Thoughts on Intuition

One of the ideas I've thought about a lot of late is the notion of intuition. What is it exactly? What role does it play in our lives? Is it a good thing or not?

The source of my interest in intuition is not just one book or personal experience, but several. It is brought about by a variety of subjects, including physics and mathematics, as well as history and current events. It is a theme that pops up again and again in the books I read, so I figure it is worth exploring.

According to dictionary.com, intuition is the "direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process." Also, it is "a keen and quick insight." The "independent of any reasoning process" part is what catches my attention, as this separates the idea of intuition from science.

Of course, intuition does serve a purpose in our day-to-day life. Without it, we would be forced to consider various possibilities we face every day without referring to past experience. For example, if I fail to set my alarm, my intuition may tell me that I'll wake up late and not get to work on time. I don't need to consider every single day whether I should set the alarm. But this is not such an important example of intuition. It is when we make decisions based on probability -- which can also be called incomplete knowledge -- that intuition tends to muddy things up.

In the book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, physicist Leonard Mlodinow describes how intuition comes from experience, and the perceived causal connection between events/actions. He notes the research done by scientist Daniel Kahneman, who found that people often make false connections based on intuition. The example was a group of Israeli air force flight instructors who argued that they could change the behaviour of their pilots by yelling at them after they messed up. In the same vein, these instructors usually found that praising the pilots for doing a good job resulted in poorer performance the next flight. Therefore, they logically deduced that praise was a waste of time, while punishment brought about the desired effect.

Kahneman eventually realized that what was happening was a phenomenon called 'regression to the mean' (p.8). Extreme performances (either good or bad) are beyond the norm, and they tend to return to a more average performance in subsequent trials. In other words, there was no cause/effect relationship, but the instructors' intuition told them otherwise. Throughout the 1960's, research found that people's intuition about randomness failed them.

Mlodinow later discussed another phenomenon that tends to support a false trust in intuition, the 'confirmation bias' (p.189). "When we are in the grasp of an illusion... instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct." He also quotes Francis Bacon: "The human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirm it, and though contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken" (p.189). So, humans have the unmatched ability to ignore facts when they disagree with intuition.
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Richard Feynman was possibly the smartest man of the twentieth century. I have only begun to learn about his impact on science through reading the book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, and through viewing a number of interviews with him on YouTube.



One of his points that really struck me in the above video is how he desired to speak to knowledgeable men, those men who had explored their subject as deeply as possible to the point where they have nothing left but more questions (for nature holds many mysteries). This statement implied that most people don't have complete knowledge upon which to base their conclusions. We think we "know" something when, in fact, we are guessing or assuming the truth of the matter. We are greatly impacted culturally by superstition or so-called common sense. And this is, in part, why intuition tends to confuse us rather than enlighten.

In my own world, I sometimes wonder about history (in the sense of the official story that is taught in schools and taken for granted within a culture at large). How certain should we be about what we think we know? My intuition tells me that what we learn in Canadian history classrooms is what actually happened. I am led to believe that Canadians have fought valiantly in wartime. And yet, I remember talking to an old Korean man one night many years ago in Seoul who had been in the Korean War. He told me that the Canadian soldiers he saw behaved like cowards. This assault on my common knowledge of the Canadian soldier was a major affront to my pride. But what if it were true? Do we tend to get duped by what our cultural myths would have us believe? I believe it is foolish to think otherwise. It is intuitive to believe that which we are constantly told unless we learn to doubt. Question authority, goes the old saying.

Should intuition be ignored? For daily routine, I doubt it matters if we follow intuition. But in matters where people tend to have opposing points of view or a different cultural background, intuition is probably the greatest barrier to seeing the truth. Once we recognize this, we can learn to control our impulse to accept that which we assume.