I have horrible news for you friends. You are all rational people. It’s true, and inescapable.

Our minds naturally rationalize, everyone’s. For everything we experience in a day, our mind seeks a causal connection between it and other events, and if it can’t find one readily, it will make one up. A great deal of human knowledge is based on this tendency, everything from philosophy to art to science, though some would object to my adding science to that list.

We do make every effort to refine our rationalizations, establish traditions and rules, expectations. This is everyone. We are all brought up to relate to this process. The world as it’s described by a rational and rationalizing mind. But this is not the only form of consciousness possible. In fact, your rational mind has inevitable gaps in its operation. These gaps are of vital importance as the process of rationalizing, or normal cognition, will grind to a halt without these lulls in its operation.

Under stress, especially extreme stress or duress, your rational mind stops being able to function. There is no way around that either. You get frightened or very upset and a second system for understanding the world kicks in. Some claim it’s more or less completely unconscious but I personally don’t agree with this. It’s older and more deep seated than the parts of the mind that function rationally.

Do you think it’s necessary to go into this second system of understanding? I actually do yes, because it creates breaks in a process that left to remain dominant will drive us to an entirely rational insanity.

Is it true that the first impression is the more accurate one when faced with new people or situations? It is, especially socially. As far as mechanical evaluation goes, it may not be as absolutely reliable as those impressions can themselves still be bent by cognitive bias.

And intuition is not the same as impression? It isn’t. I myself subscribe to the intrinsic model of cognition. In the intrinsic model, cognition occurs not to allow us to respond to things as they happen, but to allow us to anticipate things in advance. It doesn’t even have to be accurate. Accurate enough and you have a valuable survival mechanism. The idea that maybe you shouldn’t approach that animal, or that the person standing in the dark alley should be avoided.

Is cognition one of the first things we learn? Cognition as we understand it now is learned slowly. Intuition is the innate mental process we start with, and it’s what many species operate from almost exclusively.

It’s like instinct? It is an amalgam of all of our instincts.

How can they monitor intuition in young beings? How do they know it is the first mental process? Well, there are many processes that can be reverse engineered from adults, and other things that can be observed from testing behaviour and looking at the structure and predictability of it. The right hemisphere is not restricted in the ways we popularly think. It in fact takes on a parallel of many of the functions that also occur in your left hemisphere, to the point that without some ability to share information between the two, you won’t even be able to come to a complete realization of an idea of intuition. But as much as the processes of thought are distributed in a more or less balanced way, there does still tend to be a persistent arrangement of some function that is more or less universal.

Figurative thought, and the knowledge and mental processes that allow it to occur, tends to focus in the left hemisphere, and literal thought and instinct tend to focus in the right hemisphere. Generally, each person’s right hemisphere is just a bit larger than their left, though often the difference is minimal. The brain in development places the primary functions in the organically dominant part of the brain. This is why language tends to be on the left, but emotional processing on the right.

I find when I am tired, my analytical side is in full throttle, but I have a hard time with words. Yes. Their functions can become temporarily decoupled even.

Intuition is an emergent property of the default or bottom up channel of our body and brains function. Your mind is always working. You are always “dreaming.” You only register anything you sense because your sense organs send a signal that modulates the ongoing function of your brain. You know you saw something because it temporarily disturbs your unconscious processes which are something like thought.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~