Published on the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month
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Intuitive Feeling-Learning
Feb 5 2007, Mike Estep
Welcome to the first article in the Mike Estep.com blog series. It
is my wish that this series will give the readers a perspective that makes sense
but may not have been considered previously. Enjoy!
In our society, people are taught to believe early on that the only way
to get ahead and become smart is through attendance and achievement in
school. I have traveled this path and obtained several degrees, including a
PhD. However, I have also come to believe that this training can possibly be detrimental
to the learning process in most people.
I did learn a lot in school, but academic training has a specific focus. This
focus has to do with exercising our conscious, logical, thinking intellect. Specifically,
we are exercising our ability to think with language, terms, and symbols in
various academic areas such as math, science, history, reading, writing, etc.
We are also taught to believe that this way of learning should always be the
priority. If our conscious thinking intellect is not included or exercised,
we are led to believe that we are not learning at all, or that other forms of
learning are substantially inferior.
This belief is just incorrect.
Consider how children learn to speak their native tongue. At first infants do
not know words or meanings, they are just surrounded by noises of others speaking.
After months of exposure, babies begin to babble. Without conscious understanding,
these children are improvising and gaining control of their speaking apparatus in
a feeling way. Later, this babbling turns into pure imitation of single words or
small phrases. Sometime after this has occurred, meaning starts becoming attached
to words until children can finally have conversations with adults.
The conscious thinking intellect was not involved until the end of the process. Does
this mean that before this time no learning occurred? Learning has obviously occurred
using different types of mental processing. Children learn to speak their native
tongue by exposure, improvisation, imitation, and then coherence. All of this includes
feeling perceptions (physical, auditory, visual, emotional, and intuitive). In other
words, people learn to talk by feeling first and later by thinking. Regardless of
the language and culture, this has been the basic process for children to learn their
native tongue for at least thousands of years.
It is also important to note that this process is pursued instinctively by the children –
it is not instigated by adults. While adults might occasionally try to coax words or
phrases out of children (“Say Momma”), adults do not try to teach children for several
hours each day to speak. It is ironic that since the natural process works so well
that once children learn to speak, they are either indirectly or directly encouraged
to never use this process again to acquire academic knowledge. The feeling parts are
left out. They are now only supposed to think.
Humans are by design born using this intuitive feeling process to learn. Because of this design, it doesn't make sense to me to end this process as soon as we learn to think consciously with words. Not only should humans be encouraged to continue this intuitive feeling-learning process, it should also be taught in school. However,
I’ll bet most of you reading this have never heard math or science teachers during a class
making statements like the following: “OK, today instead of thinking through
this problem, we are going to feel how this problem works and derive our solution from
these feeling perceptions.” Some of you reading this may think that feeling and math/science are unrelated. Nevertheless, I know from working with students and personal experience that the concept is possible and can be achieved through practice.
After much contemplation, I have come to believe the seeds of genius are partially linked
to intuitive feeling-learning. We are not supposed to neglect or ignore feeling perceptions
in learning. It is simply incorrect to do so. It is common for geniuses to continue
learning by feeling throughout their entire lives. Da Vinci, Mozart, Einstein, and
others commonly used intuitive feeling-learning in their endeavors. This is made abundantly
clear by studying the things these people said and did.
Everything considered, it stands to reason that humans can be trained to use intuitive feeling-learning, along with their intellect, for life. This powerful combination is literally the stuff that genius is made of.
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