Naomi Sutherland

In 2012, the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research decided to launch a research project called “Enhancing Intuitive Decision Making Through Implicit Learning”. It looks at the role of intuition in decision making. 

“The whole goal of this research endeavor is to determine if we can develop techniques to measurably improve intuition,” says Ivy Estabrooke, a program manager at the Office of Naval Research. 

In fact, what they are finding is that soldiers that rely on their intuition are more likely to uncover covert operations or secret explosives than people that follow prescribed learning. 

Read the New York Times article: Here 

Can you believe that? Of all the possible agencies, the daddy of constitutional reason is entrenching mysticism into the Army. Possibly the best news I've had all year. 

But again I'm left with one fundamental question: why is mysticism so frowned upon in today's society if people trust in nothing else as much? 

Psychology Today says that System 1 reasoning - that of the right hand side of our brains, which operates the reptilian intelligence we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors - governs Intuition and actually works faster than our powers of reason. 

POWERS OF PREDICTION 

And the good news doesn't stop there: Intuition is also smarter than Reason. 

For example, in one study, published in Psychology Today, shows that researchers asked their subjects to play a card game where the goal was to win the most money.  What the subjects did not realize, however, is that the game was rigged from the start.  There were two stacks of cards to choose from; one was rigged to provide big wins followed by big losses, while the other deck was set up to provide small gains but almost no losses.  

It took about 50 cards before the subjects said they had a hunch about which deck was safer, and about 80 cards before they could actually explain the difference between the two decks.  However, what is most fascinating is that after only 10 cards the sweat glands on the subjects’ palms opened slightly every time they reached for a card in the dangerous deck.  It was also around the tenth card that the subjects started to favor the safer deck, without being consciously aware that they were doing so.  In other words, long before the analytical brain could explain what was going on, the subjects’ bodily intuition knew where there was danger, and guided them toward safety.