Gut Instinct

Going With Your Gut: Strengthening Your Sixth Sense

Sarah Mahoney
c. 2006 Rodale Press Inc.
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

Photo: National Academy of Sciences via The New York Time "Intuition is the capacity for direct knowledge and immediate insight, without any observation or reason," says David G. Myers, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Hope College.

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One morning last November, Tammy Turner, 36, woke up thinking about her Pap test, scheduled for the following month. Even now, she can't explain exactly what made her call the doctor's office and move up her appointment to that week. "It wasn't that I had symptoms, just this gut feeling that something wasn't right," says Turner, who lives in Lakewood, Colo. Her test revealed stage 1 cancer, and by the time she had a portion of her cervix removed in January, it had advanced to stage 2. Turner can't account for that feeling, but she's glad she acted on it: "My cervix has healed and everything looks healthy."

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 best seller, 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.

We've all had hunches -- moments in which we act without quite knowing why.

"Intuition is the capacity for direct knowledge and immediate insight, without any observation or reason," says David G. Myers, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Hope College and author of "Intuition: Its Powers and Perils."