Spotting sociopaths by intuition

I wasn’t abused in my youth. But I’ve always been an observer of humans. Acquiring as much environmental data as I can is something I was born with. My brain is just wired that way. But I agree that a brain can also be trained that way, through abuse. The result is the same: hyper vigilance, observant learners, high sensitivity… it all creates a brain wired to pick up as much data as possible, a lot of which is neither blatant nor consciously provable.

I’ve been thinking on how to define the difference between instinct, intuition, emotions and reasoning.

IMO

– instinct is adrenaline related, and aside from survival fear has little to do with emotions. It just hits you and action often follows immediately. A typical related sensation is the stretching of time while observing every tiny detail possible.
– intuition kicks in with less apparent threats, and can even be used for situations that do not implicate any danger at all, known or unknown. It presents itself as a feeling or conclusive thought out of the blue, but in hindsight can be related to environment cues given over time and space (serendipity is closely related to intuition in that way). So, the processing of the cues was done on a subconscious level. So, when you have a sudden thought, feeling which present themselves as a conclusion about a situation or person without any apparent conscious reasoning before it, then that is most likely intuition kicking in. The reason why it’s so vulnerable to being disregarded is exactly the lack of conscious reasoning preceding the conclusion. And so often you end ‘consciously reasoning’ against the conclusion, per the example panther gave. Unless you are schizophrenic and dillusional, it seems it is better to trust the out of the blue conclusion: people can fake obvious cues, and spaths can control facial expression, but there are things they cannot control: omissions, smells, the preying stare, … Important is that intuition can present itself as a cognitive conclusion and thought without involving any emotions.
– emotions: the basis of emotions are often hormones. We feel them strongly. And they are often confused with intuition. We are feeling so much love, so it’s our subconscious that must know they are the right person for us. Well, we all know how that turned out. Besides there are different levels of emotion. Fear can come in two manners: fear for a physical survival threat, fear for the ego being hurt or making a mistake. The first is instinctive, the latter is a more complicated cognitive one. As for love: there is attraction, there is infatuation, bonded love and caring. It takes experience, honesty to oneself to point the source of the feeling. Emotions in that way are not the best advizor, even though we made decisions based on them. They just are. But if we are deadly honest with ourselves, they can be used as symptoms.
– conscious reasoning can be logical but also prone to rationalising issues and responsibilities away. A problem with conscious reasoning is that it does not take into account the less obvious data out there. It only takes the facts into account that we are conscious of at that time. If ego fears and insecurities (emotions) can lead to rationalisations then conscious reasoning can be a very bad advizor. And it is very prone to being deceived by planted evidence, lies, etc…

Yup, hunger and sucking are instinctive responses as well which you are born with. So is running away from a predator 🙂 It takes certain worms in the body that excrete hormones to make its victims (such as mice) to walk into the cat’s paws, instead of make it run away from the smell of cat as far as possible.

a medical dictionary explanation to “instinc”: “a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason2 : behavior that is mediated by reactions below the conscious level”

“Science Dictionary
instinct (Ä­n’stÄ­ngkt’) Pronunciation Key An inherited tendency of an organism to behave in a certain way, usually in reaction to its environment and for the purpose of fulfilling a specific need. The development and performance of instinctive behavior does not depend upon the specific details of an individual’s learning experiences. Instead, instinctive behavior develops in the same way for all individuals of the same species or of the same sex of a species. For example, birds will build the form of nest typical of their species although they may never have seen such a nest being built before. Some butterfly species undertake long migrations to wintering grounds that they have never seen. Behavior in animals often reflects the influence of a combination of instinct and learning. The basic song pattern of many bird species is inherited, but it is often refined by learning from other members of the species. Dogs that naturally seek to gather animals such as sheep or cattle into a group are said to have a herding instinct, but the effective use of this instinct by the dog also requires learning on the dog’s part. Instinct, as opposed to reflex, is usually used of inherited behavior patterns that are more complex or sometimes involve a degree of interaction with learning processes. ”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/instinct

According to the above scientific definition the sucking of an infant would be regarded as a reflex, whereas my actions during the car accident, the man following to my car, etc would be regarded as instinct. Yes, I involved adrenaline with that, because we were discussing the use of intuition and other alternatives to get out of a bad situation, from directly life threatening to less obvious danger.

a dictionary link to intuition: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/intuition “1. direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension.”