The 2024 Academy Awards recognized several stellar performances, including Cillian Murphy's portrayal of physicist Robert Oppenheimer, which earned him the Best Actor award. But what drives such top performances? When an actor fully embodies the character to the extent that it creates an immersive, persistent world of fantasy, we say the actor acted intuitive.
Such performances are not limited to acting; we can also encounter such intuition in sports and music. But it is broader than that. Acting intuitively is something we all do. It's any kind of situation where we just know what we need to do right now - that allows us to be the best version of ourselves.
So how can we ensure that we behave intuitively where it matters? And can we promote this ability? Our latest research, published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, suggests that intuition can be trained and is best understood as an "embodied state of mind," supported by the cognitive skills to be aware of ourselves and our environment, and being immersed in an experience.
What does an embodied state of mind mean? William James, widely recognized as the founder of modern psychology, suggested that consciousness has two sides: the "I" and the "me." The active aspect of self-awareness is the 'I' - this is the part of our consciousness that experiences the here and now - sometimes called the 'experiential self'. The more passive aspect of consciousness is the 'I' - this part that observes or reflects on our actions. We might call this the rational or reflective self.
This distinction has long been recognized in neuroscience research. For example, studies have shown that taking psychedelic drugs and experiencing awe or wonder can reduce activity in the default mode network, which is a self-referential brain network underlying reflective self-awareness.
Furthermore, recent research has suggested that mindfulness meditation could help us move from reflective self-awareness to experiential self-awareness by training our attention.
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Immerse with awareness
Our intuition depends on many unconscious processes that support all our cognition, perception and interaction with the world. It requires that we take in a lot of that, but that we also not lose ourselves by being overwhelmed by our senses. In other words, we must maintain the proper level of consciousness while immersed.
We perceive the world with our whole body, through all our senses - from vision to 'thermoception' (sensing temperature) and 'proprioception' (knowing which parts of your body are where without looking). This allows us to interact with the world around us in safe and useful ways. Ultimately, intuition happens when we are attuned to both what is happening in our bodies and what is happening around us.
But being highly aware of ourselves and our environment cannot fully explain intuition. When we work with our intuition, we act based on what we feel. But it can be difficult to maintain our awareness when we are fully engaged in a specific task that uses intuition. Therefore, another faculty is needed: the faculty of immersion.
The ability for immersion or absorption means that you can become completely absorbed in a task through focused attention. This is very similar to what is also called "flow".
But if you get too caught up in it, wouldn't you lose your awareness of yourself and your surroundings? That's why we suggest that you need meta-awareness: an awareness of having the experience, rather than thinking about the fact that you are having an experience. In other words, you must be in an experiential rather than a rational state; you experience, not reason.
Take acting for example. When we starred in a school play, we might have thought it was fine to represent Juliet, until we realized that everyone was looking at us as we stumbled over the words. We then switched from experiential self-awareness - in which we embodied Juliet - to reflective self-awareness, in which we thought about what we were doing. This type of 'choking' during a performance is also very common in sports.
An actor acts intuitively when he enters a state of immersion during his imagination, with full attention and awareness of the imagination, as well as full awareness of himself and the environment. They are completely immersed in the consciousness of the experience - they have experiential consciousness.
But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that method acting means immersing someone so deeply that the actors are no longer themselves. They must maintain meta-awareness in others to avoid mental health problems such as dissociation and worse.
How to develop your intuition
If intuition is an embodied cognitive state and not a momentary phenomenon that can occur by chance, does this mean that it can be developed?
Achieving intuition is considered one of the goals of Konstantin Stanislavski's approach to acting training (the basis of Western mainstream acting). But even here, intuition is often still treated as something handed down from the muses, like a burst of creativity or insight.
However, our research has shown that intuition can be trained. To do that, we need to train the underlying skills: an awareness of our internal and external world, combined with immersion.
As part of our research, we invited acting students for an intuition training, developed by co-researcher Micia de Wet. This consisted of exercises focused on imagery and structured through guided meditations to train the actor's attention and sensory awareness. The training also included exercises to encourage immersion in story worlds through play and imaginative exploration. We found that this training strengthened the actors' intuition. Our survey of 310 actors also found that the more they engaged in mindfulness meditation, the higher their acting intuition.
Although this training was specific to acting, we recommend that similar guided meditations, role-playing exercises and mindfulness training can increase our attention and focus. These can increase intuition in other contexts because these exercises sharpen the general underlying cognitive skills of awareness and immersion, bringing awareness to the body and environment.
Rather than an esoteric phenomenon or a temporary moment of peak performance, intuition is an important cognitive and emotional state that is supported by skills that anyone can use on an ongoing basis to interact with the world around them - and that can also be developed.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
