Q. Whenever I mention intuition, someone in my family typically rolls his/her eyes and mumbles, "Yeah, right. Dream on." Does intuition really exist as a brain function, or is it just a figment of someone’s imagination?

A. Everything pretty much starts and ends in the brain. This includes intuition. According to Joseph Chilton Pearce, intuition results from interactions between the emotional brain (limbic layer) and the right hemisphere of the human brain (likely the right frontal lobe with perhaps assistance from the temporal lobes). Some brains are more intuitive about ideas and processes; others are more intuitive about people.

Brains that are functioning within normal parameters have access to this mental function, although not everyone is willing to talk about it, and society may have somewhat marginalized “women’s intuition.”

A plethora of definitions exist from perception via the unconscious to a type of “knowing” that appears to be outside of conscious reasoning. Indeed, intuition may involve the brain trying to convey information to you that it has picked up subconsciously from the environment. Wilson, in his book Strangers to Ourselves, reported that at any given moment the five senses are taking in more than 10,000,000 pieces of information. The eyes alone receive and send millions of signals to the brain each second. The human brain can process consciously about 40 pieces of information per second, so a great deal of information is being absorbed and processed subconsciously. It may be that some of this information is fed to you in the form of intuition.

According to the authors of Executive EQ, when you engage not only the analytical mind but also your emotions and intuition, your senses and emotional intelligence (EQ) enable you to scan hundreds of possible scenarios to arrive at the best solution in a matter of seconds instead of hours—the answer being as good or better than if you relied solely on intellect.

In his book Primal Leadership, Daniel Goleman described intuition as working best when data from a gut sense are used to build on other types of information. For example, if a business plan looks good on paper but somehow doesn’t feel quite right, proceed with caution. If you get an intuitive flash, ask yourself if there is any reason you should discount the information. If not, factor it into the decisions you make.

Jung and Einstein, among others, believed intuition to be an extremely valuable natural human ability and a key dimension of creative processes, problem solving, and decision making. The question is, are you owning, honing, and using yours?