Are Emotions Prophetic?
** It's hard to tell if this article is saying anything new, but it's another angle to consider
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/are-emotions-prophetic/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=twitterclickthru
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For thousands of years, human beings have looked down on their emotions. We’ve seen them as primitive passions, the unfortunate legacy of our animal past. When we do stupid things – say, eating too much cake, or sleeping with the wrong person, or taking out a subprime mortgage – we usually blame our short-sighted feelings. People commit crimes of passion. There are no crimes of rationality.
This bias against feeling has led people to assume that reason is always best. When faced with a difficult dilemma, most of us believe that it’s best to carefully assess our options and spend a few moments consciously deliberating the information. Then, we should choose the alternative that best fits our preferences. This is how we maximize utility; rationality is our Promethean gift.
But what if this is all backwards? What if our emotions know more than we know? What if our feelings are smarter than us?
While there is an extensive literature on the potential wisdom of human emotion – David Hume was a prescient guy – it’s only in the last few years that researchers have demonstrated that the emotional system (aka Type 1 thinking) might excel at complex decisions, or those involving lots of variables. If true, this would suggest that the unconscious is better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the conscious brain, that the very thought process we’ve long disregarded as irrational and impulsive might actually be more intelligent, at least in some conditions.
The latest demonstration of this effect comes from the lab of Michael Pham at Columbia Business School. The study involved asking undergraduates to make predictions about eight different outcomes, from the Democratic presidential primary of 2008 to the finalists of American Idol. They forecast the Dow Jones and picked the winner of the BCS championship game. They even made predictions about the weather.
Here’s the strange part: although these predictions concerned a vast range of events, the results were consistent across every trial: people who were more likely to trust their feelings were also more likely to accurately predict the outcome. Pham’s catchy name for this phenomenon is the emotional oracle effect.
= new reply since forum marked as read
it is the stuff of dowsing (American Society of Dowsers are headquartered in my small hometown of Danville, VT) 
http://www.dowsers.org/
http://www.dowsers.org/index.php/learning1/about-asd/history-of-dowsing
I'm working in Southern Virginia, presently but the last I was up there... it was the same as ever (my Dad was born in Hardwick and many of my folk are from Greensboro)
This is the hotspot now: http://www.clairesvt.com/
wild people up in the Northeast Kingdom!!
http://www.rwbrownphotography.com/print_galleries/vermont_color/
one of Richard Brown's photos of portraits of Vermonters...
http://www.rlpwx.com/index.php
