![]() Analytic thinking, on the other hand, is slow, logical, conscious and deliberate. Intuitive thinking is described as automatic, fast, and subconscious. In the psychological literature, intuition is often explained as one of two general modes of thinking, along with analytic reasoning. This means that, as with creativity, your intuition can actually improve with experience. ![]() This makes your intuitions more reliable. When you have a lot of experience in a certain area, the brain has more information to match the current experience against. In reality, the car in the far distance in front of you made a similar small swerve (since they are locals and know the road), and you picked up on this without consciously registering it. You are glad you relied on your gut feeling even if you don’t know where it came from. As you continue driving, you notice that you have only just missed a massive pothole that could have significantly damaged your car. Intuitions occur when your brain has made a significant match or mismatch (between the cognitive model and current experience), but this has not yet reached your conscious awareness.įor example, you may be driving on a country road in the dark listening to some music, when suddenly you have an intuition to drive more to one side of the lane. This matching between prior models (based on past experience) and current experience happens automatically and subconsciously. When a mismatch occurs (something that wasn’t predicted), your brain updates its cognitive models. This ensures that the brain is always as prepared to deal with the current situation as optimally as possible. This is described in what scientists call the “predictive processing framework”. Research suggests that the brain is a large predictive machine, constantly comparing incoming sensory information and current experiences against stored knowledge and memories of previous experiences, and predicting what will come next. Intuition or gut feelings are also the result of a lot of processing that happens in the brain. They are appraisals of what you have just experienced or thought of – in this sense, they are also a form of information processing. Emotions are actually not dumb responses that always need to be ignored or even corrected by rational faculties. However, this attitude is based on a myth of cognitive progress. As a result, they view emotions and intuition as fallible, even whimsical, tools. Gradually, many have come to think that humans have progressed from relying on primitive, magical and religious thinking to analytic and scientific thinking. Indeed, relying on your intuition generally has a bad reputation, especially in the Western part of the world where analytic thinking has been steadily promoted over the past decades. This would be met with disbelief – surely important decisions have to be thought over carefully, deliberately and rationally? Imagine the director of a big company announcing an important decision and justifying it with it being based on a gut feeling.
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