Define 'Hunch'

[TeeDee]

'Hunch' , 'Gut feeling' , 'Instinct'

A Bit of a strange question i will agree , but I need to know what YOUR Interpretation is of that feeling sometimes described as 'hunch'??

Don't reach for the dictionary , I'm more interested in your own idea/experience is of the feeling,sense, idea of 'hunch'

What do YOU think it is?

Do YOU always trust it?

When you do trust and go with it how many times does it turn out to be wrong?

This is related to Bushcraft but i need some examples and ideas of what 'Hunch' is.





Many thanks in advance.

[Wayland]

I would say that it was a sense of something that is not rooted in clear evidence.

[Rob]

a feeling that you know something without being able to scientifically prove it - or you havent proved it yet.

Policeman's hunch - I know this guy did it.

Good for tracking too - some people have other names for it - but working on a hunch and then confirming the hunch was correct by finding sign.

In the case of tracking - I go with it moer often than not and more often than not it is correct.

[Man of Tanith]

Personally a hunch is something that whilst i dont have any specific proof of something i am convinced the idea is right although i refer to it as gut instinct
whilst i do not always trust it(usually when relating to edibilty of plants) i have found that most times my hunch is correct.
outside of bushcraft settings my gut instinct is normally correct enough for me to take it into consideration whilst making decisions
Sam

[Jericho]

HUNCH - Knowing you're right without the evidence to back it up.

[Neumo]

For me a hunch is something that comes into to play when you need to make a decision, so it's usually a short term thing. It is when something you are deciding about just feels instinctivly right when the is nothing otherwise particulary obvious or convincing to make you decide on that option. It's always nice when you later get proved right & it is something I will use more often than not unless there is a good rational reason for making another choice.

Some people could argue that it was just luck that responsable for a good outcome, not instinct, but the same could be said for an experienced decision as well. It depends on your outlook on life i suppose.

[Tadpole]

70,000 years of survival instinct, that in the last 200 years we’ve been trained to ignore.

[Neumo]

70,000 years of survival instinct, that in the last 200 years we’ve been trained to ignore.

There is a lot of truth in that....

[drewdunnrespect]

a hunch an educaated guess that could be correct but more often than not is wrong

[TeeDee]

Ok Great start. So if you had to choose other words to define what hunch meant to you , how would you?

Do you go with hunchs at work? When driving? When Meeting people?

< Sort of fishing here , but it is all related ( I think ) >

[Toddy]

I think of it as the way to describe the ephemeral sense evidences.
It's not that there's no evidence. It's that it's in tiny clues scattered in everything from the way things look, smell, feel, to the way it triggers our primitive brain warning systems and includes our past experience.

It does apply to people to. We might not be fully aware of it, but tiny eye movements, a tone in a voice, body language.......it's all relevant to how we view people.

You've got us all intrigued now

cheers,
Toddy

[calibanzwei]

I think that linked in with 'hunches' are 'blink' decisions - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, a book I found and read once...

Gladwell’s major claim is that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as a decision made cautiously and deliberately. What we are actually doing is what Gladwell calls ‘thin-slicing’. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us looking for a pattern, throwing out the irrelevant information and zeroing in on what really matters. Our unconscious mind is so good at this that it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking.

[MrEd]

a hunch,

well at work i go on the 'gut feeling' type of sense, i suppose thats the same as a hunch but for me its just that it doesnt feel right, or that i can guess whats going to happen next.

this is based on past experiences, and also subtle signs about how someone is with me and subtle changes to their vital signs, mood, demenour - i trust my gut instincts a lot

[Kerne]

I think of it as the way to describe the ephemeral sense evidences.
It's not that there's no evidence. It's that it's in tiny clues scattered in everything from the way things look, smell, feel, to the way it triggers our primitive brain warning systems and includes our past experience.

It does apply to people to. We might not be fully aware of it, but tiny eye movements, a tone in a voice, body language.......it's all relevant to how we view people.

You've got us all intrigued now

cheers,
Toddy

I'd go along with this. I have often had a "hunch" that something was wrong when out in the wilds and, as a result, have stopped and assessed what is going on. Often this is a navigation thing - I have gone off track and something is telling me that I have. When I stop and look I find evidence that this is, in fact, the case but I believe we take masses of information in all the time and just don't process it consciously. The hunch is just a bit of this information (or a collection of bits of this information) that becomes insistent enough to break through to cause us to stop and apply a bit of conscious reasoning.

[John Fenna]

For my money a "Hunch" is a subconcious and rapid assessment of that information that the "rational mind" has not recognised as valuable input to the decission making process.
You may not be able to reason why you have a "hunch" but deep down you know it is right!



Even when it is wrong!


I tend to live my life along the lines of - "If it "feels" right - do it. If it don't - don't!"

I aint dead yet and I have had a very interesting life so far!

[TeeDee]

So.. would/could it be a 'Inner feeling of/or decision based on subconscious sensing??'

Is it considered as an equal rationale process for reaching a decision as scientific method?

When you choose lottery numbers do you go by 'feel' or do you choose by the data of numbers most picked over the last 'x' years?

[British Red]

I don't see how the absense of evidence for the basis for a decision can be considered equally rational or indeed as having followed a process. Indeed in order for something to be a hunch, it implies (or at least I infer) that no process has been followed and there is an absense of a rational basis for the belief.

Now, whether is is an equally effective method (as opposed to rational) is a different question (see monkey stock brokers)

Basing lottery number choices on history, based on the assumption of a random occurence, would be no more rational than a random choice, nor would it be a useful process (although as a process it is valid - it simply doesn't help to arrive at a statistically improved outcome). Dice do not have a memory.

Red

[locum76]

Does anyone remember having a hunch, acting on it and it turning out to be blatantly wrong?

[woodspirits]

your answers will be as diverse as your audience, why do you ask?

[Silverhill]

Ready for some simplified two-word alliteration???
...........Intrinsic Intuition.

[Biker]

a hunch an educaated guess that could be correct but more often than not is wrong

I'd call it an undeucated guess. Some might call it instinct, others call it faith. Often it's just having the confidence to follow those series of signs that you can't put a finger on but know they're what led you to that moment.

I have hunches now and then, as does everyone but it's something I more than often follow trusting my feelings on the matter. The more you do it the more you find yourself proved right. SWMBO on the other hand needs justification and it in tripicate before she'd trust anything like instinct. Which is why she's constantly amazed when my shortcuts driving through a city I've never been in (without GPS) turn out to work.

Interesting replies.

[locum76]

your answers will be as diverse as your audience, why do you ask?

My hunches tend to keep me out of trouble and don't end badly. So to me they seem to work out. I wondered if it was the same for other folk?

For me a hunch is more than a guess, It's part of natural wariness. I think I believe a hunch to be part of an evolved risk aversion just as Tadpole was alluding to.

[TeeDee]

I'd call it an undeucated guess. Some might call it instinct, others call it faith. Often it's just having the confidence to follow those series of signs that you can't put a finger on but know they're what led you to that moment.

.

Hunch - Gut Feeling - Instinct - Faith

Are they all the same?

[Biker]

Hunch - Gut Feeling - Instinct - Faith

Are they all the same?

Uh not quite. Putting it into words isn't easy since we're talking about slippery things like feelings and subtle emotions.

I'd put hunch and gut feeling together. Instinct as something else, but on the same side of the coin. Faith is another fish entirely, that comes along in the catagory of hope.
Like you hope that there's water on the other side of that sand dune while walking through the desert after your plane went down. You have faith that there will be an oasis right there. What you see at the crest will be a mystery until you get there, it just comes down to your positive atitude or not (and faith that your God will save your sorry ar$e.)

On the flip side to that. Instinct would be sending you off in another direction. Maybe it's that primitive man rising to the occaison, it's this survival instinct that's been bandied about, or maybe it's those little telltale signs that say water's thataway. It comes down to whether you're confident enough to listen to it and act upon it, or go with the rest of the survivors over that dune crest.

I'm convinced that self confidence coupled with knowledge helps hunches along the right path. But that slippery thing called luck still plays a bit part in it too.

For example: Everytime I drive into a carpark I know, without doubt, that I wll find a parking space. Alison has sat beisde me and watched a car back out of a space just as I'm arriving and is gob-smacked at my luck, and comments everytime with "You jammy sod!". Maybe it the gut instinct that leads me to that particular carpark on that day and not another one, who knows?

I hope I haven't just jinxed myself now.

This voodoo stuff is spooky once you try and nail it down into a quantifiable setting.

Does jinxing yourself exist or is it just self-confidence becoming undermined?

[bushwacker bob]

OK, so I was the only person who thought a 'hunch' was a spinal deformity caused by too much bell ringing at Notre dam.

[durulz]

The thing on Quasimodo's back?

[Biker]

Wait a sec' wasn't it the partner of Starksy?

[British Red]

The thing on Quasimodo's back?

Don't know his name, but his face rings a bell

[Bushwhacker]

An abnormal convex curvature of the upper spine.

[Nat]

70,000 years of survival instinct, that in the last 200 years we’ve been trained to ignore.

Couldn't of put it better myself.
It's the prickling at the back of the neck, the hackles reacting to something. Never ignored it, been wrong a few times, but not enough not to listen to it when it happens.
Kept me alive for a long time.
Preternatural or supernatural, either one suffices along with gut instinct. No scientific explanation could cover it.