Six years ago, Malcolm Gladwell released a book entitled Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In his usual style, Gladwell weaves stories in-between descriptions of scientific research the support his hypothesis that our intuition can be surprisingly accurate and right.
One year ago, authors Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education not only had some choice words for Gladwell’s cherry-picking of the research, but also showed how intuition probably only works best in certain situations, where there is no clear science or logical decision-making process to arrive at the “right” answer. For instance, when choosing which ice cream is “best.”
Reasoned analysis, however, works best in virtually every other situation. Which, as it turns out, is most situations where big life decisions come into play.
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I’d like to hear more about what place intuition has in the world and in our psyches. I find myself distrusting & discounting my intuition entirely because I have suffered from depression for so long that I learned to ignore _all_ my self-talk, including intuition. But now that I’m (slowly) recovering, I find I’m missing a vital guidance.
So our intuition can lead us astray. Maybe intuition is not a guiding light to begin with, but rather a subconscious tool we use to embrace things in the world that we desire to identify with. I leave this page wondering if we are the navigators or inheritors of our intuitions.
- Chris
http://facebook.com/chrissnewton