In my career as a software developer, I’ve occasionally gotten a reputation for having a knack of finding and fixing bugs in software I often joke that’s because I engage in intuitive debugging. What most of my coworkers don’t realize is that in many cases, I’m not joking.

I tend not to think of intuition as something that is supernatural. Instead, I think a lot of our intuition is a matter of allowing our brains to roam free and paying attention to the unexpected connections it makes. The reality is that our bodies take in a lot more sensory input than we realize. Our brains filter out a lot of that input, focusing on details to build a picture that we think is going to be most useful and filled with the select details that matter to us.

For me, tapping into my intuition primarily involves with shutting that filter down and letting my brain sift through the “raw data” again and notice things it’s been trained to ignore. It can then explore new patterns that might get missed due to that “filtering process.”

This is why I also think that one’s intuition is not 100% accurate or reliable. The new information and ideas that such intuitive moments still has to be tested and verified before accepted or acted upon. But I don’t think that’s any different than the ideas and conclusions my more (consciously) analytical mind arrive at, either.

But being able to let my mind relax and expand in ways that let’s it look at the same input and ideas fresh is a useful skill to develop in my opinion.

(This post is part of #ChangingPathsChallenge2024. For more information about the challenge and a list of prompts, please check out Yvonne Aburrow’s post where they announced the challenge.)