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 intuition, such as the characterization of it as “a blink of the eye,” which I first published in 1997. My book Intuition: A Bridge Between Science and Spirituality is just about finished, and I have begun work on another about feminism and intuition.

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: The Bridge between Science and Spirituality.  During the last year, I have started a personal weblog titled “Intuition In-depth: Bridging Science and Spirituality.”  Working with a Brandeis undergraduate, I have 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, L.D., and C. Liebow, and S.S. Rothman.  “The Circulation of Mammalian Digestive Enzymes.”  Physiological Reviews 82 (2002): 1-18.

Isenman, L.D.  “Towards an Understanding of Intuition and its Role in Scientific Endeavor.”  Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 40.3 (1997): 395-403.

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”