It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticise is good, to know how to create is better.
- Henri Poincaré
Do you have a voice in your head, do you hear your thoughts? Do you have conscience of concepts going around in your mind? Do you hear actual words or see them written? Do you formulate full sentences when you think something out?
The existence of an inner voice seems debated among consciousness researchers, and in the last decade, the claim of its omnipresence in the human brain has clearly been moderated. The brain works in mysterious way and if all human brains fill out the same functions using similar (if not identical) pathways, it appears that having mental representation of your thoughts, either visual or abstractly, is subject to individual differences. Through the years, 3 conscious thought processes have been identified: inner speech, when you literally have a conversation in your head helping you figuring something out or narrating your life like a voice-over; mental images, when thoughts form as pictures or mental visualisation of objects or concepts; and abstract thinking, when you can tell the thought process is happening but it is all very abstract, with no “tangible” words or images, but maybe feelings and concepts. That is not to say that people that have no idea what I am currently talking about do not think, but that they do not seem have mental representation of their thoughts in any way; thoughts are there but they do not visualise them in their head.
It is not uncommon either to experience a mix-representation, when people can either be having a chat with themselves and have visual images. Personally, I am able to have polyphonic internal conversations. It’s like there is one voice for “the real me”, the one that will actually say something, the one that lives in the “real” world, and then there is one voice for each aspect of my personality: the more social one, the lazy one, the classy one, the smart one, and all the other ones. Which also means that yes, I do argue with myself quite a lot because it can be hard reaching an agreement with so many voices. But that also means that when I read a book, the whole universe contained in the book comes alive and each of the character have their own voices (all the inside MEs like reading and if they do easily agree on something, it’s role playing when reading). What it also means, is that sometimes I’m not sure which of the voices to listen to when I listen to my “intuition”.
Your intuition is that immediate and quasi-instantaneous knowledge/acknowledgement that does not require reasoning or reflexion. It is the voice in your head telling you what to do on the spur of the moment, it’s the gut feelings you have when you met someone, the first impression they leave you with. Tricky things they are, first impressions… Did you know that within 3 seconds of seeing someone walk, you get a sense of whether you like this person or not? 3 seconds. You’ve never talked with them, you might never will, but you already have an opinion of them: your intuition has spoken. The first impression you get of someone can make the difference between talking to them or ignoring them all night. We all have heard the sayings about trusting your guts, or that your intuition knows best and to always rely on it. What the sayings don’t tell us is that your intuition can be biased, and it is based on a given set of competences in relation to a specific domain.
The difference between your intuition and a more conscious or thorough reflexion is that your intuition uses previous experiences and unconscious and various mental shortcuts to reach a decision very quickly. On the other hand, the conscious reflexion is slow and based on analytical analysis of a given situation to methodologically evaluate different options and find the best solution. The intuition is based on perceptions and instincts; conscious reflexion is based on a more critical and methodological approach. As a result, the intuition can be easily affected by many environmental and personal factors. Your previous experiences will feed your intuitive thoughts and determine how you will react to a given situation. Moreover, the way a problem is phrased, or a situation presented will also affect your intuitive response. It’s called the setting bias: how a situation is presented will impact your final choice. Generally, your intuitive response pushes you to choose what seems to be the “safest” choice but if the safest option is presented in a negative manner (focussing on risks and loses instead of gains), our intuition tends to choose more risky options presented in a more positive way. For example, taking the current situation with the corona virus Covid-19, would you rather choose a program that will save 200 people out of 600 or a program where 400 people will die? If the outcome is the exact same, you might be tempted to prefer the first formulation focussing on life save and not the one highlighting number of deaths. Now imagine that there is a second program where there is a chance out of 3 that everybody survives. This is a worst option than the first one, which has a guaranteed survival of 200 people. However, if you had to choose between a program where 400 people die or a program that has a chance out of 3 to save everyone, which one would you take? You should take the first one, but your guts might tell you to select the second one, presented in a more positive way. That’s why when facing a problem, we should take a step back, hold our intuition and use our conscious thoughts to figure out whether it is indeed the best choice we are about to make.
However, we don’t always have the time to consciously think through every decision we take and that might be too much for our brain anyway. Because the intuition uses mental shortcuts, it has a very low energetic costs for our brain, whereas the conscious thoughts require a lot of brain power and cognitive functions. That’s why the more tired you are, the worst you get at making conscious decision and the more you rely in your intuition. Which is why we need to be aware of the different factors that can impact our intuition to make sure that in an emergency sort of situation, our intuition guides us towards the best option. Your culture, your social background, or even your current emotional state can impact how you react in the heat of the action. Those are factors you can’t really control: you don’t choose where you’re born or the culture you’ve been raised in. What you can do is be aware of that and avoid integrating stereotypes to your intuitive decision process. Stereotypes are representations of a specific group of people that is usually an amplification of a characteristic or personality traits; for instances, thinking that everyone that grew up in the North of England or France comes from a mining family. Stereotypes skew the way you look at someone and affect the expectations you have of them. Problem is – those tend to become reality: if you keep telling girls that they’re not as good in maths as boys, they will put less effort in studying maths (because what’s the point after all if they are not going to be good anyway?), which will lead in turn to girls having lower scores than boys, feeding back into the stereotypes. If you don’t give someone a chance to prove themselves, it is easy to think that they just can’t make it.
The last important thing to know about your intuition is that it is linked to your expertise: the more you know about something, the better your intuition in this domain is. When you learn about something, spend time reading about it, and slowly developing an expertise, your brain detects patterns used during conscious thoughts that will slowly become part of the mental shortcuts your intuition uses unconsciously. A medical doctor will be able to develop a very good intuition in the medical field, better than anyone that has not studied anatomy and medicine, but that’s not going to make them a good chess player. You can’t transfer your intuition from one domain to another. No possible shortcuts there: to develop your intuition in something, you need experience and expertise. We are not born with intuition; we develop it based on our life experience. You can create bridges between different domains and ways of thinking to develop a more creative and general intuition but before you can think outside the box, you need to know what the box is...
Next time you have a gut feeling and your inner voice tells you to do something, take a minute to consider whether you should actually do as you’re told or if you need to think it through.
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