People are often able to make correct decisions based on kind of a “gut feeling” but will arrive at a different, incorrect conclusion when trying to make that gut feeling conscious. How does that work? Why do I sometimes hear the response of a person I know well in my head before they actually say it, but when I consciously try to guess what they’re gonna say, I almost always get it wrong? Looking for a psychological explanation here, I know there are lots of spiritual ones but I’m agnostic so I’d probably end up just being even more confused by those.
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So, your brain is great at finding patterns. It’s literally the thing it does best. It’s a human being’s superpower.
Any time your brain gets a bit of information about the outside world, it tries to categorise it. That’s why you can recognise a chair as being a chair even though you’ve never seen this particular type of chair before. Your brain looks at it, cross-references it with everything you’ve ever seen before, and goes, “Aha! That looks like the things in my ‘chair’ file! It must be a chair!” And your brain does this *so fast* that there is no lag. You just *know* what you’re looking at.
This served us really well when we were trying to survive on the savannah in the prehistoric era. When we heard a specific rustle, our brains would *instantly* bring up that time we heard that exact same rustle and a lion jumped out and we nearly died. So this time, we know there is a lion!
In the modern world, there are very few lions. But our brains still use this phenomenal power. You can put together a series of circumstances and realise what is about to happen based on your own experience. This is called *intuition*.
Ok so intuition is complex. Its pretty simple on the face of it but the nitty gritty gets complicated.
Short version: your brain is picking up data from your environment and running that data through your experience. Anything that ‘pings’ as an answer one way or another triggers some sort of response. Emotion works pretty well.
And its always better (evolutionarily) to have a false positive than a false negative.The former is embarrassing, the second kills you.
An example of this is what’s called the “Cheater Detection Module” (cheater as in one who does not cooperate). Its a theorized neural structure [or diffusion of structures-depends on who you ask] that’s sole function is to alert you to somebody that might be a cheater. (As a cooperative social species this is how we stay alive).
So when you get introduced to somebody this module takes in a bunch of information like body language, verbal cues, face shape, whatever, and it compares this information to what it knows to be cheating behavior.
And if it ‘pings’ you are presented with an extremely visceral emotional response. That “oh i dunno about this person” response. Seems like a perfectly fine person but your gut is saying something is weird. That’s your brain telling you “Danger! May attempt to harm you in some fashion! Danger!”
Trust those responses. You get them for a reason.
More in line with your question, things are similar but more complicated. Because you’re not dealing with behavior, which as social creatures we tend to just be better at, you are dealing with memory. Memory is fickle at best, it is designed to be adaptive to make you learn and keep you alive. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to work. And it works by being fast. Left or right? Lion or bush? Enemy or friendly? Your brain is designed to analyze a situation and throw up an answer before you consciously think about it because that is faster.
Consciousness is really really really slow compared to all the things your brain does. Trust your ‘gut’ it tends to know what its doing.
I think it is your mind guiding you by using micro amounts of information that you observe from your environment but aren’t really aware of. Like stuff your brain puts at the back of the priority list of what to pay attention to, but tiny bits of data about your situation leak through anyways and I think it might instinctively guide your actions as a survival mechanism and you wouldn’t be able to process why. Thus, you would just have a feeling or urge that one choice is better than another or that something is going to happen – which is what I have always took intuition to mean. But that is just what I think is most likely. Im not a psychologist, I am a philosopher, but we ask many of the same questions. I’ve wondered about this a bit myself and these are only ideas.
We can observe learned skills transforming into something like “intuition”, in the sense that after we have practiced them enough, they fade from conscious awareness and operate unconsciously.
I typed that first sentence automatically, without thinking about which keys were being hit at a time, then to write this sentence, I paid attention to my fingers.
I observed that when I did that, my typing slowed down as I made it easier for my brain to keep track of what my fingers were doing, which was almost too fast for me to follow.
You can try the same experiment, if you like, and it should be obvious that the more detailed attention you pay, the more you alter how you do the task, it appears in many cases to be more complicated than it’s worth to pay attention rather than simply thinking about what you want to type and letting your fingers do their job.
A natural inference to draw from this is that you have many extremely practiced skills operating at once, but being such basic ones, you have no memory of the process of having learned them.
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