Lois Isenman

Areas of Expertise

Cognitive Science

Email: lisenman@brandeis.edu

Current Project

My area of study is intuition. I resonate scientific understanding of this compelling yet mysterious mental capacity with a number of intuitions I have had about it, such as its characterization as “a blink of the eye” (Isenman, 1997). I also examine the variety of different roles intuition can play in scientific endeavor.
 

Biography

After many years working as a biologist I realized that I approached my work differently from most of my colleagues. Eventually I recognized this was because I have a cognitive style that is unusually weighted towards intuition. As a Science Scholar at the former Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, I began trying to understand what intuition actually means and how it works.  Quite to my surprise, I had a number of complex and revealing intuitions about intuition.  Over the next number of years I explored the biological and cognitive mechanisms that likely underlie this mysterious mental capacity. The scientific and intuitive material have bootstrapped on each other to a surprising degree.  The book I have written provides, among other things, a bridge between these two seemingly very different ways of knowing. It is titled Understanding Intuition: A Sense of the Whole. I maintain a personal weblog titled “Intuition In-depth: Bridging Science and Spirituality.”  Working with a Brandeis undergraduate, I have also set up another weblog titled “The Bridge: A Science and Spirituality Resource.”   

Education

Ph.D., University of California San Francisco

M.Ed., Tufts University 

B.A., Brandeis University

Representative Publications

Isenman, Lois. “Trusting Your Gut, among other things: Digestive Enzyme Secretion, Intuition, and the History of Science (Part I and Part II).” Foundations of Science, 14, (2009). [DOI 10.1007/s10699-009-9164-0] [DOI.10.1007/s10699-009-9163-1]
  
Isenman, Lois D., and C. Liebow, and S.S. Rothman. “The Circulation of Mammalian Digestive Enzymes.”  Physiological Reviews 82 (2002): 1-18.

Links

Intuition In-depth: Bridging Science and Spirituality

The Bridge: A Science and Spirituality Resource

Download "Towards an Understanding of Intuition and its Role in Scientific Endeavor”