There are words we all use, words we believe we understand and which, if we look closely, actually mean almost nothing—or rather, mean too many things at the same time, becoming a kind of mathematical unknown onto which we project explanations that allow us to believe we have understood something when, in reality, we have simply given a name to our ignorance.

One of these words is magic.

Magical thinking has probably existed for as long as human beings have existed and, in the end, it arises from a very simple mechanism: we observe a relationship between two events, we fail to understand the cause-and-effect connection between them and, not knowing how to explain what we see, we resort to magic; then, when we finally discover the mechanism, that same relationship immediately ceases to be magical and becomes scientific.

Something similar happened for centuries with the word “God”: when faced with a phenomenon we could neither control nor understand, we attributed its cause to a superior entity, and the progress of scientific knowledge has gradually relieved God of a remarkable number of meteorological, astronomical, biological and medical duties.

Another of these words is intuition.

When we reach a conclusion without being able to explain the steps that led us there, we say we had an intuition; and since the answer appears to emerge from a part of ourselves that we do not directly control, the step from there to mystery, magic or transcendence has always been a very short one.

It is no coincidence that the idea of receiving information from a “higher” source, or at least from somewhere other than ordinary rational consciousness, appears in practically every culture: “intuitions” comes from the Latin *in-tuire*, which means to receive a lesson from within; the genius, before becoming synonymous with an exceptionally intelligent person, was a spirit capable of inspiring and suggesting; Socrates’ daimonion was that mysterious inner voice which, in certain circumstances, warned him particularly about what he should not do; and, more generally, the history of religions, philosophies and contemplative practices is full of images created to describe something that human beings have evidently experienced for a very long time.

Naturally, all of this can be interpreted in mystical terms, but we are not obliged to do so, because there is a much more immediate explanation: an enormous part of our mental activity takes place completely outside rational control and continuously produces behavioural responses, evaluations, choices, predictions, associations and interpretations without our knowing exactly through which mechanisms they were constructed.

When the answer is especially rapid, meaningful or apparently inexplicable, we call it intuition.

We know more than we know we know

The idea that a huge part of our brain functions perfectly well without consulting our consciousness may be slightly disturbing, particularly because we are very attached to the idea that we are rational creatures who consciously decide what they do, but it takes only a moment’s reflection to realise that things could hardly be otherwise.

Our organism does not ask for our opinion when regulating body temperature, circulation, digestion, balance, posture and thousands of other processes; nor do many of the activities we consider voluntary require us to know anything about the mechanisms involved.

Imagine, for example, that we wanted to build a mechanical system capable of intercepting an object thrown through space: we would need information about initial velocity, direction, acceleration, the position of the receiving mechanism, the time required to reach the interception point and a considerable number of other variables; yet, when someone throws a ball at us, we’re able to catch it quite easily without consciously solving a single equation, and we can be certain that if we tried to rationally control every single step, the ball would hit us in the face before we’d even moved a single muscle.

This simply means that we possess extremely refined mechanisms, developed over millions of years of evolution, which allow us to interact with the environment effectively, rapidly and often in ways far more sophisticated than our conscious mind could manage.
It also means that many of these mechanisms are much older than rational thought itself, so much so that we share them, in different forms, with a great many other animal species.

The problem begins when, impressed by the extraordinary results achieved by rational thought in science and technology, we start believing that rationality must therefore be the best tool for approaching every kind of problem, forgetting that our brain was not born in a laboratory, was not designed by an engineer and, above all, is not a machine that coolly analyses neutral data: inside us coexist ancient instincts, emotions, automatisms, memories, conditioning, associations, fears, desires, expectations and an enormous quantity of information accumulated throughout life, and the result of all this underground activity often reaches consciousness already packaged as a feeling, an impulse, an attraction, a distrust or a decision.

At this point, however, we need to make a fundamental distinction, because the fact that a large part of our mental processing occurs outside conscious control does not mean that everything we “feel” is correct and, above all, does not mean that every thought that suddenly appears should be treated as a message from the Universe.
Otherwise, every fear would become a premonition, every desire a call of destiny and every personal dislike incontrovertible proof that “my intuition tells me that this person has bad energy.”

The interesting question, therefore, is not whether intuition is true or false, mystical or scientific, rational or irrational; the real question is where what we call intuition comes from, and how much we can trust the information on which it is based.

A seemingly inexplicable feeling may arise because we have unconsciously detected dozens of small signals—a hesitation in someone’s voice, an inconsistency between words and posture, an almost imperceptible change in facial expression, something we failed to bring into conscious awareness but that the brain nevertheless registered. But it may also arise from an old experience, a completely arbitrary association, a childhood fear or a conditioning process that no longer has anything to do with the present situation.

I may feel that someone is untrustworthy because I have unconsciously noticed a series of genuine warning signs, or because that person vaguely resembles someone who cheated me twenty years ago: from the inside, the two feelings may be absolutely identical, and this is where things become interesting.

Intuition may be compressed experience

For many decisions, particularly when we have accumulated substantial experience in a particular field, intuition can represent an extraordinarily efficient form of processing: an experienced musician immediately hears that something is wrong, a physician may sense that a clinical picture “doesn’t fit” before being able to explain exactly why, an entrepreneur may feel that a negotiation is moving in a bad direction thanks to hundreds of previous experiences that do not need to be consciously recalled one by one.

In such cases, intuition might be described as compressed experience, an enormous quantity of information transformed into a synthetic sensation.

The same mechanism, however, can produce systematic errors when the original data are wrong, when previous experiences are irrelevant to the present situation, or when the brain continues to apply strategies that were useful in the past to circumstances that are now completely different.
For this reason, I find equally naïve both the position of those who regard intuition as some kind of infallible supernatural faculty and the position of those who dismiss it as irrational and believe it should always be replaced by conscious calculation.

Reason and intuition are not enemies and, above all, they are not alternatives: rational thought allows us to verify, compare, correct, measure, construct models and evaluate consequences; intuition allows us to process rapidly an enormous quantity of elements that would be impossible to manage consciously.

The intelligent question is therefore not which of the two we should use, but when, and for which kind of problem, it makes more sense to use one, the other, or both.

Sometimes the best solution is to collect information, analyse it rationally up to a certain point and then allow the problem to “settle”, rather than continuing to torture it through endless internal dialogue; at other times, it is useful to do exactly the opposite, listening first to the intuitive response and only afterwards subjecting it to rational verification.

But there is a further problem which is far more important today than it was even twenty years ago: we are immersed in a quantity of information, stimuli, opinions, images, advertising, notifications and messages that none of our ancestors could have imagined, and every day somebody is deliberately trying to tell us what to desire, what to fear, what to buy, what to think and even which emotions to feel.

At that point the question becomes almost unavoidable:

is what we feel really intuition, or simply the result of the bombardment we have been exposed to?

• Do I truly desire that thing, or has someone taught me to desire it?
• Does that fear belong to the present situation, or was it installed in me by somebody else?
• Am I genuinely evaluating a person, or merely projecting an old experience onto them?
• Is there really a logic behind what I am doing, or am I simply constructing an elegant rationalisation to justify something I have already decided for reasons I do not wish to admit?
• In the end, because this is always the real question: what can I trust?

How do we know which voice is ours?

And here, paradoxically, we return to the title: if we want even the slightest chance of distinguishing intuition from noise, we must first create conditions in which it is possible to hear something that is not shouting.

The first step is external silence, which means interrupting, at least temporarily, the continuous flow of information, opinions, images, notifications and stimuli with which we fill every empty moment of the day; the second, much more difficult, is internal silence, which means slowing down that uninterrupted dialogue through which we comment on, judge, interpret, anticipate and mentally debate almost everything that happens.
This does not mean ceasing to think, which is probably impossible anyway; it means ceasing to intervene immediately in every thought, allowing it to appear without instantly transforming it into a story, and observing what remains when the noise becomes quieter. It is curious how certain answers become clearer precisely when we stop chasing them.

After gathering the information available and doing all the rational work we can, often the most intelligent thing to do is something else: walk, play music, exercise, sleep, occupy ourselves with something that has nothing to do with the problem and allow that part of the mind which continues working without our supervision to do its job undisturbed.
Then, when something emerges, we can listen to it.

Not obey it automatically, of course, but at least give it the right to speak and only afterwards ask reason to perform its own task: does this feeling come from experience, fear, desire, old conditioning, or have I genuinely perceived something that I had not yet managed to formulate?

Perhaps we will never completely know where certain answers come from: we can call them unconscious processing, intuition, genius, daimon, or use whatever other name we prefer; and if someone prefers to call them angels, I personally have no objection: the name, in the end, matters relatively little.

What matters is remembering that, if angels speak, they speak softly.

by Bruno