# Can You Train Your Intuition? Intuition is a topic that sometimes feels like it has a little friction with technology. I don't know if you feel the same. We'll figure that out. At Fontis, I study gut feelings of citizens in the streets about new technologies. We collect them and give them to municipalities and companies who are making these technologies, to make them more connected to the humans who live in the cities where all this technology is. So gut feelings is something I research. And I think intuition and gut feeling are kind of the same. But also maybe not. Intuition is a word we all kind of feel like we know what it is. We might even have an intuition about what intuition is. But there's no hard definition. I've been talking about this topic more and more over the past few months, and I noticed that people think very differently about this word. And I find that fascinating. When I was preparing this talk, I found a lot of definitions with very different takes on the topic. One word that comes back often is *immediate*: intuition is this thing that you immediately feel rather than think, rather than rationally explain. It's also often said about women, that women have a better intuition. But I think the reason we believe that is because we have *that* intuition. An intuition that is based upon all the traditions and the cultural things that we tell ourselves. Research says it's not true, but it's something that still lives. ## The knowledge that traveled into your hands Our senses take in about 80,000 bits of information per second. We can only consciously process about 50 bits. So there is a lot more unconscious knowledge than there is conscious knowledge. In between sits what Michael Polanyi called *tacit knowledge*. Think of playing the piano. You've practiced a piece so many times that your fingers just go. You don't even have to think about it anymore. That's the knowledge that traveled into your hands. Years later, when you're back at the piano, you might not know the piece anymore. But if someone gives you a little push and you start playing, it comes back. As Polanyi put it: we know more than we can tell. Visual knowledge works the same way. Close your eyes and think of Marilyn Monroe and Einstein. You can picture their faces, you know what they look like. But if you have to describe them to another person, suddenly that becomes very hard. That's also knowledge that lives in this tacit field. This is my take, after reading a lot about it: if you act repeatedly on tacit knowledge and you get feedback while doing it, that tacit knowledge becomes intuition. ## Listening to your body There's also something called interoception: feeling the feeling of your own body. There's really nice research about this from Wall Street, back in the days when there were lots of people in that big room making very quick decisions. The researchers looked at who was doing well, and those were usually the people who could sense themselves very well. They measured it by how well people could feel their own heartbeat. People who felt it very well also had better results in fast trading situations. Listening to your body, I think, is a big part of what makes you better at intuition. ## Making knowledge round In personal knowledge management, you can make sense of your notes by thinking about concepts and linking them. But you can also look at a concept from different domains: what's happening in the brain, for example, or how are you experiencing it yourself? By doing that, by looking at one concept from different angles, suddenly the map of content doesn't stay flat anymore. It becomes kind of round. You're able to look at it from different perspectives, different experiences, different domains. I always really like this image: the shadow that falls on different walls is the perspective that people can have on the same round concept. When an accident happens and there are a lot of people around it, they all saw the same thing, but they noticed and explained very different things. Because we all have a different lens on the world. So by talking to each other about the same topic, we can see it becoming not a flat surface, but a round object that we can observe from different perspectives. And that makes it much easier to detect this topic when you encounter it out in the world. ## Fast and slow, and the dog wagging its tail I had some really nice books about intuition on my list for a long time. I kept postponing them, I don't know why. When I knew I was going to give this talk, I thought: oh my god, I need to read them. I didn't finish them all. But I want to highlight a few things. Most of you are probably familiar with *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman. System 1 is your gut feeling, your intuition. Very fast, but also makes mistakes. System 2 is the rational system where you weigh your options and see what's best. It's usually explained as: this one is fast but makes mistakes, and then there's the thinking. We put a lot of weight on that. We are thinking animals, that's what differs us from the animals. But thinking more and harder about something is not always the best way to go. If I'm throwing a ball at you and you need to catch it, you'd need to do some pretty tough math to calculate where it's going to land: speed, angle, air resistance, wind. But if you've practiced a little, you just catch it. You're not even looking at your own hand most of the time. We need the fast system to manage ourselves in this world. But we also need the slow system to learn new things and then practice them until they become System 1. By the way: the idea of the monkey brain and the rational brain has actually been debunked. There are not different types of brains. It's all really interconnected. Jonathan Haidt takes it even further. His paper is called "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail." If you look at a dog, you think the tail is making a movement. But is the tail actually making the movement, or is the dog wiggling and is the tail just going along? He says we essentially only have System 1. We make our moral choices from our guts, and then we just use System 2 to defend the thing we already decided. There's been discussion about whether that's entirely true. There's no right or wrong, I guess, because we don't really know exactly what intuition is. But I think it's a very nice perspective on how our intuition might be more important than we often think it is. ## Cognitive surrender A paper that came out this year asked: if you're working with AI a lot, and you're using it as a machine to answer all of your questions, what happens with System 1 and System 2? They did an experiment with almost 3,000 students. Half could use AI, half couldn't. One of the riddles: a bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? If you answer from your intuition, you say: 10 cents. But if you're actually thinking about it and calculating, you know the ball only costs 5 cents. A riddle that can really lure out the difference between System 1 and System 2. When the AI was correct, people using it were 25% more accurate than those without. But when the AI was deliberately given wrong answers, those same people scored 15% *worse* than people who had no AI at all. The reason? The AIs most people use are very confident. Very confident in their answers. They came up with a word for it: *cognitive surrender*. And the question it raises is: if you're consulting AI a lot, and usually learning new things happens through System 2 to train our intuition, whose intuition are you now training? And do you even still train your intuition, or do you really bypass it? ## A rule of thumb One thing that keeps coming back in everything I've read: intuition is like information reduction, basically. We have it for a reason: we need to function in this world. And having this one rule of thumb is helping you make fast decisions, and it's usually almost as accurate, or even more accurate, than if we're trying to rationally come up with the answer. Someone in the room shared a rule I loved: *be vaguely right instead of precisely wrong.* When I asked this question in the community, someone said: you cannot train your intuition, but you can listen to it better. I don't know if that's entirely true. But I do think you need the silence, the peace of mind, to stand still for a while, to be able to be intuitive. ## The lens that shapes itself Your lens on the world is shaped by everything you've done, the person who you are, the persons that you talk to. When you use that lens, by registering your experiences consciously, writing them down, making pictures, making art, talking about it, you gain feedback on what this lens is doing for you. It's a loop. You start with your lens, you have experiences, you think okay, what is the rule of thumb? Then you go back into the world and gain feedback, and that changes the lens again. And so on. ## The Brain Palace Blueprint I've been working on a framework I call the Brain Palace Blueprint. It has two angles: understanding versus action, and zooming in versus zooming out. These are the different chambers that I do my work in, and where I can train my perception. You start in the **library**, where you collect information and enhance it a little with your own perspective and feelings. Then in the **observatory**, my personal favorite, you connect your ideas and look at concepts from different angles, making them round. On the action side, there's the **strategy chamber**, where you think about your projects and how they connect to the knowledge you've collected, or where the gaps are. Then there are the **work chambers**. When I'm in there, I need to stay in there. I need to finish the task I started and I cannot go back to the drawing table, because there's always more to research and always more things that I find interesting. And all around it: the **gardens**. The gardens are the spaces to stand still, to listen to your intuition, to park an idea and look at it two weeks later. Were those ideas I had really genius? Or does it look different now? ## Five ways to train your intuition Five things that seem to help. **Listen to your body.** Your heartbeat, your gut, the physical signals. Wall Street traders who could feel their own heartbeat did better in fast trading situations. **Explore experiences.** Not just collect them. Notice them. The richer the pattern, the better your gut can work with it. **Find your rule of thumb.** Intuition is information reduction. One good heuristic, vaguely right rather than precisely wrong, often beats careful deliberation. **Broaden your lens.** Look at the same concept from different domains, different people, different angles. You start seeing it in places you didn't notice before. **Gain feedback.** Without it, your lens never changes. You just keep seeing what you always saw.