Intuition Can Be Learned By Everyone

Currently I'm indulging myself -- as I'm spoiling my mind -- by reading various books in parallel. Oh boy, how exciting this is! The books are called: Freakonomics, Super Brain, You Can Heal Your Life, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Enlightened Brain, and Look Who′s Back.

I'm reading 10-20 pages daily in each book, i.e. I'm more or less enjoying all of them daily. Recommendation: Try reading multiple and different books in parallel; you′ll also love it! In my blog article today, I'd like to share with you some thoughts and paragraphs of one of them: Thinking Fast and Slow, by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman.

In his superb book, Kahneman stresses the notion that our minds contain two interactive modes of thinking: System 1 operates quickly and is unconscious, intuitive thought (automatic pilot), while slower System 2 is conscious, rational thinking (effortful system). I′d like to quote the following incredible insightful ideas and findings about intuition:

“The psychologist Gary Klein tells the story of a team of firefighters that entered a house in which the kitchen was on fire. Soon after they started hosing down the kitchen, the commander heard himself shout, 'Let′s get out of here!' without realizing why. The floor collapsed almost immediately after the firefighters escaped.

"Only after the fact did the commander realize that the fire had been unusually quiet and that his ears had been unusually hot. Together, these impressions prompted what he called a 'sixth sense of danger.' He had no idea what was wrong, but he knew something was wrong. It turned out that the heart of the fire had not been in the kitchen but in the basement beneath where the men had stood.

"We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces 'White mates in three' without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times a days. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician – only more common.

"The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after a thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon′s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: "The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition."

What do you think? How would you define intuition?

Kind regards,

Andreas von der Heydt

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Andreas von der Heydt is the Country Manager of Amazon BuyVIP in Germany. Before that he hold senior management positions at L'Oréal. He′s a leadership expert, executive coach and NLP master. He also founded Consumer Goods Club. Andreas worked and lived in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

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