Mindfucks vs. Intuition
Yesterday a client asked me a great question:
"What's the difference between a mindfuck and intuition?"
Just a note: we can mindfuck ourselves or get mentally manipulated by someone else, like for instance gaslighting. This piece is about the first: self-inflicted mindfucks.
The Mindfuck
Let start with the mindfuck. Mindfucks stem from anxiety. Some trigger fires off in the limbic system of your brain saying: "Danger, danger! I might die!" This is where you already go wrong. In the past, you needed social acceptance and inclusion to not die. That's almost never the case anymore, but you still have this mechanism ingrained into your brain. So, your brain goes to work, extrapolating scenarios that might ensue. An important aspect of a mindfuck is that it does not live in the present but in some hypothetical futuristic scenario. Your brain keeps coming up with more details and other possible scenarios that will probably never happen but DO give you the feelings of anxiety of such a scenario. If x then y else z, but maybe x is c and then d happens. We lack letters in the alphabet for all possible scenarios a proper mindfucker can come up with. Welcome to your hamster wheel of anxiety.
Your brain is marvellously creative in tormenting itself with these scenarios and living them out in your imagination. Life in this hamster wheel simply is a form of pure self-inflicted suffering. The first step on your way out is actually to become aware that you're inside the wheel. After that, if you really want to get to the root, dig deeper to find out to whom or what you're actually attached.
Intuition
Then there's intuition. Intuition works differently. It doesn't start with anxiety. It's a form of intelligence, connected to subconscious, implicit memory. Intuition is the ability to immediately understand something without conscious reasoning and is sometimes explained as a gut feeling about the right- or wrongness of a person, place, situation or object. This is also a survival mechanism but rooted in the present to make split-second decisions, like for instance directly understanding that someone is about to harm you. So the temporal nature of intuition differs profoundly from that of a mindfuck. The first lives in the present, the latter in the future.
The 'adaptive unconscious'
So intuition lives in the present but is tied to your past. That's because intuition taps into something called the 'adaptive unconscious' by comparing current sense experiences with impressions and memories from the threshold of your subconscious mind. This connection to your subconsciousness is what makes it hard to explain why your intuition feels so right. And it is for that exact same reason, it's also possible that your intuition is terribly off. You cannot properly validate intuitive reasoning. So just because your gut feeling tells you so, doesn't necessarily make it true. You need to take into account your own fallibility & be willing to accept that you are wrong.
A better way
My take on this is the following: mutually exclusive reasoning will get you in trouble. Use either only conscious or subconscious reasoning and you'll be ignoring parts of your capacity. When exclusively using conscious reasoning you won't make use of your rich & vast subconscious memory nor the fast processing power of intuition.
On the other hand, if you always fully rely on your intuition, you might be fooling yourself in many cases. Sometimes we are too eager to find connections, so we create them when none exist. The subconscious is non-verifiable, so it's healthy to second guess yourself.
To be the best we can be, we need to learn to use both forms of reasoning in conjunction with one another, because they reference different parts of our intellect. Combining them maximizes intelligence, wisdom, potential & accuracy. So listen to your gut, but also validate that gut feeling through more accurate methods.
Embodied Intelligence
I'd like to call this embodied intelligence because it combines the gut's mind with the mental mind. Use that beautiful brain of yours to validate and invalidate your ideas; don't be afraid to be wrong. We need more of this, especially today since everybody seems to be so sure of themselves.
If you want to read a great anecdotal story about intuition, check out this one about the Greek Kouros statue that the Getty museum in New York acquired. Scientists had proven it was the real deal, while several art historians intuitively & instantly knew it was a fake. But they couldn't explain exactly why.
You can also read a more detailed version of this story in 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell, a great book!
In service of the betterment of men,
Erik