Understanding Intuition - A Journey In and Out of Science

Understanding Intuition: A Journey In and Out of Science explores the biological and cognitive mechanisms that account for intuition. The book integrates the scientific, objective, and personal, subjective perspective on this important, yet elusive, mental capacity using specific encounters to illustrate that intuition is enhanced when we attend to the subtle aspects of our inner experiences, such as bodily sensations, images and differing kinds of intuitive evaluative feelings, all of which may emerge no further than the fringe of awareness.
Over the course of the book, readers will gain a deeper appreciation and respect for the unconscious mind, its potential sophistication, and its potential wisdom. Users will find this to be a timely and critical resource for students and researchers in psychology, cognitive science, theology, women's studies and neuroscience.

• Stresses the powerful influence of the unconscious mind and its important adaptive role
• Frames intuition as significant and novel unconscious insight
• Presents a systematic framework for understanding different kinds of intuition
• Examines the emotional underpinnings of intuition, giving special emphasis to the role of somatic feelings and their derivatives

Lois Isenman received her PhD in Cell Biology from the University of California, San Francisco in 1980. She worked for many years as a researcher in Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley and at Harvard and Tufts Universities. During this time, she became aware that her cognitive style was strongly biased towards intuition, and she eventually became interested in exploring what intuition means as well as its role in scientific endeavor. As a Science Fellow at the former Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College in 1994-95, she began having some unusual intuitive experiences about intuition itself. A few years later she began working on intuition full time as a Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center of Brandeis University. Her works brings together the Cognitive Science that likely accounts for intuition with foundational first-person experiences of intuition.