Your instinct

The other day I posted a comment on Facebook about following your instinct.  But what exactly is “your instinct”?  Here’s what I found:

According to dictionary.com the word instinct is a –noun

1. an inborn pattern of activity or tendency to action common to a given biological species.

2. a natural or innate impulse, inclination, or tendency.

3. a natural aptitude or gift:and  

4. natural intuitive power.

According to the cultural dictionary instinct is a behavior that is not learned but passed between generations by heredity.

The encyclopedia tells us that it’s an involuntary response by an animal, resulting in a predictable and relatively fixed behavior pattern. Instinctive behavior is an inherited mechanism that serves to promote the survival of an animal or species.

There’s all kinds of movies with the word instinct in it not to mention a couple of cell phones.  You remember, Basic Instinct from 1992 with Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone.  We all sat there yelling at the screen for him to run because she was CRAZY!

Published articles from around the world tell us to trust our instincts because it’s a natural part of our being.  It’s not something we make up - it’s just there.

Intuition/instinct is drawn from the right hemisphere of the brain which is the same side that controls nonverbal, holistic thought and expression.  The right brain, processes from whole to part, holistically.  It starts with the answer. It sees the big picture first, not the details. If you are right-brained, you may have difficulty following a lecture unless you are given the big picture first.

So we all have it, even some of the world's greatest scientists, the most logical thinkers of all time, have made their greatest discoveries based on flashes of intuition (think of Newton and the apple that fell on his head, or Archimedes shouting "Eureka!" in his bathtub).

So whether you’re right brained or left brained it seems like a no brainer to listen to your intuition/instinct if you think something isn’t quite right because 9 times out of 10 that feeling is right.