I’ve been amazed at this phenomenon. I’m not entirely sure if it is scientifically sound or not. Two examples I can recall:
When I was 12 I broke my arm. Rather nasty break too. My sister had called my mother and she (my mom) knew something bad had happen when her work had paged her.
A female coworker of mine had a drunkard for a husband. One night she heard police sirens speeding past her house. She knew at once that they were chasing her husband. Without even seeing them. It turns out it was. He sped past their house and was ultimately stopped several blocks away.
Did the works pager say who was calling. If I got a page at work from a close family member I would deffinately susspect something was very wrong, and I’m a bloke.
I’m not sure if the other isn’t just expecting the worse. If she heard a crash outside did she susspect it was her husband, and then just forget about it when she sees him later and realizes the crash wasn’t?
I reckon Bippy explained your first example.
In the second you have to consider a well-known phenomenon (another Doper will be along shortly to name it - my intuition tells me so!):
if you think ‘I expect those sirens are chasing my husband’ and they actually are, you remember it
if you think ‘I expect those sirens are chasing my husband’ and they aren’t, you dismiss it.
I think the examples given are not good ones. If there is a women’s intuition, I suspect it has to do with reading people better than a lot of men. You can guess some thing from sensing familiar people’s emotional states.
One theory about women’s intuition stems from women having a larger corpus callosum, which connects the two halves of the brain. The idea is that better communication between the two halves would allow women to fit the pieces of the puzzle together more quickly.
Dunno if it’s a GOOD theory, but it’s what I heard.
1 - It’s also learning to watch what the people and children around them are doing. Mothers especially get really used to unconsciously tracking others. When I was a re-entry student, I had a class that required group reports. Once, our group kept getting booted out of a series of rooms that we were trying to meet in. At the end of the meeting, one of us was missing a jacket. He moaned about having to retrace through all those rooms. I told him to check by the main stairs first. He thought it was magic. I let him.
What has actually happened was that he had seen a bunch of friends near the stairs and gone to say hi, while we were walking between rooms. It just felt like he would be more likely to forget the jacket while distracted than when we were deliberately changing rooms.
2 - Women may be better at reading tone of voice and body language - giving them intuition on people’s intentions.
3 - Women, especially pregnant ones, have a better sense of smell. This might give subliminal clues to other people’s emotions.
And as to the examples given - mothers catastrophize really well. It’s our job. We’re bound to be right some time.
Did I ever tell you about the time it got quiet - the four year old had taken the screen off of his bedroom window (practice for fire safety week at school) and the two year old had taken off all of his clothes and crawled out to go for a walk. We were out calling for him when we met a new neighbor. He had apparently gone down two blocks and only come back one and had been trying to crawl back in the window of the wrong house.
They took having a strange naked two year old trying to break into their house really well. It really doesn’t take too many of these little events to pump up the catastropy muscles.
Is there even any evidence that women (or others) have this alleged ability?
We could be trying to explain how something works, when that something doesn’t even exist.
A few months ago, my daughter was invited to sleepover at her friends house. She wanted to go and the house isn’t too far away. The same evening, my son wanted to stay late at a friends house to watch horror movies, we let him. The my husband and I decided to go to a local bar to see a band that we know.
At about 10:00, I told my husband we should go home. He asked why and I just told him that we needed to go home.
When we got home, everything was fine. I went to pick up my son and he was bummed about coming home.
About ten minutes after we walked though the door,my daughter came home. Her friend’s father took her home and told us that she was scared and wanted to come home.
I don’t know why I knew that we needed to be here.
Man, I really tried to find the article, but I remember reading a news article that stated that women undergo a mental change once they are pregnant and have babies. There was study done where women could distinguish the sound of their childern’s voices from other infants much, much better than men. That’s proof of something, I suppose.