Just as we make the distinction when talking about intelligence (there is no doubt a greater display of its dimensions), we must do it when talking about intuition. Intuition is plural in its manifestations, its origins, its meanings…, but it seems certainly useful to start separating the cognitive from the emotional. Associated with thought, it helps us find solutions or truths that were hidden from us and that we can explain; Associated with emotions and feelings, it helps us, for example, to trust or distrust a person or a project, without being able to explain it.
Almost all of us recognize manifestations such as the following: a deep and inexplicable certainty; a sudden fix for a persistent problem; a timely, unexpected and valuable idea; a firm commitment to a certain direction in which to apply our effort; a peculiar feeling of trust (or mistrust) towards a person, an issue, a project or information; a feeling, mental or visceral, of warning about risks or dangers; an interesting abstraction or connection, suddenly arising from the study of a documentation… The reader undoubtedly distinguishes the cognitive from the emotional, and perhaps where there is more difficulty is in the identification of genuine intuition within the intricate jungle of concerns, fears, conjectures, etc., that concur in our mind.
Cognitive intuition led, for example, Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz (1829-1896), a German chemist, to discover, in the form of dream revelation, the ring structure of the benzene molecule. He actually had more revealing dreams, and it's not surprising that he publicly defended the value of intuition. We can briefly recall it.
One evening in 1865, in front of the fireplace fire in his study in Ghent, almost in the dark, turning the problem in mind, our researcher fell asleep. He soon had a vision; in it he recognized a set of playful atoms (a scene he had already contemplated in a previous dream) that ended up giving shape to a kind of worm or snake that bit its tail: something like the uróboros, an alchemical icon.
He woke up immediately, and spent the following hours arranging the ring atoms, until he reached the well-known C6H6 hexagonal architecture. This is how the chemist described the experience, who incidentally had also studied Architecture.
The scene in which we can imagine Kekulé really seems to catalyze the intuitive contribution, and perhaps almost all of us have ever received a response of this nature, when we fell asleep with a special unease in our heads. It can be said that, with his investigative efforts, he gained a gift from the unconscious; a reward that did not come to him through the path of analytical reason. Of course, cognitive intuition can, and usually does, come in the waking state, and so we have all once had a valuable idea at an unexpected moment, a kind of "eureka." This happened to the physicist Freeman Dyson that, after spending several months studying Feynman's inferential leaps and Schwinger's careful steps, he helped to clarify things decisively in the field of quantum electrodynamics,but the reader will remember closer cases.
As for emotional intuition, we can refer to Masaru Ibuka, Akio Morita's partner in the Sony foundation. Ibuka maintained, perhaps seriously, that he had a cup of tea and waited for the visceral sensations, before deciding on a matter of great importance. In this regard let us remember the appearance of those first radio receivers, made with transistors. As it is known, the transistor was developed in the Bell Laboratories of Western Electric, in the United States, in 1947; The Americans, however, did not imagine all the possibilities and seemed to be studying applications for the military industry at the time.
In the early 1950s, Ibuka traveled to the United States and became interested in the invention. He ended up acquiring for $ 50,000 the manufacturing license for these small devices, called to replace vacuum tubes; With them I wanted to make small portable radios in which no one seemed to have yet placed high expectations. There were many obstacles encountered by Ibuka in his efforts, but he was convinced to be on the right track, to have the necessary technology and human capital, and he did not give up on it. Nor did he give in to the creation of the Walkman in the late 1970s, being already honorary president of the company. And we can also talk about emotional intuition in the case of Ray Kroc, from McDonald's, just as we can also talk about cases in which it was not intuition that glittered, but mere wishes for success.
In short, and although all this is more complex, cognitive intuition nurtures our insight, creativity and perspective in the search for solutions or answers, and the emotional warns us, without being able to explain why, of risks, dangers, threats and even of valuable opportunities or paths to take. But the final conclusion of these lines must be that we all have in the powerful intuition a powerful reinforcement for our intelligence; a reinforcement that perhaps we do not make the best use of.
