[waru]

Well, the powerful thing about intuition is that you actually can intuit something totally new. Of course it draws on past experiences, but it can connect past experiences and solutions in new ways, to create a brand new solution. So, I think intuition is not as simple as being a faster way of pulling out an old solution.

I, for one, often struggle to explain to others why my gut feeling is right, but it often is.

[eof]

New, yes.. but just 'out of the blue'.. I doubt it. A life long plumber is not going to suddenly intuit a better algorithm for full text search; but a dataminer in the accounting world might.

I agree that it can connect past experiences and solutions in new ways; that's obviously what it does, but my point is those past experiences and solutions have to exist already; it's literally what they are drawing from. If your brain categorized failures as 'solutions' due to irrational thinking, whatever you intuit from those 'solutions' is going to be a failure as well.

Struggling to explain why your gut feeling 'is right' when it pops into your head is normal and completely separate than being absolutely unable to make a good argument for it when people offer contradictory solutions.

Personally, when my intuition is ahead of my reasoning, yet I have a strong personal belief my intuition 'is right' I will often later, in a spontaneous way rationally link it all together in a sort of "ohh thats why it's like that."