The word for Turner’s vague feeling is intuition, and right now it’s an American obsession. Maybe it’s the book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, which advocates the “power of thinking without thinking.” Or the growing acceptance of alternative medicine and its focus on listening to our bodies. Maybe it’s our addiction to TV shows such as Medium and House, in which intuition trumps evidence.  More from Prevention: What Your Body’s Trying To Tell You We’ve all had hunches—moments in which we act with-out quite knowing why. “Intuition is the capacity for direct knowledge and immediate insight, without any observation or reason,” says David G. Myers, PhD, a psychology professor at Hope College and author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils. These insights swim to the surface of our attention and ask us to do something. Some are big decisions: See the doctor now; marry this man; don’t get on that plane. Others are barely perceptible: There’s something off about that new guy in accounting—be careful. “People treat intuition like it’s a dirty word, but it’s actually one of the body’s survival mechanisms,” says Antoine Bechara, PhD, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa. “It’s a means of taking you away from danger and steering you toward what is good for you.” Gradually, the science of intuition is shaking off its woo-woo connotations, as experts become more sophisticated in understanding where it comes from and how to measure it. They’re also increasingly confident that most of us have substantial talent for intuition, and that it influences us more than we realize. “Assuming everything in your emotional world is stable,” says Oliver Turnbull, PhD, a professor of psychology and a researcher at the University of Wales Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in the United Kingdom, “you shouldn’t have to force yourself to ’listen’ to your intuition. It’s already there.” Yet many of us ignore this tool—or worse, respond to urges that are misguided or the product of a fevered imagination. Fine-tuning your intuition will help you make better decisions whether you’re buying a car, making new acquaintances, or solving problems at work. It could even save your life.[pagebreak]

Understand Your Urges

Experts say intuition probably evolved as a skill that saved time. “Intuition is fast, based on pattern matching,” explains John Allman, PhD, head of a laboratory at the California Institute of Technology that focuses on brain evolution. “Our brains are constantly comparing current experience with the past, trying to find a fit so that we can make a quick decision. When we find a match, often in a fraction of a second, our intuition boils down a lot of experience into a simple, visceral metric: I feel good about this or not,” Allman says.  Take Amanda Brumfield, 32, a disability-claims representative in Hattiesburg, MS, who remembers having the kind of visceral feeling Allman describes—and is alive because of it. She was 19, riding shotgun with friends on a winding country road. There were no obvious warning signs:  It was raining, but her friend was a good driver. No one was drinking. “Something told me to put on my seat-belt. I got this sense—part spiritual, I guess, but part physical. The best way I can describe it is just a really strong feeling in my body. It wasn’t scary, just matter-of-fact. So I buckled up.”  Moments later, the driver lost control of the car and slammed into a tree. Emergency workers told Brumfield, who was unharmed, that without the seat-belt she would have been crushed. (Her friends had minor injuries.) More from Prevention: When To Go With Your Gut—And When To Ignore It Without any conscious effort, Brumfield’s brain was acting like an automotive-safety computer, running facts, previous information, and sensory input at lightning speed. “This kind of intuition isn’t mystical,” Myers says. “It’s an automatic, intelligent response to situations we’ve previously learned about or experienced.” And the more experience we gain, he says, the more we recognize patterns and associations, “just like a chess master can glance at a board and immediately know the next move.” Psychologists never really doubted the reality of intuition—in fact, Carl Jung, a pioneer in the field, believed it was one of the most important abilities humans have. A leading personality test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which flourished in the 1950s and then became widely popular in the 1980s, even gave people a way to measure how heavily they rely on some of their intuitive skills. But it took until the early 1990s for Bechara to develop a test for those hunches and figure out where they originate. The Iowa Gambling Task requires participants to play with four decks of cards that allow them to win or lose varying amounts of money. The decks are stacked in a complicated pattern: One deck has more losing cards, but grants larger wins, for example; another deck has more winning cards but doles out smaller amounts. At first, people think the decks are random. But, Bechara says, usually by the 40th card or so, the average participant can intuitively “feel” which deck is luckiest. “Knowledge accrues slowly, so you never discover all of a sudden which decks are good or bad,” he says. But by the 70th or 80th card, most participants feel confident in their assessment. Working with that test, researchers soon proved that people with brain injuries and illnesses that damage the prefrontal cortex of the brain do far worse on the card game than people without injuries. Brain experts are even gaining ground on the type of cells used in intuition. Cal Tech scientists have linked Von Economo neurons, found in humans and, to a lesser degree, in apes, to intuitive assessment of complex situations. These cells start to emerge a month before birth and keep forming until age 4 or so, Allman says. In people with lesions in the prefrontal cortex, intuitive abilities diminish until patients can no longer “read” social situations. “Often, they’re the victims of scams because they lack the radar most people have,” he says.[pagebreak]

Read People Like a Book

Perhaps the most important realm for intuition is the nuances of interpersonal relationships. These are the barely perceptible signs that alert us to changes in those close to us, the tiny cues that make us ask, “Are you sure you’re okay?” Myers points out that when it comes to decoding emotions, there’s plenty of evidence that women have a bit of an edge: For example, when people viewed a silent 2-second film clip of an upset woman, female viewers were more able to accurately say whether she was angry with someone or discussing her divorce. When shown pictures of couples, women are better at predicting which are phony and which are real.  And in photos of coworkers, women are more likely to discern which one is the other’s supervisor. “Some researchers think evolutionary pressures may have favored women who were able to read their children’s and mate’s nonverbal expressions,” says Myers.  We also use intuitive skills in quickly sizing up new acquaintances or information. A 2002 Harvard study found that psychologists can predict which surgeons are most likely to be sued by analyzing four 10-second snippets of doctor-patient conversations. Surgeons whose tone of voice conveyed dominance were much more likely to be sued than those whose voices showed warmth, concern, or anxiety for the patient. And researchers at the University of Washington can analyze facial expressions and tone of voice when newlyweds discuss conflict and accurately predict whether couples will divorce after watching them interact for just 3 minutes.  More from Prevention: How Instincts Lead To Better Decisions For some professions, that ability to read nonverbal cues is essential; doctors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists, for example, begin developing that clinical intuition early in their careers. When Ellen Sweeris, 24, was finishing her training in neonatal intensive care nursing last year in northern California, she was working with an older nurse.  “The nurse was caring for a premature infant who had been doing just fine all night, and his clinical picture was good. Suddenly, she said to me, ‘Something is wrong. He seems irritable, and I don’t like his color.’ She called the doctor in, and he ordered some tests, and sure enough, the baby had developed an intestinal infection that’s very common in the NICU. Within the hour he had turned gray and his belly was bloated.”  After treatment, the baby was fine, and the experience made a believer out of Sweeris. “I’d always pooh-poohed what instructors called nursing intuition, because it just sounds so…unscientific. But as soon as that nurse said what she did, I realized that I thought there was something funny about the baby, too. Because his vital signs weren’t registering any change yet, I wasn’t letting myself acknowledge it. But it’s not like we pulled it out of the air—there were clinical signs that we both detected. We just couldn’t fully articulate them yet."[pagebreak]

Make Your Best Guess

Whether you’re trying to save lives or simply deciding on a new car, you can benefit from intuition. You may even find that intuitive-based decisions feel more satisfying than purely rational ones. Dutch intuition researchers recently overloaded car shoppers with automotive minutiae.  One group was left to stew over antilock brakes and rear-wheel suspension; the others distracted themselves from the analytical process by working on puzzles. When it came time to buy the car, the group that had done the puzzles said they made more satisfying purchases than the group who kept spinning their wheels in purely rational thought.  “We get this intuitive information whether or not we are aware of it,” says Mona Lisa Schulz, MD, PhD, a medical intuitive—she helps people recognize their symptoms through intuition—based in Yarmouth, ME, and author of The New Feminine Brain: How Women Can Develop Their Inner Strengths, Genius and Intuition. “The challenge is learning to access it better, then opening your mouth and talking about it.” Here are five ways to sharpen that sixth sense: 

  1. Play with it Ask yourself which line will move fastest at the supermarket, what the person ahead of you will order at Starbucks, or what your friend will wear to dinner, suggests Philip Goldberg, PhD, author of Roadsigns: Navigating Your Path to Spiritual Happiness, who coaches people on trusting their hunches. “Try watching movies with the sound off and speculate what’s happening. Or cover up captions in the newspaper and decipher the content, or guess about the background of a person you’re meeting for the first time.” By tracking your success, you can get a better handle on what intuition feels like. 2. Laugh at your intuitive screwups People make intuitive blunders all the time, mismatching the current situation to a past experience. “Humor, which activates the prefrontal cortex, as does intuition, seems to be one of the main ways the brain recalibrates these faulty assumptions,” Allman says. “If you can’t laugh at the intuitive errors you make, you’ll continue making them.” 3. Settle down People have believed for thousands of years that calm periods of contemplation, whether it’s Zen meditation, yoga breathing, or Judeo-Christian prayer, make us more open to our intuition, says Goldberg. “It may be a cliché, but you can see much more in a still pond than in one that’s turbulent,” he says. Pay especially close attention to feelings that resurface over and over. “One of the hallmarks of intuition is that it feels persistent,” he says. 4. Get a second opinion When faced with a decision at work, consult your intuition for the best answer. But then run it by a colleague with comparable or greater experience in that area. That person’s intuition may confirm your own or offer a deeper insight, Schulz says.
  2. Add a shot of intuition to your daily analysis Some people thrive on data. That’s fine, but give yourself a definite cutoff point for analysis and then try a trick psychologists call incubation: Give yourself a fun distraction such as doing a puzzle or reading before making your final decision. This will allow your intuition to play a role. Finally, remember that the best choices almost always hang in the balance. “Decisions involve taking in plenty of facts the rational way, from books, the Web, or our doctors,” Schulz says. “But then we can also use our intuition—a feeling, an image, a dream, whatever that little bit of inside information is, to make the choice that’s best for us.” More from Prevention: How To Heal Yourself With Intuition