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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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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