(Note: I use AI to help me translate my stories from Japanese to English.)
I watched a scientific TV program about the sixth sense. The program reported the results of some experiments. In one experiment, there were two people: one sat while the other stood behind them. The person sitting could correctly guess whether or not they were being stared at more than 50% of the time.
I enjoyed watching this program and thought it was fun to imagine that we humans might have a hidden power like a sixth sense or intuition.
Speaking of the sixth sense, I think of a Japanese man named Shoichi Sakurai. He is a legendary mahjong player who went undefeated for 20 years. Although he is no longer a professional player, he still has a strong sixth sense, or intuition. He can tell what others did the day before. He can even predict things, such as when someone is about to smoke a cigarette.
He says that it is important to feel rather than to think. He writes that to sharpen your intuition, it is good to practice making predictions. For example, when you take an elevator, you can try predicting who will be inside. However, he writes, few people actually do this. He also writes that nature is his teacher, and that he learns many things from it.
Intuition also plays an important role when making scientific discoveries. When trying to find laws behind complex phenomena, intuition is essential. There is a Japanese scientist named Kenichi Fukui, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981. In one of his books, he wrote something like this:
“To develop intuition, it’s important to become familiar with nature from an early age. Playing in nature helps nurture intuition. The reason I was able to win the Nobel Prize is that I had developed my intuition by playing in nature as a child.”
From the examples of Shoichi Sakurai and Kenichi Fukui, it seems that two key ways to cultivate intuition are training yourself to make predictions and spending time in nature.