Intuition - is the intuitive mind a gift or trainable like the rational mind?

The more I think about our brain, how we process information, the evolutionary path that got us here, and our strong emphasis on formal learning, I think we are missing on the most beautiful and creative part of our brain - that is the intuitive mind that Einstein calls as a gift. Below I will try to jot down some thoughts about our intuition or gut feel (it is more appropriate now to involve gut as it is considered the second brain) and open the possibility that it is more than a gift and the opportunities on how we could possibly train the intuitive mind.

From an evolutionary perspective, we are trained to sparsely parse and pick relevant subset of the information thrown at us and process only a portion of it through the conscious mind. My conjecture is that the rest of the information is being processed by the subconscious and that is merged with what we learned through conscious efforts during the day. Recent study indicates that not only we consolidate our learnings while we sleep but also tag what the brain thinks are important (https://nyulangone.org/news/brain-mechanism-found-determine-which-memories-last). I think during that process of consolidation and tagging, there might be prioritization based on past knowledge and experiences or future prediction of what could be important to us.

Let us boil this down to a simple evolutionary example and go into other examples how this actually works. From an evolutionary perspective, I like the predator prey example as it could be life and death situation for both the prey and predator. But it also ties into the world of nonlinear dynamics we live in even at the macroscale and the famous Lotka-Volterra equations to understand predator and prey populations and it is widely applicable to many things around us on a daily basis. As the prey is running (individually or as a herd) away from the predator, it is processing information about terrain, what is the predator going to do next, what maneuver or motion is really possible or not, and so on. At the same time the predator is locked on the prey (if it is a herd, it is scanning for the weak and vulnerable), playing the mental game of what the prey is going to do in addition to all the things the prey is doing in terms of navigating the terrain and predicting in real-time what comes next. Both the prey and predator are also consciously and subconsciously making determination as to who is going to outlast this run. The evolutionary advantage that the prey has is that the predators have only enough energy for short bursts and they have to only survive for a short duration. This is a massive optimization in real time with tremendous amount of uncertainty coming from the terrain and also how the others are going to react (including others in the herd and the predator(s)). This gets only complicated as certain predators hunt in groups. To deal with uncertainty in decision making, both preys and predators have to leverage past information if that is a terrain the prey or predator has wandered many times before. If not they have to contextualize the current terrain in terms of what they have learned from other terrains that they have covered in the past. They also need to have learned about the behavior of the opponent and their own kind. They also need to have learned about when to stick with the pack and when to break away and to date we see strong remnants of the herd mentality that got imbibed into us during our evolution for survival but it leads to irrational things now.

As you can see, this is a very rich example even at a very high level of description. As a side note, it tells us why we are born to drive in crazy and chaotic traffic like in India. Let us break this example apart for the topic of the day on intuitive mind. We have lots of information thrown at us in real time and it is a life and death situation. Our conscious mind is processing what we think is the most important for our survival and also only giving some major instructions. Rest of the actions are dictated by the subconscious and pure muscle and brain memory without our conscious control. This processing beyond the conscious mind encompasses the intuition or gut feel. This intuition or gut feel only surfaces when we tap into it. How is the intuitive mind trained? What resources does the intuitive mind have?

Intuitive mind has access to the data that we are not consciously processing. Intuitive mind can replay the scenarios of what happened and what could have happened afterwards while we have reserve brain energy (when we slow down or when we are sleeping). Intuitive mind might be prioritizing based on the obsessions and deep thoughts that we have as those are of the biggest consequence. If we look at today's education system, we think learning is cramming the kid with many activities and keep them busy all the time with very little sleep. So we might be killing the intuitive mind and a chance to develop that intuitive mind. Even though the education enterprise has grown exponentially compared to a century back, we are not having the same extent of breakthroughs proportional to the bodies in action. Is this because we have exhausted low hanging fruits or is it just that we are not able to utilize the untapped neurons that we can get access to via our intuitive mind?

Bringing it all to real life, I wanted to give some examples. I can start with me as I have a first hand sense. I have (or used to) a very good short term memory that I thought was a handicap as that only made me cry when I was young. I could walk through at bedtime an exam that I had taken during the day and figure out what I got right and wrong. I was extremely prone to making silly mistakes and it was not fun discovering them before going to bed. When I was in 9th grade, I started playing chess during breaks at school or after school. I could replay the chess moves at bed time and realize all the mistakes and lost opportunities during the game. This used to drive me bonkers and one day I quit playing chess cold turkey as I could not take the pain anymore. This shows that our brain has the ability to replay things in our mind and some of it we can do consciously and some happen subconsciously. I got reminded of this while ready the article that just came out of Rice (https://news.rice.edu/news/2024/brain-rest-neurons-rehearse-future-experience). Continuing with my experiences, I might be thinking of a problem or presentation for days or weeks and very few for years. I wake up or suddenly the light bulb goes off and everything is clear. I do not think it is because suddenly I made all the connections but I think it is because the subconscious mind is working behind the scenes on the problems we are obsessed with and we have the ability to tap into all the background work if we train our mind. We might think that we got the solution by intuition and we are lucky to have that light bulb moment - but is might be all the training of the intuitive mind that is continuously tapping into the vast majority of the neurons in our brain when we have reserve energy. If we are busy all the time and with little sleep, we are not tapping into that vast part of the brain power.

As I read in awe about greats like Einstein, Ramanujan, Mozart, Nikola Tesla, et al., I wonder whether a genius (besides their genetic predisposition) is the one who could tap into that vast amount of neurons via the intuitive mind that we do not tap on a regular basis. If we take the example of Einstein, whether his training in music coupled with years at the patent office with possibly free time and problems of the time like electromagnetism, clocks, synchronization of clocks for trains across stations, etc. led to his ground breaking research into special relativity and space time. I wonder whether Ramanujan's obsession with Pi trained his mind to develop a capability to see beyond everyone in many fields of mathematics he has touched? I wonder whether Mozart could play out all the movements and sounds of different instruments in an orchestra in his mind just like an able prey being chased by a predator with a level of detail that others cannot do? Was Nikola Tesla tapping into his intuitive mind when he said he could visualize his inventions in his dreams and could sketch out on paper?

In closing, I will leave with some questions to ponder. Are we becoming a shallower society chasing down all the shiny things around us or what gives us instant gratification? Did we stop the deep thinking that is needed to come up with breakthroughs and chasing down what we can quantify at the moment? Have we become vulnerable to fall into the trap of the latest hype like Crypto, Gen AI, IoT, etc. going back to our herd mentality? Are we giving the right education for our kids to reach their true potential or fallen into the rat race as we do not know anything else better or become risk averse? Are we with the constant notifications of emails, social media, and other distractions, completely stopped deep work and in turn, we cannot tap into all powerful intuitive mind nor can we train that intuitive mind?

Looking forward to your comments, experiences, thoughts, and anything else to bring back the gift of intuitive mind that Einstein talked about.

p.s. I have no formal training in cognitive or brain science and all this is based on my intuition that I developed based on my obsession with the complexity and beauty of our brain