Just follow your instincts...

'Just follow your instincts' - What great advice!...NOT!!! How many times have I thought I was supposed to turn right and then ended up on the other side of town taking me 3 hours extra to walk home. Or when I met someone who I was certain was the type to kill animals in his spare time only to discover he was a male Mother Teresa. I am sure this has happened to all of you, but these examples will never come to your mind when you think about your instincts. Incidences where your thoughts have led to the correct conclusion will always pop up and, therefore most people probably believe they are intuitive i.e. special (aside: face it - if everyone is special in their own way, no one is actually special, sorry). Now I am by no means stating that we don't have a form of 'intuition' or little voice that is sometimes able to tell us correctly where to go or how to judge someone. I believe that this it is simply our highly intelligent subconscious that is able to piece together past experiences, peripheral visions, conversations, facial expressions etc. to give us our 'instinct' that comes to us before we can consciously figure out how we actually knew the answer. A common example is ' I just had a feeling he was cheating on me, gosh I was so right, it must have been my womanly intuition'. Sorry to say, dumbo, (not dumbo because you got cheated on, but dumbo because you thought it was your female intuition that caught him) I am certain that your significant other was leaving some very obvious clues, not to mention behavioural changes which led you to conclude that he was a swine. If your womanly instincts were actually that good then you wouldn't have been with him in the first place. To mistakenly rely on this 'intuition' as some magic fairy godmother that will tell you the answer when you have no other way of finding it out would be ridiculous; although, your 'intuition' i.e. subconscious would be the best thing to use if you had no other option! However, when you do have the option, relying on intuition would be highly dangerous in science, for example, and a horrible way to approach meeting new people. I guess what I am trying to say is don't listen to people who tell you to blindly follow your gut. The advice I would give would be not to follow your instincts but to LISTEN to them. Be aware of them, be conscious of their limitations. Then you can choose whether or not it would be wise to go ahead an follow them or if you should search for some more empirical evidence to base your belief.