The 2024 Academy Awards were honored with a number of stellar acting performances, including Cillian Murphy’s portrayal of physicist Robert Oppenheimer, which earned him the Best Actor award. So what drives such high performances? When an actor so fully embodies his character that he creates an immersive, sustained world of make-believe, we say the actor is acting. intuitively.
These performances are not limited to acting; we can also see this intuition in sports and music. But it is broader than that. Acting intuitively is something we all do. This is just our To know what we should do right now – allows us to be the best versions of ourselves.
So how can we make sure we’re being intuitive when it matters? So can we develop this ability? Our latest research, published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and Art, suggests that intuition can be trained and that it is best understood as an “embodied state of mind” underpinned by self-awareness and cognitive abilities. our surroundings and being immersed in an experience.
What does an embodied state of mind mean? William James, generally considered the founder of modern psychology, proposed that awareness has two sides: “I” and “me.” The active aspect of self-awareness is the “I” – this is the part of our awareness that experiences the here and now – sometimes referred to as the “experiential self”. The more passive aspect of awareness is the “I”; It is this part that observes or reflects our actions. We might call this the rational or reflective self.
This distinction has long been recognized in neuroscientific research. For example, research has shown that taking psychedelic drugs and experiencing awe or wonder can reduce activity in the default mode network, a self-referential brain network that underlies reflective self-awareness.
Moreover, recent research has suggested that mindfulness meditation can help us move from reflective self-awareness to experiential self-awareness by training our attention.
Intertwined with awareness
Our intuition is based on many unconscious processes that support all of our cognition, perception, and interaction with the world. It requires us to perceive many of these, but also not to become overwhelmed by our senses. In other words, we need to maintain the correct levels of awareness while submerged.
We perceive the world with our whole body, with all our senses; from seeing to “thermoception” (feeling temperature) and “proprioception” (knowing where parts of our body are without looking). This allows us to interact with the world around us in safe and convenient ways. After all, intuition happens when we tune in to both what’s happening in our body and what’s happening around us.
However, being highly aware of ourselves and our environment cannot fully explain intuition. When we engage with our intuition, we act in line with what we feel. But it can be difficult to maintain awareness if we become fully engaged in a particular task that uses intuition. That’s why another skill is needed: the ability to dive into it.
The ability to be immersed or absorbed means that you can remain fully immersed in a task through focused attention. This is very similar to what is called “flow”.
But if you get too carried away, don’t you lose awareness of yourself and your surroundings? That’s why we suggest you need meta-awareness: awareness of having the experience, rather than reflecting on the fact that you’re having an experience. In other words, you must be in an experiential rather than rational state; You are experiencing, not reasoning.
Take acting, for example. When we’re cast in a school play, we may have no problem representing Juliet, until we realize everyone is staring at us as we stumble over the words. We then moved from experiential self-awareness, where we embody Juliet, to reflective self-awareness, where we (over)think about what we are doing. This type of “choking” during performance is also quite common in sports.
When an actor enters a state of immersion during daydreaming, he or she acts intuitively with full attention and awareness to daydreaming, as well as full awareness of self and the environment. They become completely immersed in the awareness of the experience; They have experiential awareness.
But we should not make the mistake of thinking that method acting involves immersing the actors so deeply that they are no longer themselves. They must maintain meta-awareness in others to avoid mental health problems such as dissociation and worse.
How can you improve your intuition?
If intuition is an embodied cognitive state rather than a temporary phenomenon that can occur by chance, does this mean that it can be developed?
Achieving intuition is considered one of the aims of Konstantin Stanislavski’s approach to acting training (the foundation of mainstream acting in the West). But even in this case, intuition is treated as something passed down from the muses, like a burst of creativity or insight.
But our research has found that intuition can be trained. To do this, we need to develop basic abilities: combining awareness of our inner and outer world with immersion.
As part of our research, we invited acting students to intuition training developed by co-researcher Micia de Wet. This consisted of structured exercises focusing on imagery and using guided meditations to train the actor’s attention and sensory awareness. The training also included exercises that encouraged immersion in story worlds through play and creative exploration. We have seen that this training strengthens the players’ intuition. Our survey of 310 actors also showed that the more they engaged in mindfulness meditation, the greater their acting intuition.
Although this training is specific to acting, we suggest 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 general basic cognitive abilities such as awareness and focus, bringing awareness to the body and the environment.
Rather than being an esoteric phenomenon or a temporary performance peak, intuition is an important cognitive and emotional state that everyone can use constantly to interact with the world around them and, furthermore, is supported by abilities that can be developed.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Valerie van Mulukom does not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic duties.