Intuition

When I was younger, I wasn’t too big a fan of “intuition”. I wanted to fully understand the reasons why I believed what I believed. I wasn’t really comfortable with a partial understanding + a “gut feeling”.

This was in high school. Early on in college, I started to change. I think the tipping point was when I read this neuroscience book called How We Decide. It’s basically about how emotions and logic work together to drive the decisions we arrive at. The main takeaway I got from the book is that intuitions and emotions are the result of unconscious analysis. They’re not random.

There’s a bunch of little people inside your head who think about things for you, and spit out a feeling that you feel. You don’t have time to think about everything, so you often rely on them to do it for you, or at least to get you started. These people work hard, they work behind the scenes, and there’s a lot of them. You aren’t aware of them, but they’re there. They aren’t perfect, but the point is that the feelings that they spit out for you are based off of your experiences, rather than being random. This means that there’s an element of reliability in these feelings.

Consider that an expert chess player could just look at a board and “get a feeling” about what the right move is. He isn’t consciously going through all the possibilities in his head, he just has this “gut instinct” about what to do. That’s why he could play 20 different games at once… and win!

We can’t all just look at a chess board and know exactly what to do, but there are various things that all humans seem to be pretty good at. For example, consider how quickly and effectively we could infer the emotional state of other people. After a split second of looking at or listening to someone, we pick up on the subtleties of their voice or their body language, and we could then identify their emotional state quite accurately. If you think about it, this is just as amazing as the chess player! Both involve processing a lot of information, very quickly, very effectively, and doing so unconsciously.

Obviously, our intuitions aren’t always correct. My point is just that they’re correct often enough that they shouldn’t be ignored. They should be used along with more deliberate and conscious analysis to come to a good conclusion. Doing so is an art that takes a little bit of practice, but is very effective.