"In Understanding Intuition, Lois Isenman offers a gate into the too-rarely seen clarity and scope of our own minds. The invitation is to let go of what we just think we know, and in doing so, to open ourselves up to an entirely different way of knowing." --Koun Franz Deputy Editor, Buddhadarma
"This wide-ranging and important book on the science of intuition is scholarly yet accessible, rigorous yet personal. By expertly weaving together ideas and findings from psychology, neuroscience and spirituality, it represents a synthesis on the topic of intuition that goes notably beyond what has been published before in a single volume."--Dr. Oliver Robinson, author of Paths Between Head and Heart: Exploring the Harmonies of Science and Spirituality
"Intuition is an under-appreciated human faculty whose unconscious learning, memory, and response cues are never-the-less invaluable. Not only does intuition underlie the genius of creative discovery, in art, math, and science, but also this faculty guides each one of us through the vicissitudes of daily life. In contrast with rote learning and conscious deliberation, intuition is especially useful, if not necessary, in a current cultural milieu of continual change and information overload. Isenman's book, Understanding Intuition, is a masterpiece that brings together the latest research trends in cognitive and affective neuroscience, while examining intuition in terms of bottom-up and emergent implicit processes from the perspective of nonlinear dynamics. This book is well-researched, well-organized, and highly readable, as Isenman walks the reader through definitions and conceptualizations that are otherwise nonverbal, ineffable, and seemingly inexplicable." --Terry Marks-Tarlow, PhD, author of Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy and Awakening Clinical Intuition
"Lois Isenman describes an inner access point that bridges the structure of our Subjective reality with the Objectivity of received Intuitive perceptions. She is moving us toward our next levels of consciousness." --Helen Palmer, Academic psychologist and Author of The Enneagram
"A rich, nuanced and scholarly work, Understanding Intuition takes on a vital but little discussed aspect of scientific, artistic and interpersonal creativity, culminating in a stirring final chapter that looks at the human spirit and our collective future. Weaving skillfully between the rational and the intuitive, Isenman's work itself reflects its subject. Jonas Salk, a renowned synthesizer of intuition and reason, would stand and applaud." --Jonathan D. Salk, M.D. Co-author with Jonas Salk of A New Reality: Human Evolution for a Sustainable Future and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine
"Moving back and forth between personal experiences of intuition and the scientific evidence describing the processes involved, Intuition's Journey surveys the intelligence of the unconscious, where decisions are made about a half second before our conscious mind is aware of having decided. Isenman takes us into this world where our intuitions originate in a knowing that is "unconscious insofar as it escapes our notice, even as it guides the flow of our mental associations." --John Ryan Haule, Ph.D.
1. Some Basic Questions2. Implicit Learning3. Intuitive Cognition4. The Brain and Perception5. Emotion and Cognition6. Mental Imagery, Imagination, and Intuition7. The Importance of Embodied Experience and Imagery in Intuition8. A Feeling for the Truth9. Who Are We?
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.