New Practice Game - Targeted Intuition

In addition to my existing mental training regimen, I have decided to add a new training game in order to home in on one of my favorite things about perception - judgment. We judge people. It happens. Everything you think about someone else's thoughts, emotions, or reasons for what they do comes down to judgment. It's not a bad thing, as long as you understand what's happening, which through this blog, I intend to do.

WARNING : If you decide to follow my mental training regimen, please don't add this game in until you are comfortable playing the first ones. This exercise is all about directing your intuitions in order to better understand how your brain processes information subconsciously. Without a conscious thought a process to compare to, you are doing something so horrible, so grossly shocking, that any true Sherlock Holmes fan would be humiliated to be caught in the act of - guessing.

With that in mind, here is the Targeted Intuition Training Game:

1) Observe a person. Before consciously ingesting any details, try to allow your brain to give you an intuitive profile, a "first a impression without justification." (In reality, your brain will have some sort of justification, but the idea is for you to be unaware of the subconscious calculations involved.)

2) Once you have your intuition, break it down. Isolate the individual elements, and highlight any unusual ones. (Let's say a woman walks by - Your intuition goes something like, "She's a nervous mother." Okay, fine. Why a mother? Why nervous?)

3) Now take another look. Play the other games. Find details. Make deductions/inductions. See if you can arrive at any specific conclusions. Form a second profile about the person.

4) Compare your two profiles. See if any of the intuitions you formed were justified. Try to find out WHY your brain arrived at your intuition (Try to figure out what your subconscious mind was 'thinking' during step number 1. If you were way off, find out why. If you were dead on, find out why.

The point of this game is to begin to break down what we perceive as intuition, and display it for what it really is - a cumulative sum of countless calculations being made by your brain on your behalf, in order to better prepare you for dealing with the world. My theory, which this blog is a crucial part of, is that by slowing down the process, by training your intuition to see what is relevant, we can gain a better understanding of how we think, and what we can really see when we are watching closely. In addition, with a little extra effort, we can train our conscious mind to see things that were previously unavailable to us.