Aspies For Freedom

This was interesting.

To answer your question, I rely on my intuitions all the time. It's just the normal thing for me to do, I think.

I have tendency toward a certain type of "gut feeling" that is a bit odd. I'll come across something and a sense of need will come over me, even though rationally I know I have no current need for that item at all. Sure enough, almost every time, a circumstance arises in the next day or two wherein I find I need that very object, whatever it was. I find it saves a lot of future effort if I just heed my intuition when it hits.  Mom

It's a term often used by seasoned homicide detective's.

I would describe it as "a feeling that all things suddenly add up; order replace chaos."


Gut Fred! Jawohl!

I rely on gut feelings at work and act, but  instinct isn't enough - I like to check literature (usually the internet)  to have some reliable information to back up gut feelings.
Sometimes I want to use a word that I have an instinct is the right word for what I want to say, but usually I will check before using the word when writing. Always my gut feelings in these situations are right. At work - when I go to literature - it turns our my instincts are reliable - but I will always continue to check.

My feeling is that intuitive thinking is using and relying on the sub conscious. We need to have experienced or heard information before and that helps us to draw conclusions. So rather than saying intuitive thinking relies on the unconscious - It would be more accurate to say it relies on the sub-conscious.

I think we use our instincts/subconscious mind all the time - if we just relied concrete thought, we'd be like computers. In some ways - you could relate and compare this article to the Meyers Briggs Personality profiles. The article seems to state the obvious - still worth thinking about though.

Yes indeed. Unfortunately, the gut feelings don't always come through clearly enough for me to act on them and sure enough something bad happens. Quite often, it is just a vague feeling of unease rather than a clear aversion to a person or situation.

I wonder if it is anything to do with psychic powers as mum said her mother was very psychic and she was too but never had the time to develop her own powers.

According to DARPA, there's a specific region of the brain that's designed to subconciously analyze the visual field and detect things that might be a threat.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneo...binoculars

Someone once told me, if you are going to invest, invest in the companies whose products you use every day.  Makes sense to me.  Mom

I'm only just learning about intuition; but when I do use it, it seems surprisingly correct. All my life I've made decisions by logic (which means that neutral decisions like what to eat in a restaurant are often highly annoying!); but it seems that the subconscious thought that produces intuition can work as well. When I try to use intuition, I usually check to see whether my intuition is correct (by logic), though, before I act on it.

I believe gut feelings are related to subconscious thought.

No, not crazy. That's what happens to me too and if I ignore the whisper, something usually goes wrong for either someone I know or me.

I use it a lot, although I question whether it's always heuristics, because I suspect it's also sometimes pattern-recognition sorts of things, and just about any form of processing that's not done on a conscious level.

The last time I ignored my gut instinct about someone, it landed me in a world of trouble, so I'm not ignoring it anymore.

I agree - that's exactly what it is - recognising sets of patterns that's not done on a conscious level.

No gut feelings are your "unconscious" minds recognition of patterns in data you are seeing but not percieving directly (i.e. say you're looking at a shirt out of the corner of your eye but you are not aware of it, there are pieces of information that are coming into your mind that you are not directly aware of because only so much information can be focused on at one time by you direct awareness).

I've had gut feelings but not in the social realm, like I can feel how things are connected.  When someone writes words, I can tell whether those words are vague or clearly conceptualized.

Many times when people write and communicate their words, they are poorly conceptualized and I usually automatically  replace those poorly conceptualized words with clear ones I pull "instinctually" from my mind.

I instinctively know certain things about how certain disparate patterns are related... like for instance my

Tree
River
Crows feet (on the side of someones eye)
Cracks in the road
etc

My mind automatically will whip through images like that and pop up other stuff automatically without me having to think about it.

I can even describe what is happening -- > I'm doing a fractal similarity search.  I can't describe it mathematically, but I can describe it conceptually (since concept-words are mathematical functions and data in a different form).