Verified by 
Key points
- Intuition is not magical, and there is no such thing as a naked eye.
- We know things we cannot always verbalize.
- Experts have better intuitions than laypeople.
Intuition is nothing magical. Much of our everyday knowledge is implicit or tacit. Let me give a personal example.
As a teenager, I used to sit and do my homework with the window open in my room on the first floor of our house. One day, I noticed I knew when our cat was coming home even though I couldn't see or hear her. When I looked out the window, I saw her standing at the front door. I did this before she started meowing to be let in.
I was amazed at my clairvoyance as I was sure I had not noticed the cat in any way. It took a few more successful predictions before I realized that I had unconsciously learned that the birds gave warning signals when the cat approached; thus, the change in the birds' song made me look out the window and watch for the cat.
Some of our implicit knowledge can easily be made explicit. You know that squirrels do not wear glasses in the wild, although you probably never thought about this fact before. And you can give valid reasons for this knowledge. Other forms of implicit knowledge are far more difficult to highlight. What we call intuition is the most difficult kind of implicit knowledge to make explicit.
For example, most of our knowledge of our mother tongue is implicit in this way. We have intuitions about what is grammatical, but we find it hard to explain why. And try to explain to a child in words how to ride a bike.
My dictionary defines intuition as "direct perception of truth or fact, independent of any reasoning." However, what is "directly perceived" by one individual cannot easily be perceived by other individuals or not at all. In particular, people with expert knowledge can sense many more phenomena "directly."
A wine connoisseur, for example, can make several fine distinctions that exceed the ability of a mere amateur. This may sound paradoxical; if two people experience (almost) identical sensations, must they not perceive the same thing?
No, there is no such thing as a "naked eye." (And no innocent ears either; even newborn babies show preferences for phonetic patterns and speech melodies they were exposed to in the womb.) Our perception is always dependent on our past experiences and how we have implicitly learned to categorize the world. It is impossible to draw a sharp line between what is perceived and what is derived, partly because different people have different perceptions and partly because much of what we unthinkingly count as perception is only observed with the help of various instruments—glasses, cameras, microscopes, amplifiers, speedometers, etc.
Education, habit, and other cultural factors also play a role in what we perceive. A trained eye finds amber on a beach where the untrained eye sees only seaweed and sand; a mother can distinguish her baby's cry from hundreds of others; and a psychiatrist recognizes a mental illness where others see only an absent-minded look.
What an expert experiences as a "direct" sensation is dependent on long training and practice. Experts combine information into larger meaningful units, filter out irrelevant information, and rely on a larger set of mental models. The processing of sensory information by the expert is implicit (unconscious). It appears to the expert as a "direct perception of truth or fact, independent of any reasoning," that is, intuition.
Visual imagery and spatial thinking play a major role in intuition. The Latin root word intuire means "to see." Some of our visual and spatial knowledge is difficult to verbalize and, therefore, becomes part of our implicit knowledge.
There are strong parallels between the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge and that between visual thinking and verbal thinking. Consciousness is spatially structured, and further cognitive processing is required to transform the immediately given experience into a verbalized form.
