Intuition - Origin and Definition

[TomasM]

The Brain, Feelings, and TIntS Intuition Types

I'm going to attempt to map the brain regions for different types of intuition identified by TIntS (Inferential, Holistic, and Affective). By narrowing down these functional areas it should start to become clearer how intuition is operating with relation to the body and mind. To start I have identified a video that provides some information related to how we experience "feelings," and what portion of the brain is used when processing these mental (rather than physical) states. Each type of intuition will utilize different parts of the brain, but I think (and hope), that we will see some centralized brain regions that ultimately consolidate all of the inputs (like a funnel) and then provides us with awareness, conscious explanation, and ultimately choice.

This video communicates that there are many areas of the brain used in the production of feelings with the Insular Cortex providing somewhat of a consolidation area that works in harmony with other regions of the brain. It's not a long video and is actually quite palatable and interesting.

Sources used by the video creator:

• Craig, A. D. (2016). Interoception and Emotion: A neuroanatomical perspective. In L. F. Barrett, M. Lewis, & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of Emotions (4th ed., pp. 215–234). essay, Guilford Press.
• Damasio, A. (2019). The strange order of things: Life, feeling, and the making of cultures. Vintage.
• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Pan Macmillan.
• Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). WW Norton & Company.

 

[meowzician]

@TomasM

1) What exactly is intuition and how accurate is it?
Intuition is using analogy or spotting patterns to solve problems. Sometimes it's conscious. But usually its unconscious. You get the sensation there is a pattern, but you can't quite put your finger on it.

2) Is intuition derived from both genetic and environmental factors and to what extent does each contribute?
Yes. Like so many things, we are born with a given range. Where we fall within that range is due to environment, including things like practice, the tendency to collect scads of data, etc.

3) Since it is a dichotomy does intuition extend itself from a deficiency in sensory function or is it an extra-sensory state of its own?
I'm not sure that either is true. I think it is simply a natural talent that can be honed.

4) Can intuition be developed?
Yes, but only to a point. When you reach the top of your genetic range, that's it.

5) What value is there in having and/or developing intuition?
Intuition has evolved because it helps us stay alive long enough to procreate. Ever intuit that the person you just met is dangerous? It's a good idea to pay attention to that intuition. You are unconsciously picking up on things like body language, micro expressions, and tone of voice--things that DO indicate they are probably a danger.

6) Is there a downside in having and/or developing intuition?
Intuiters for some reason rarely have the intuition that their intuition is not always reliable. Intuition is a great starting place. But it's nice when it's backed up by evidence or reasoning. Any unproven intuition should always be red flagged as possibly wrong, even if your intuition is especially good. You are not psychic.

7) Are there other functions or abilities that branch off of a developed intuitive?
I'm not sure. Maybe creativity? The ability to anticipate consequences?

 

[ErikAlberto]

I don’t have anything that I feel led to add to what you’ve had to say about intuition, but I did want to give you more than just a like.

You’ve put an extraordinary amount of effort, energy, and research into articulating your thoughts about intuition. These are not only well thought out, but quite simply good and worth having verbalized.

Although intuition as a cognitive function is my natural habitat, understanding and categorizing what it is, how it works, and so forth is something I find very difficult to do. Your post has been interesting to read and helpful in my own attempts to find language for my natural habitat—both for myself and in communicating it to others.

 

[TomasM]

I don’t have anything that I feel led to add to what you’ve had to say about intuition, but I did want to give you more than just a like.

You’ve put an extraordinary amount of effort, energy, and research into articulating your thoughts about intuition. These are not only well thought out, but quite simply good and worth having verbalized.

Although intuition as a cognitive function is my natural habitat, understanding and categorizing what it is, how it works, and so forth is something I find very difficult to do. Your post has been interesting to read and helpful in my own attempts to find language for my natural habitat—both for myself and in communicating it to others.

Thank you @ErikAlberto

When dealing with the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind, there are so many topics that start becoming relevant. There are elements of intuition that are situated in a grey area where NDEs, OBEs, dreams, telepathy, and science are all positioned right next to a veil that can’t scientifically be crossed. However, we are starting to get some evidence that allows us to see the fringe of intuition with science. Every puzzle piece may be obscure but collectively an image is starting to take form.

I appreciate the support.

 

[TomasM]

When Meaning Becomes a Chill
Frisson, ASMR and the Intuitive Mind



Frisson and ASMR appear to share a curious bodily pathway: a tingling sensation that often begins around the scalp or back of the head, moves through the neck, and may travel down the spine or into the rest of the body. ASMR research commonly describes this as a pleasant, static-like tingle associated with relaxation and well-being, often triggered by whispering, soft repetitive sounds, careful movement, or cues of personal attention (Barratt & Davis, 2015). Frisson, by contrast, is more often described as an aesthetic chill: a shiver, wave, or goosebump response produced by music, beauty, awe, emotional intensity, or sudden meaning (Schoeller et al., 2024). The overlap is important because the same general “tingle channel” may be activated by very different origins.

The difference between ASMR and frisson may not be as simple as warmth versus chills. ASMR is often calming, intimate, and soothing, but studies have found that it can involve both relaxation and physiological arousal. In one study, people who experienced ASMR showed reduced heart rate alongside increased skin conductance, suggesting a state that is calming but still bodily active (Poerio et al., 2018). Frisson, meanwhile, is usually more intense, upward-moving emotionally, and more strongly associated with chills or goosebumps. ASMR may feel like safe attention arriving through the senses, while frisson may feel like significance arriving through meaning.

This is where frisson becomes especially interesting in relation to intuition. If frisson were only a reflex to external sound, surprise, or cold, it would be less connected to consciousness and the mind. But aesthetic chills are often linked to meaning, expectation, reward, awe, beauty, memory, and emotional recognition (Schoeller et al., 2024). Some research even examines people who can voluntarily generate piloerection, or goosebumps, suggesting that top-down mental or affective processes can sometimes engage the same body system without a simple external trigger (Heathers et al., 2018). This opens the possibility that frisson may not always begin with the senses. In some people, it may begin with an internal construct: a pattern forming, a realization approaching, an imagined scene, a remembered feeling, or an intuitive recognition that has not yet become fully verbal.

For highly intuitive people, frisson may therefore function as an embodied confirmation of rapid meaning-formation. The mind may begin assembling a pattern before the body fully registers it, and the tingle may follow a fraction behind as the nervous system converts recognition into sensation. This does not prove that frisson is “intuition,” but it does suggest an overlap between intuition, imagination, consciousness, and bodily awareness. ASMR and frisson may share the descending tingle pathway, but they seem to differ in what calls that pathway into action: ASMR through sensory-social safety, and frisson through meaning, awe, emotional salience, and perhaps the mind’s ability to generate significance from within.

I felt that this information was relevant to mapping different types of intuition within the brain since frisson can have this overlap between the mind and body sensation. Intuition often appears to take cues from both mind and the body when it is creating an affect or awareness.

References:

Barratt, E. L., & Davis, N. J. (2015). Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR): A flow-like mental state. PeerJ, 3, e851. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.851

Poerio, G. L., Blakey, E., Hostler, T. J., & Veltri, T. (2018). More than a feeling: Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is characterized by reliable changes in affect and physiology. PLOS ONE, 13(6), e0196645. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196645

Schoeller, F., Horowitz, A. H., Jain, A., Maes, P., Reggente, N., Christov-Moore, L., Miller, M., & Friston, K. (2024). The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 24, 1031–1043. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-024-01168-x

Heathers, J. A. J., Fayn, K., Silvia, P. J., Tiliopoulos, N., & Goodwin, M. S. (2018). The voluntary control of piloerection. PeerJ, 6, e5292. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5292

 

[Fruiteloop]

There is something about the flow state where you just let go and "it happens".

Letting go could be a top down process because the brain's inhibitory system relaxes certain parts of what feels like resistance.

So like there are buddhist monks that can not only control breathing and heart rate but other physiological body processes.

Suppose we have this mechanism for attention, we become aware of a process inside us.
We can adjust ourselves to become intune with this process by regulation of other processes.
That means we must look at what effects what.
If I breath what does this change in the rest of the body.
If my heart beats what changes in the rest of my body.
If I look at the exterior environment what happens to my body.

Intuition often has been described as the ah-ha moment, the realization of something, where a soft cool sensation spreads in the brain areas.

So this is also physiological.

Tell an advanced buddhist monk in a brain scanner to achieve a certain state of insight and they come up with insights.

They are becoming intuitive on command.

By paying attention to the cool sensation and then feeling if they can make it bigger more cool and more realized.

We could also say that we could pay attention to the unconscious more often and this increases intuition.

This helps me allot to practice writing my thoughts down. Then I become more intuitive in knowing what to write.

I happen to forget to pay attention but as long as I remember I get better at it. So become more intuitive.

 

[TomasM]

Letting go could be a top down process because the brain's inhibitory system relaxes certain parts of what feels like resistance.

This sounds more related to the perceiving part of your INFP type.

So like there are buddhist monks that can not only control breathing and heart rate but other physiological body processes.

IDK, maybe? If the monk is consciously doing it and knows how they are doing it then it feels more conscious than unconscious/subconscious and intuitive.

Intuition often has been described as the ah-ha moment, the realization of something, where a soft cool sensation spreads in the brain areas.

It depends on what you mean by Ah-ha. I usually think of Ah-ha in a similar way as a Eureka moment where there is a conscious understanding of something. Intuition is something which is known but not understood - it can’t yet be explained.

Tell an advanced buddhist monk in a brain scanner to achieve a certain state of insight and they come up with insights.

They are becoming intuitive on command.

This feels like a reverse intuition, but I don’t know the process for how a monk achieves this outcome. It could be valuable in discovering the origin of intuition but when I was talking about frisson it was really seeking to connect the different parts of the brain involved between the cortex and insular cortex [and areas in close proximity]. Frisson is not intuition but it does seem to be acting on similar areas of the brain. The origin of frisson is different from ASMR and it is in that difference that I’m recognizing the same parts of the brain being utilized.

We could also say that we could pay attention to the unconscious more often and this increases intuition.

I don’t know what you mean by, “pay attention to the unconscious.” If you mean allowing yourself to trust your intuition more then that could very well increase your ability to leverage it - assuming you are already an elevated level of intuition. Some types of intuition can be learned [to a degree] but some types depends on how a person is built internally and this is a nature and nurture dynamic often acquired rather than learned.

This helps me allot to practice writing my thoughts down. Then I become more intuitive in knowing what to write.

I happen to forget to pay attention but as long as I remember I get better at it. So become more intuitive.

This seems more related to ADHD, which does appear related to the NF type. It could be related to intuition since the mind is processing so many variables that it creates a state where we often feel scattered-brained. I haven’t checked to see if there are any studies that connect ADHD and intuition but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some correlation. That said, I do have a friend who is ADHD and has stated explicitly that she lacks intuition - she is very smart but I believe she is correct in her self assessment.

 

[Fruiteloop]

Intuition is something which is known but not understood - it can’t yet be explained.

ok I see what you are getting at

In some way I feel stuff happening inside me that can be be transferred from the unconscious to the conscious otherwise I would not know about it. If something confirms my intuition that be something in the future that has not happened but I can adjust myself to it. That is where the attention comes in. Sometimes I get scared of thoughts that are not real, those could be called false intuitions. A real one would be something that comes true. Trusting an intuition I would have to first realize something is about to happen. I have more intuition on my feelings because I can understand people as to what they are like, this is positive or negative valence. As in I can tell if I am going to upset someone or not. So I approach things differently by what mood they are in that I "just know about". It was in my mind that paying attention has more benefits to intuition because the convex of intuition would be sensation. If a person is relaxed they often have more insights. So to be more relaxed people can pay attention to sensation in that way. Not sure if I can explain it but sensation has a relationship to the unconscious that is not clear to people who are not intuitive. Sensing types might get small insights but big insights I am not sure. Intuitive people depending on extraversion or introversion they spend less time on sensation so it's harder to pay attention. But to an intuitive once they do pay attention to sensations more is realized. So it may be the top down this is right in one sense but bottom up intuition can happen also. INFJ I guess look for what will happen next all the time, they anticipate all the time and is where the intuitions come from. I can do that sometimes but I need to be in a certain mood to relax and focus on future events. It is kind of opposite but still happens intuitively. I am more the kind of person that waits for things to happen and be ready for what I have to do at that time and not exactly in the future. And with my feelings. So it is like a split of (Fi and Si) to that of (Te and Ne), the first has to relax then the second has to know. How this happens in INFJ is not clear yet but be in a configuration similar. (Se and Fe) doing something I think is already relaxed.

 

[just me]

co-pilot search

"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."​

Origin and Context​

While this quote is widely associated with Einstein, its exact origins are somewhat unclear. The earliest known reference linking Einstein to this expression appeared in the 1976 book "The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness" by Bob Samples. However, Samples did not claim to be quoting Einstein directly; rather, he was interpreting Einstein's perspective on the intuitive mind Quote Investigator.

Interpretation of the Quote​

The quote highlights a critical balance between intuition and rationality in human cognition. It suggests that while rational thinking is essential for problem-solving and decision-making, intuition is a profound and often overlooked gift that can lead to deeper insights and creativity. Einstein's words serve as a reminder that modern society tends to prioritize rational thought at the expense of nurturing and recognizing the power of intuition The Minds Journal+1.

Significance​

Einstein believed that intuition plays a vital role in scientific discovery and creativity. He often emphasized the need to trust one's instincts and the importance of imagination in the pursuit of knowledge. This quote encourages individuals to honor both their intuitive and rational faculties, advocating for a more balanced approach to thinking and understanding the world A-Z Quotes.
In summary, this quote encapsulates Einstein's view on the interplay between intuition and rationality, urging society to appreciate the unique insights that intuition can provide while still valuing the practical applications of rational thought.

 

[just me]

Intuition is more about the present than the future, at least to me. Intuition recognizes multiples and "around the corner" type of understanding. The human mind may make future changes for how we might relate to things, but intuition seems to me like a present function, less like seeing into the future. Intuition can "lead to" deeper insights. Our brains learn to trust certain data collected and apply that data. Intuition is a type of understanding, possibly seeing things others do not see. jmo

 

[Fruiteloop]

@just me

The quote you made attributed to Einstein but is not from Einstein reminded me of a video I saw more than 10 years ago:

Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain | TED Talk​

Intuition as he defines it is the right brain having a wide open big picture ambiguous view of the world where the left brain is marred in details and mechanical self referencing models.

A few days ago I was trying to understand big picture vs detail oriented thinking.

It seems that details are based on narrowing in on something to manipulate it.

Big picture thinking actually is looking at things in a wide view literally.

In a wide view you cannot know everything, in a narrow view you are trying to get everything perfect.

So intuition would be that wide view where anything can happen,
yet maybe we could know if something is about to happen by paying attention to the wide view?

 

[just me]

quote:So intuition would be that wide view where anything can happen,
yet maybe we could know if something is about to happen by paying attention to the wide view? unquote
@Fruiteloop, I myself would call that a theory, not unlike my own's being a theory.

There is a scientific rendering for gut feelings, which could be called intuition. From NeuroLauch...

No single brain region owns intuition. That’s the short answer. The longer one is more interesting: intuition emerges from a distributed network of structures that process emotion, memory, body state, and pattern recognition in parallel, mostly outside conscious awareness, and surface the result as a feeling rather than a thought.

The core players are the amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. They don’t take turns. They fire together, cross-referencing emotional history against current sensory input at a speed that conscious reasoning simply can’t match.

Understanding the psychological definition and mechanisms of gut feelings makes clear why this distributed architecture matters: intuition isn’t a shortcut around thinking, it’s a different kind of thinking entirely. copied

I can say over many years I have had intuition without gut feelings. Why say it is a gut feeling in one place, then say it is a different kind of thinking altogether? When we are going somewhere and something tells us we shouldn't go and to turn around and go home, for example.
How can we divide thought and gut feelings so readily? Is it really a different kind of thinking, or are we just gathering information from different sources in our thinking?

Question: can a person summon intuitive thinking, or does the mind just share it with you as you go through life? I know the way I think to answer that, but I'm curious how others see it work.

 

[TomasM]

@just me - There are different kinds of intuition and though the gut does a play a role it isn't always at the forefront of all intuition types. You can see the types on the previous page.

The brain and the mind are two separate things IMO, though modern medicine will suggest that the mind is purely electrochemical in the brain. Over the last three decades some new neuroscience and psychological analysis has started to emerge that suggests consciousness and the mind might actually be somewhat separate if not entirely. We could also point to many other cultures historically that would laugh at modern science for thinking it was even possible for the mind and brain to be electrochemical.

The brain itself is distributed (as you suggested) and though some regions are more specific to function this is not always static. On the previous page I wrote a post about a girl who had a hemispherectomy (removal of half the brain) and many of the functions from one side mapped to the opposite remaining side. This does not necessarily mean that everything can be remapped or that a person who has had a hemispherectomy can regain all function; however, the girl in the video I posted is living a very normal life with only moderate disability. The age of the patient and plasticity of the brain play a big role in the outcome. In this particular case the girl was three when she had the surgery. I think you might find that post interesting.

Having a hemispherectomy also calls into question many of the left/right brain assumptions and mappings. All of that said, I do believe that the well known mappings can give insight into how the brain and mind may work separately especially in areas where remapping occurs successfully after a hemispherectomy.

 

[Fruiteloop]

No single brain region owns intuition. That’s the short answer. The longer one is more interesting: intuition emerges from a distributed network of structures that process emotion, memory, body state, and pattern recognition in parallel, mostly outside conscious awareness, and surface the result as a feeling rather than a thought.

The core players are the amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. They don’t take turns. They fire together, cross-referencing emotional history against current sensory input at a speed that conscious reasoning simply can’t match.

Question: can a person summon intuitive thinking, or does the mind just share it with you as you go through life? I know the way I think to answer that, but I'm curious how others see it work.

Since intuition can be defined in many ways I suppose the way you experience it is similar to how ISTP I've known do. That is to say going or not going in a particular direction and this be a small intuition (Si) and is similar to survival instinct in the unconscious. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex as I have heard is used to switch tasks when something is not working. So if you experienced a subtle danger in the environment you switched what you were doing to avoid it.

One time I was in a baseball game and the ball came at me more than 100 miles and hour, if I had not pulled my glove up in from of me it would have hit me in the face. I never played baseball before so my reflexes were super fast but I do not know why they were so fast in that moment. So I think it was instinctual not intutitive.

These two things might not be defined as big intuitions though. A big intuition would be something more akin to knowing when something has happened far away like how some people know when a relative died or is arriving. Something that can be more knowing rather than just danger.

Knowing something without actually knowing: It can be big or small, about danger or some hidden event.

Often I just know the right things to say to people because I get feelings about what to say. That could be from intutition?

Feelings are hidden inside people so this may be a new definition: Intuition is knowing what is hidden and basing our action on it.

Introverted intuition is seeing into the hidden unconscious knowing what is in there, extraverted intuition is seeing into the world making the unconscious form connections arising from the unconscious. (I believe we all have the potential to do both and to do all functions Extraverted and Introverted). The relationship to sensation Si and Se is more complicated but it does make sense that we have both working together with intuition. The buddhist monks be more Ni I think because they explore unconscious things in meditation or any unconscious function in themselves. So thinking that is unconscious can be explored intuitively as well. The (Ti) or (Te)

 

[Fruiteloop]

The brain and the mind are two separate things IMO, though modern medicine will suggest that the mind is purely electrochemical in the brain. Over the last three decades some new neuroscience and psychological analysis has started to emerge that suggests consciousness and the mind might actually be somewhat separate if not entirely. We could also point to many other cultures historically that would laugh at modern science for thinking it was even possible for the mind and brain to be electrochemical.

The problem with separating the brain from mind is that many things that effect the brain also effect the mind.

The girl from age 3 with the hemispherectomy, she had time to adjust. Those who have a lobotomy never recover. Something is up with that? Alcohol, drugs, food, all effect the brain and mind and it depend on the individual persons neurochemistry/biological makeup.

Brain cells do what is known as predictive coding in network modules. (inhibitory and excitatory cells)
It is a homeostatic self regulation process where they map the outside world in relation to what is needed to survive in the world.
These brain waves are signals mapping the world and our survival relationship to it.

Now there are specific things we do not know why they happen in the brain such as colors being as they are but if you cut the color part of the brain out you become blind to color and only see in black and white or not at all. People born blind can hear more because the brain parts used for vision are used for sound instead so they don't see colors but I don't know 100% they could be hearing the colors?

Some people have good spatial intelligence, they can solve a rubix cube the first time the see it with no help. But this is based on the structure of the brains connections and not necessarily the mind being different in a ephemeral way. People do not just gain a structure by will power alone but by either developing it (which creates the new structure) or from it being hard coded in the brain.

How intuition would be in the brain may be like colors.
Something we do not understand but is not separate from brain processes.
Brain signals are fluid in the brain and change all the time. (like images we see change all the time)
So intuition is not separate from brain signals, people have the wrong view that the brain is a lump of meat. It is doing more than just that.

 

[just me]

Knowing what is hidden is too broad a speculation. We might know pieces to the puzzle, but never see the entire puzzle put together as a clear picture.
We cannot summon intuitive thinking at our own level of thinking. We cannot say, let me see what my intuition tells me to do. This may come as time reveals more to us but might not ever surface either. As of now in the present, I cannot summon two ways of thinking if one is intuitive to compare the two. What I CAN do is compare the two when intuition speaks to me. Intuition can cloud the normal way we think as we learn to trust it. All this is personal speculation and may not be documented elsewhere. I see through experience when at this level.