, unadorned, unadulterated and therefore very Intuitive.

Bibliography

Psychology Today http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200007/is-there-sixth-sense?page=2 http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/social-design/201108/reasoning-is-more-intuitive-wethink Institute of transpersonal Psychology http://www.itp.edu/about/carl_jung.php http://ithinkidesign.wordpress.com/category/design-thinking/ http://www.kaplusa.com/blog/2009/12/the-role-of-intuition-in-design/ http://transground.blogspot.in/2012/04/can-designers-train-their-intuition.html Overdose.am http://www.overdose.am/2012/04/20/what-design-can-do-conference/ Videos Ted Talks Paula Scher gets serious | Video on TED.com David Kelley on human-centered design | Video on TED.com Design That Matters | Video channel on TED.com