Has India Discovered
The Secret Of Intuition?

This clue to the secret of intuition originates from India. That discovery follows from the finding of how the mind recognizes patterns (Nobel Prize 2004) - how you recognize the smell of an orange. Your smell system locates the coded pattern of that smell from your memories for millions of smell patterns. That act of recognition creates an idea in your mind.

Ideas are coded patterns of nerve impulses, which enter your awareness as thoughts. Science suggests that a ten billion degree sea of particles existed just one second after the big bang. Their patterns of radiation engulf us. Those patterns are not random. Their inter-relationships have been consistent. The speed of a photon has an unchanging relationship to the passage of time. Science does not know if such relationships existed before the big bang.

But scientists have found them to be stable across billions of years of time. They define those consistent relationships as axioms. An axiom is accepted without proof. Consistency across time is the only proof of their truth. Truths and lies are themselves ideas about the connections between patterns. Our thoughts carry ideas which express the universe of relationships in the firmament.

The idea of democracy is just one among many patterns of social interactions. You know "democracy" differs from "dictatorship." You can recognize the idea just as you can recognize a twitch in your toe. A twitch too is an idea. Science has discovered many mathematical relationships between ideas. Our knowledge is a store of ideas. But it is not mathematics, but intuition, which evaluates the massive assembly of stored knowledge in our minds. Intuition enables us to recognize the ideas of objects and events in the world around us.

The secret of intuition is that it is a logical routine, an algorithhm, which enables your brain to recognize a smell pattern. From the patterns of moving leaves and scurrying shadows, an animal identifies a predator, feels fear and takes flight.

Intuition is the same routine behind each intelligent animal response. It is a pattern recognition process. Intuition enables nerve cells to swiftly recognize, interpret and act, by extracting logical answers from massive neural memories. Nerve cells respond to the combinatorial codes firing at their dendritic inputs.

The Secret Of Intuition - Instant Access To A Massive Memory
The unimaginable size and scale of your memory far outclasses the memory stores of a computer. If the DNA codes in the human body were written into 500 page books, those tomes will fill the Grand Canyon 50 times over! Your brain stores memories of evolutionary experiences from millions of years. It stores the sights, sounds and experiences of a lifetime. It stores the memories of thousands of habitual activities.

From this galactic store, your brain recalls just the image of a school picnic, or the complex hand movements of your signature - the same moment you think about it. Your intuition is this process, which assists you in all the problems you face in life.

The Secret Of Intuition - Inductive Reasoning
Intuition uses logic to retrieve data. Traditionally, logic follows either deductive, or inductive paths. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal. That is deductive reasoning, where an accepted principle is used to draw a conclusion. In inductive reasoning, a number of established facts are used to draw a conclusion. Over centuries, all observed elephants are gray. So, elephants are gray. An inductive argument, however, is never final and is open to being falsified. The discovery of a pink elephant will falsify "the gray elephant theory." Both science and intuition use inductive logic.

The Secret Of Intuition - Reverse Reasoning
Traditionally, inductive reasoning uses the principle of inclusion. The gray elephant theory is a result of experience over time. If we see a gray animal, we will confine our search to a list of gray animals. Intuition uses the principle of exclusion. If the animal is pink, elephants are excluded from the search. Subsequent discovery of a pink elephant will make this induction wrong. But, if the reasoning that all elephants are gray is true, then the induction that a pink animal is not an elephant is equally true. Nerve cells become inhibited, if they fail to recognize a pattern.

The Secret Of Intuition - Inhibit To Highlight
If the back of your hand is touched with a felt tip, neural activity takes place in the related touch sensory region of your cortex. Particular neurons begin to fire to indicate this sensory information. You will feel the touch. In the process, the surrounding neurons will become inhibited. This inhibition is strongest for those immediately adjacent to the excited neurons. Throughout the nervous system there are neural circuits which switch off other circuits when their own areas are energized. This phenomenon reveals the secret of intuition. Intuition highlights messages by inhibiting information from non contextual sources.

The Secret Of Intuition - Eliminate To Identify
Eliminating all unrecognized categories from a list is a quick way to focus the list on the answer. Neurons in the olfactory system store the inherited combinatorial codes of myriad smells. Over a lifetime, an animal adds millions more differentiated odors in codes. All cells in the system which fail to recognize the code of an encountered odor shut down. The active cells fire strongly to indicate the identified smell.

It is a routine, which searches a massive database in the blink of an eye. When you speak, an inhibition process swiftly combs your entire vocabulary, eliminating every unrecognized relationship to your idea. If it is furry, it is not an elephant. If it is gray, it is not a rabbit. If you are looking at a gray, or furry thing, it is not this page. If there are 100 cars, it is not your garage. Intuition eliminates a galaxy of possibilities to accurately use each word, even as you speak.

The Secret Of Intuition - An Enigma For Science
Scientific searches seek an exact match to identify a complex pattern. Back and forth searches grow exponentially as the search space expands. For science, it is impossible to search for subtle overlapping patterns in large spaces. So they never imagined it would be possible to swiftly and instantly search the mass of data in the mind. Science continues to follow the theory that the mind is a computational device. But, the mind recognizes patterns, using intuition.

The Secret Of Intuition - Delivery Of A Single Choice
As someone said "When a tiger bounds towards you, what should your response be? Should you file your toenails? Do a cartwheel? Sing a song? Is this the moment to run an uncountable number of randomly generated response possibilities through the decision rule?" Inhibition works to eliminate alternatives for every decision of the nervous system. Animals cannot afford to freeze into immobility, unable decide between chewing grass and drinking water. Intelligent action, pivotal for survival, mandates a swift logic, which ceaselessly narrows possibilities down to a single answer. Nature's logic evaluates myriad known possibilities to choose one option for action. If the choice is to chew grass, the drive to quench thirst is instantly inhibited.

The Secret Of Intuition - Delivery Of Artbitrary Choices
Inhibition delivers swift answers. Inhibition of weaker signals inhibits even less active possibilities. This image is interpreted by your mind as either two faces facing each other, or as a vase. Logically, it is both two faces and a vase. Your system inhibits one idea to identify the other. Intuition may not always deliver logical answers.

The Secret Of Intuition - The Spreadsheet Analogy
All nerve cells are known to be active in all regions of the brain, even when they do not appear to be actually participating. If a nerve cell is but a single entity in a multi billion processor system, why is it active when it does not need to process any data? Such activity is vital for the global evaluation of the mind. Even a spreadsheet follows the same routine. Any change in one cell is reflected in all the cells, even if there are a million cells. This is because entries in all cells of a spreadsheet are recalculated for each new input. With its ability to do millions of calculations a second, simultaneous recalculations enables the user to see the global impact of any change. Similarly, each one of billions of cells is tirelessly alert to events in the system, “recalculating” its inputs in the context of its own inherited and acquired memories

The Secret Of Intuition - Just Hints Are Enough
Intuition finds answers from even slivers of data. For a militant hiding in a cellar, the movement of a few hairs could indicate a current of cold air from a stealthily opened door. That is a vital message, which will inhibit every other sensory input. Instant elimination of possibilities from a database of cosmic proportions would trigger his immediate recognition of danger. Unexpected meanings are derived for a soft whisper or a shifting shadow. With access to vast data, intuitive recognition needs imperceptibly small slivers of information to enable recognition.

The Secret Of Intuition – Inherited & Acquired Combinatorial Codes.
Learned and inherited combinatorial memories can explain the incredible swiftness of animal motor controls. When a motor neuron fires to contract a muscle, the neurons of all opposing muscles become inhibited to avoid conflict. Each motor neuron also has up to 20,000 feedback/feed forward links with 60,000 other motor neurons. For coordinated movement, each motor impulse must follow evaluation of 20,000 other neuron decisions. This happens up to 10,000 times a second. Intuition is the swift process, of recognizing the right combination (Nobel Prize 2004) of the 20,000 inputs from other muscles, which causes each motor neuron to fire or be inhibited. Intuition is the intelligent recognition of combinatorial patterns.

The Secret Of Intuition - Access To A Massive Wisdom
Your mind has immense knowledge, stored as coded answers from myriad evolutionary and real life experiences. With such global access, the system swiftly evaluates trillions of pages of that wisdom to locate competent answers. But, to win, you need to be aware that you are so equipped. That self assurance is crucial. The eliminative search process wisely discards “impossible” solutions from its search. If you think it is impossible, you will not think of it. It is confidence, which can prevent many winning solutions from being so excluded. Confidence is the key to a good life. Listening to intuition delivers the wisdom of your mind.

The Secret Of Intuition - Often, A Blinkered Vision
But, the elimination routine has its limitations. From the extensive knowledge in your mind, intuition eliminates all out of context items to reach an answer. If something you know does not suit your current emotion, that data is also eliminated at the outset. Your mind eliminates all data linked to conflicting emotions. It narrows possibilities to the answer, which is appropriate to the current emotion.

If you are angry, it eliminates all positive views of your opponent. You have no awareness of such elimination. For you, the reduced list of possibilities is the truth. So, emotional decisions become irrational. Because of this emotional weakness of intuitive wisdom, science has founded its vast structures purely on clearly defined reasons.

The Secret Of Intuition - Superior To Reasoning Chains
The structures of science are built on definitions and reasoning chains. But, intuition is incomparably superior to reasoning chains for pattern recognition. So many things known to scientists can never be explained through reason. Analytical logic cannot assess a great painting, or comprehend passionate poetry. It cannot identify between charm and dignity, or contempt and enmity. Scientific knowledge, is a mere subset of what is known to intuitive wisdom. Intuition can be just as often wrong as scientific reasoning. But it girdles a wider horizon and is an incredibly powerful weapon for coping with the environment. Ultimately, it is their intuition, which enables scientists to build reasoning chains. And this clue to the secret of intuition originates from India!

This page was last updated on 13-Mar-2017

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Once, Decades Ago, I Tripped Over The Divine

For me, the flash of insight into the sublime happened way back in 1989. The vision stunned me with the grandeur of its simplicity. The startling prospect emerged from, of all things, an algorithm! Its potential flickered into my view by accident, while transferring a Prolog AI disease recognition procedure to a Lotus spreadsheet.  I had inadvertently reversed the logic of the Expert System, instructing it to eliminate improbabilities, instead of selecting probabilities. Such algorithms are just repetitive procedures. Cold and logical lines of code. But, they yield dependable results. Algorithms are just mechanical tools. But, this algorithmic code was unique.

The capability of the algorithm was that it could sift a Google sized database of connected facts to instantly recognize patterns. This was 10 years before Google started building its vast data warehouses. But, I knew the mind identified complex patterns when you just opened your eyes!  For the next few months, glimpses of probable neural accomplishments through instant pattern recognition kept waking me up at 3 a.m. I kept adding to the list on paper. The dots just kept connecting. Decades later, more possible links keep opening up new horizons - say, the seat of consciousness or the persistence of working memory. This algorithm could distinguish between good and evil. It could make us weep in anguish or gasp in wonder.  Could it be the fabled divine gift to life?

It worked in the mind. Gray's Anatomy was an exhaustive source and a starting point for me. Its 1500 pages listed the functions of virtually every mental organ. The algorithm could link them all into a single mind that could suture an artery, while recalling a tennis match. Starting at the input level, it focused your senses. The light from the heavens. The songs of the birds. The touch of a loved one. The fragrance of a rose. The taste of chocolate. We were blessed with millions of receptors, which flashed this magnificent perception of the world to the sensory regions of our cortex. There were association regions there, which could use the algorithm on this data to identify a pencil, or a word. We could separate the idea of a gun from the idea of a war in the abundance of incoming sensory patterns.

Object and event recognition. Algorithmic pattern recognition could act at every stage of mental processing. Things were happening all around us. There was a limbic system, where the algorithm could identify between good and bad happenings. It generated emotions. This mammalian region could drive us to attack in anger, or flee in terror. It was the limbic system, which held us in thrall. It filled us with despair, or tortured us in grief. It made us question the very meaning of life. Life was so unfair. Why did we have to suffer so?

Sadly, we lacked the capacity to naturally see our emotions and feelings. The limbic system was invisible to us. It was the algorithm, which caused the motor system to transform those emotions and feelings into actions. Hunger made us raid the frig. We went to work every day to avoid the pain of guilt. Love reminded us to pick up children from school. Hatred built the death camps. In the end, urges from the limbic system drove us out of Eden.

As a precious compensation, algorithmic pattern recognition ascended to higher levels. Our prefrontal regions gifted us with science and logic. Those skills enabled us to understand the vast structures of the cosmos. We built leviathans, which could sail the oceans and fly the skies. We explored the heavens. Our powerful civilizations conquered the continents and explored the cosmos. Even more, the algorithm also pointed us to the divine, which defied logic and definition. We sensed the order and beauty, which, like the laws of nature, existed from the beginning of time.

Pattern recognition dealt with subtleties. Reason and logic could not create great symphonies, or works of art. Why do we stand in awe of the sunset? Or find joy in a lilting song, or in the laugh of a baby?  Nerve cells recognized such patterns without our awareness and fired to initiate the skin tingling thrill. Who, but the Designer, could possibly want to hard wire us to thrill to the astonishing splendor of the design?

Over three decades have passed since my first glimpse of the truth. Like an ancient city hidden by forest cover, the vast and invisible city of the mind has many avenues linking its great palaces and temples. I also realized that those divine pattern recognition paths led to still spaces, untrammelled by the ravages of emotions and feelings.... Life was worth living! Even the great sages of the past advised us to still passions to empower the sublime within us. The divine stillness lives at the core. You too can find your home there.

The information provided in this website is useful for the modification of normal behavioral patterns. Please do get professional help, before applying the advice for the treatment of any abnormal behaviors. Copyright ©2008 by Ebbi Thomas. All rights reserved. This material may be freely published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Has India Discovered The Secret Of Intuition?

Has India Discovered
The Secret Of Intuition?