Your Other Intelligence

Your Other Intelligence

by Diane Brandon

Most of us value intelligence and good application of our minds. However, even if we studied hard in school to develop our intelligence, in all likelihood we didn’t develop all of our mental potential and as a result are not using it.

What other intelligence is there, you may ask? There’s readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, to be sure. Yet we’re not talking about these disciplines. After all, they are stressed in school and our standardized tests focus on them.
How about emotional intelligence? You may have read about this set of rather worthwhile and useful skills. While an entire essay could be devoted to the need to teach and advocate emotional intelligence skills – because most schools aren’t teaching them – they’re not our focus here either. After all, they have received their share of positive press already.
Instead we’re focusing on other useful yet neglected mental skills – those that are considered to be “right-brain” faculties.

Intuition and creativity, two of our less familiar right-brain skills have long been neglected by our academic institutions, yet are finally getting the consideration and intellectual scrutiny they deserve. Of the two, creativity has received the lion’s share of recent attention, especially in business circles. Intuition has tended to be the “red-headed stepchild” in the right-brain family, perhaps because of its reputation for being arcane and the view that it’s “illogical” – among other misperceptions.
In spite of its being considered too mysterious and thus incomprehensible, intuition is finally giving up some of its secrets and receiving some long-deserved positive and credible notice.

Intuition is the realm of insights, realizations, and knowing things we thought we didn’t or couldn’t know. As neuroscientists, psychologists, and other researchers are studying the inner workings of our sub- and unconscious, their findings are shedding light on those previously unknowable parts of our minds, the source of most of our intuition and creativity.

A large part of what we call intuition is simply the product of those inner mental processes. Take “rapid cognition” for example, the mental faculty that was highlighted in the best seller Blink. Also termed “pattern recognition,” rapid cognition is a sudden knowing of the whole – the gestalt – or the answer, without having consciously gone through the mental steps to come to the resultant conclusion. Yet this is only one aspect of intuition.

Having our unconscious figure out a complicated problem we’re trying to resolve – without our having to attend consciously to the process – is another facet of intuition. This aspect of intuition can be quite useful in problem-solving in any discipline, and the unconscious, automatic nature of its processing makes it even more user-friendly. (In fact, our unconscious is proving to be a vast region – much larger than our conscious minds, with the result that there are more parts of our minds that we don’t know than those we do – and those unknown parts can sometimes guide our behavior.)

Intuition is multi-faceted and there are additional aspects of it that we can gain a working knowledge of and familiarity with, given appropriate instruction. That’s one of the beauties of intuition – its complexity and usefulness. Another feature of it is that it’s fully compatible with and complementary to our traditional left-brain intelligence and logic. After all, our minds were designed to use both modes synergistically. We limit ourselves by using only one.

Additionally, intuition is practical and applicable to real-world situations. Its benefits, both personally and in business, are extensive – from problem-solving, to improved relationships and teamwork, to insight for direction, to innovation, to sales, etc. The list is quite a long one. And those benefits can indeed be garnered by most of us.

Far from its image of elusive mystery, intuition is in reality accessible to most people. We can learn its ins and outs, how to harness its power, how to fine-tune its output, and how to apply it in our lives – and, in so doing, use more of our potential intelligence. In other words, we can still learn what we weren’t taught in school and amplify our intelligence. Isn’t it time to move past our misconceptions and add to our mental repertoire?