Intuition, Instincts or Sixth Sense (ESP)?

Have you ever had a thought pop in your head that, had you acted on it, you would have been spot on? If you have found this article, the likely answer is yes! I need to tell you that I am not an expert in this area and as I tell my friends, have only enough Psychology to be dangerous. Yet I believe I can speak at length about personal experiences involving intuition which, in most cases, would otherwise be unexplainable unless one believes that humans have a sixth sense. You decide! As for instincts, it is widely believe that only animals have them (details below). I’ve thought a lot about this and after a small discrepancy at the bank this morning, I have finally been driven to the pen or in this twenty first century, the keyboard. With summer vacation and more recently, my mother being admitted to hospital, I neglected bringing myself up to speed on the business bank account. This resulted in a problem that, had I embraced intuition, would not have occurred. Not only would the problem have been avoided, but the numbers involved were exact. I’m certainly not suggesting that you use intuition to run your bank account, but I do believe that intuition can play a role in our daily lives. Often there is a fine line between intuition and what some attribute to ESP which can often be explained by intuition or a sub-contious thought process. Whichever way you view it, it can prove important to follow what many call "there instincts" to provide checks and balances in your life. Intuition may be defined as understanding or knowing without conscious recourse to thought, observation or reason. Intuition is currently understood to be the subliminal processing of information that is too complex for rational thought, e.g. mate choice. The processes that make up intuition are learned, not innate. On the other hand, instinct is not a feeling, but an innate, "hardwired" tendency toward a particular behavior. Instincts are automatic reactions to environmental stimuli that cannot be repressed and occur in every individual of a species. The current opinion in psychology (since Maslow) is that human beings have no instincts. Extrasensory perception (ESP) involves reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairaudience, and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition. ESP is also sometimes referred to as a sixth sense. The term implies acquisition of information by means external to the basic limiting assumptions of science, such as that organisms can only receive information from the past to the present. ESP Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy Cheers!