#26: Developing Intuition (Retraining Instinct)
Learning To Respond Instead Of React
News of the Week (Intro to Worldbuilding)
I am excited to announce the launch of Worldbuilding, the practical portion of Recalibrating.
More doing, less thinking.
Worldbuilding is like a sub-plot or storyline within the overall story that is Recalibrating. A practical piece of the bigger picture.
My current plan is to continue publishing Recalibrating each Saturday (the free portion) and release Worldbuilding entries as I finish them.
Each Worldbuilding entry will have a free preview portion and a paid portion. The paid portion will have paywalled content available only to my paid subscribers. For more details, please see Worldbuilding 0.
Worldbuilding entries are built on the foundation of Recalibrating.
Recalibrating is not just the name of this newsletter. It is a philosophy for the future of our AI-augmented reality.
Worldbuilding is a series of ever-growing lessons on how to structure information systems to augment who we are as humans and leverage AI to make life easier and more in-line with what we value. A world of your own.
What world will you build?
I'm here to help you see your vision and help you build it. To point you in the right direction (calibrate) and sustainably structure your system.
I'll keep this entry shorter, considering that I've already sent one this week 🙂 Thank you for your patience as I set up my world ✨
Recalibrating Recap
Welcome to Recalibrating! My name is Callum (@_wanderloots)
Join me each week as I learn to better life in every way possible, reflecting and recalibrating along the way to keep from getting too lost.
Thanks for sharing the journey with me ✨
Last week, we touched on the multi-modal nature of reality and how new AI systems such as Google Gemini provide a clearer indication of what the AI systems of the future will look like.
These systems are only going to be as good as the information we put in them. To help structure your own data system in an authentic way, I proposed three key steps for maintaining authenticity of your self despite the noise of others:
Find Flow (activities that help you feel most like yourself and put you in the zone)
Self-Reflect (time taken to think about the flow states and how you felt)
Self-Analyze (actions taken to repeat the flow states more regularly)
By documenting your experience, you can begin to build a vault of valuable data, information, knowledge, and wisdom to feed your personal AI assistant in the future.
At the moment, AI systems still require a bit of code to build custom solutions. In the near future, that will no longer be the case. It's best to begin preparing for these systems now, so you have a head start on the rest of the world when the masses adopt AI use in everyday life.
The purpose of the steps listed above is to start training your own intuition so that you can begin to understand what type of AI you would actually want to have. An AI system calibrated to YOU.
This week, we are going to continue with our discussion on authenticity and intuition.
The Bigger Picture of Intuition
Taking time to find flow, activities that make you feel the most alive and in the moment, is an invaluable practice.
To identify the activities in which you find flow, it is often best not to overthink it. Instead, quiet your mind for a moment and see what flashes through your thoughts when considering what you truly love to do.
This flash of insight is a glimpse of your own intuition. The more flashes you experience, the more you begin to recognize the particular colour and style of your intuition. The texture and feel of your thoughts.
Taking time to recognize your intuition more regularly, you begin to calibrate your internal compass, helping to point your mind in the direction that is in-line with your authentic self. Your best you, the self-actualized self.
When you close your thinking mind and set your imagination free, what activities do you see yourself doing?
What world can you imagine? What ideas come to mind?
As humans, we are our experiences. Who we are (the self, I) is a culmination of thousands of experiences we have had over the course of our lives. The time and attention we spend creating our experiences have a huge impact on the person we think of as "I".
My life experiences have shaped who I am. Perhaps even more importantly, these experiences also shape who I will become.
Much of our daily actions occur through habits. Actions that we perform without thinking.
These habits occur as a result of instinct, something innate within us that compels us to act in a particular way when we experiencing a particular stimulus.
But sometimes, these instincts are wrong. They have been trained on bad or out-dated data.
Instead of relying purely on instinct, a leftover neurological response from our more primal era, I have been working to cultivate a more powerful skill.
Intuition.
Intuition
Intuition, imagination, inspiration, intelligence, instinct, ideation.
It's interesting to me that all of these words start with the same letter: I.
Ego means "I" in latin. Literally, the self.
What we think of as "I" can be very complicated. Some people choose (consciously or unconsciously) to not think about it at all, moving on autopilot mode each day without actually facing their self.
We stop thinking about what we are doing, and operate purely out of habit. Sometimes, we spend so long in these habit loops that we forget what it is like to change.
In this autopilot mode, we become a shadow of who we were, limiting who we could be.
When change comes, we are out of practice dealing with it, so we instinctively respond with fear and negativity.
That was how I felt when I was burnt out. But it is also how I feel when l boreout, working on tasks that I do not find fulfilling for too much of my life.
Though it took me a while, I began to feel that something was wrong. My mind and body were trying to tell me something, but I was unable to hear. I was not in alignment with myself.
My intuition was speaking to me.
Intuition means different things in different situations to different people. Generally, I think of intuition as a gut feeling, a hunch. Something I know without knowing how or why I know it.
Intuition can be thought of a higher order of consciousness, some sense of inner wisdom.
Intuition is a more complicated phenomenon than you may imagine. We intuit in different ways depending on our circumstances and the problems our brain is trying to solve.
Our senses take in data (seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting). That data is processed in the brain and across the central nervous system.
We come to a split-second decisions based not on cognitive reasoning, but on something that is hard to put into words. Something more innate to who we are.
Three Types of Intuition
To provide context on intuition, I want to share a few categories of intuition. Note that there have been many attempts to do this over the years, so this list is by no means exhaustive.
Instead, I hope it illustrates that intuition can be thought of in different ways.
Here are three types of intuition listed in a paper attempting to measure intuition:
1) Holistic Intuition integrates diverse sources of information in a Gestalt-like, non-analytical manner.
I think this type is what we traditionally think of as intuition. We take in the data from our senses and it causes us to have a particular response without taking time to analyze the situation.
2) Inferential Intuition determines judgments based on automated inferences, decision-making processes that were once analytical but have become intuitive with practice.
This type of intuition allows us to skip cognitive steps based on our previous understanding, like predicting a pattern with only a few cues. We make intuitive leaps, arriving at accurate judgement without all of the facts.
3) Affective Intuition emotionally responds to situations.
Feeling more than thinking. An emotionally-based cognitive response. This type of intuition is what I would typically think of as more instinctive.
I want to note that, in my view, instinct is slightly different than intuition.
I view instinct as something more primal, something tied to the physiology developed in our evolutionary days. A gut feeling that warned we were in danger or could be harmed.
That is not to say that "trusting your instinct" is bad, but rather that I think we have the capacity to retrain some of our instincts by being more aware of our intuition. We are most often not in the dangers that our ancestors were.
Intuition can provide the compass to point to the instincts that are beneficial versus the ones that are detrimental or limiting.
Our instincts may be out of date, due for an upgrade. Learning to understand own intuition is how we update it.
Neuroplasticity (Updating The Brain)
Putting our evolutionary instincts aside, much of our more modern instinct (emotional reactions) was formed during our childhood.
Neuroplasticity, the brain changing and adapting over time, is more passively developed as a child compared to more actively developed as an adult.
As we grow up, many situations are new to us. Our brain is in the habit of passively taking in information and allowing it to shape its development. We have daily practice dealing with change, uncertainty, and novelty.
However, when our brain grows out of this phase, neuroplasticity requires more of an effort on the part of our adult self.
To help understand this concept more, I listened to Andrew Huberman's 2 hour lecture on how writing can be used to permanently lower stress levels. I'll talk more about this in the next Worldbuilding Entry, so stay tuned.
As adults, many people do not continue learning in their lives, preferring instead to stagnate and stay the course their life is headed. Sure, they learn the odd thing here and there, but the novelty and change we were exposed to as children was much more frequent and life-changing.
Without introducing more neuroplastic moments, moments that change how we think, we default back to the nervous system reactions we developed as a child, letting that childhood reflex inform our behaviour as adults.
This nervous system response extends beyond our brain to the entire nervous system spread across our entire body. We learn as children to react to specific situations in a particular way, and our body remembers.
When exposed to a trigger from our childhood, we do not cognitively reflect on whether we should respond in the same way we were trained to all those years ago.
We react instead of respond.
Mindfulness (Responding vs Reacting)
When we are stressed, we are often not responsible. By responsible, I mean its most literal form: response able. Instead, when our amygdala is flared into fight or flight we react without thinking. We are unable to respond. Dysregulated.
We instinctively react to situations instead of responding to them.
Thankfully, we can retrain this behaviour. We can learn to regulate our self when it is stressed to give that self time to respond, take a breath rather than react. We can learn to think again.
In my experience, mindfulness is by far the best way I have ever found to improve my self-regulation. Breath work helps calm my physical self and mindful reflection helps calm my mental self. The value of these skills cannot be overstated.
Even better, by spending more time in a regulated state, being present (in the moment), I am more in tune with my senses and feelings in that moment. The more I practice mindfulness, the more confident and comfortable I am with myself. The more I learn to trust myself. My intuition becomes stronger.
Mindfulness increases my intuition as I become more aware of my self in the moment and how it is responding to the world around me.
The more mindful I am, the better I am able to recognize when I am dysregulated and can take steps to regulate myself. I learn to respond instead of react, retraining my self.
I become more self-aware, which allows me to better identify my own intuition.
Intuition is something personal, so it makes sense that the more aware I am of my unique self, the more I will be able to recognize when that self is trying to tell me something intuitively.
But, there is more I can do.
Writing Patterns of Insight
To give my thinking mind a break while helping out future me, I can place myself in a headspace that allows my thoughts to flow freely.
I can practice mindfulness and then maintain that headspace by reflecting on what I just experienced. I can extend my time in the moment, prolonging my practice.
I can write.
By undergoing mindfulness and then writing about it, I am able to hold a mirror to my ego. Showing me my self at that moment.
Even better, that writing documents my state of mind in that moment, when it has been cleared and denoised by mindfulness. This documentation provides a record to my future self of what past me thought.
Over time, broad patterns begin to emerge across my written record, providing invaluable insights on the bigger picture of my self. These patterns of insight form the foundation of metacognition (thinking about thinking).
Insight means to understand the inner nature of things. Of seeing intuitively.
By taking the time to pair writing with mindfulness, I begin to see beyond the mere moment of my self. I can see who I was, who I am, and who I could be.
This mindful writing can be as simple as you would like. A self-reflection exercise for a few minutes each day. A practice of nurturing self-awareness to recognize and improve intuition over time.
That said, there are more also powerful forms of writing.
The Writing Protocol
Writing in a specific manner has been shown to permanently lower stress and anxiety levels.
Huberman's two hour podcast on this Writing Protocol goes into great depth on how and why this protocol works.
While I knew that writing was a powerful way to change my self (writing has literally changed my life), I was still surprised at how many participants in this writing protocol had their stress levels permanently lowered.
Learning more about the neuroscience from Huberman, I was able to make connections between the scientific writing protocol and my daily writing habit. I was able to understand why writing has changed my life and how it could continue to do so with even more effectiveness.
I will be discussing this writing protocol and my key takeaways from this podcast in the next Worldbuilding Entry. These takeaways include some of the most interesting things I have learned over the last few months.
Next week
Next week, I will continue exploring intuition and flow states.
Stay tuned ✨
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