What is intuition? When does it help and when does It hurt. Intuition is the mind’s ability to recognize patterns instantly without conscious effort. It’s powerful, fast, and deeply human.

Joshua Foer, a science writer, was once commissioned by Slate magazine to cover the U.S. Memory Championship. A year later, he returned not as a journalist but as a competitor.

He won.

How?

Foer tapped into an ancient technique known as the Memory Palace. The method involves visualising a familiar place, your home, a museum, or a street you know well, and mentally placing items you want to remember in specific locations.

To recall them, you intuitively take a mental walk through that space, retrieving the items you left behind.

The method works because evolution trained us to remember places, not lists. Knowing the path back to the cave once meant survival.

That is intuition.

Intuition is the brain’s evolutionary computing power, the ability to know before consciously thinking. We sense danger before we can explain why. We recognise patterns instantly, without effort.

Daniel Kahneman calls this System 1 thinking: fast, automatic, and intuitive. It operates effortlessly, drawing on experience and pattern recognition to make snap judgments.

In contrast, System 2 thinking is slow, deliberate, and analytical. It requires effort and attention and is reserved for complex reasoning, calculations, and careful decision-making.

The external world and technology have changed dramatically. Our internal wiring has not. Much of our brain still operates as if we were living in caves.

We rely heavily on fast thinking because it’s efficient. But it also systematically misleads us. Better decisions don’t come from eliminating intuition (that’s impossible), but from knowing when not to trust it and deliberately engaging slow thinking when the stakes are high.

Which explains my inexplicable urge to override Google Maps’ alternate routes even when they promise to save 30 minutes. I stubbornly stick to the familiar, much to my wife and son’s annoyance.

In my defence, I pre-annoy them by asking them to be ready 30 minutes early.

Kahneman put it best: We are not irrational. We are predictably irrational.

Take it easy until next time.

Blogging is something I enjoy, and I share my thoughts on my blog most weekends. Explore all my blogs at https://lnkd.in/ejq7CWaQ.

Views are my own.

Blogging is something I enjoy, and I share my thoughts on my blog most weekends.

Read all my “Notes to Self” at view all blogs.