Sixth Sense

© Helen Lesser
First published in AQCH Hypnotherapy Journal (issue 22 / 1996)

Intuition, hunches, inspiration, premonition or sixth sense – all amount to the same thing – an idea out of the blue, a thought from nowhere, a seemingly non-sensical notion.

The November 1995 edition of Readers Digest included an article called “When to Follow a Hunch” by Paul Bagne. Apparently, Malcolm Westcott, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, Canada has done much research into the subject of intuition. Basically, the upshot of this research pointed to the fact that we make decisions “without consciously sifting through the mass of information we have acquired” throughout our lives.

Another study by Larry Squire, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California in San Diego showed that even when patients had had specific parts of the brain damaged and suffered with problems with their conscious memories – “another memory system continues to function”. This research lead Squire to believe that when learning something new, when having to think about things, we use what he calls the ‘declarative’ system of memory. Once tasks have been learnt, once we are not consciously thinking about them, they become part of the ‘procedural’ memory.

In other words, tasks become automatic. The subconscious takes over, leaving the conscious mind free to think of other things.

On each Practical Course, we have always said that intuition