Often we know, but don't understand how we know

I used to be in love with mysticism, where hidden secrets of the cosmos supposedly are revealed in a mysterious fashion. 

I'm still enthralled with hidden secrets being revealed in a mysterious way, but now I realize that there's no need to invoke gurus, meditation, god, inner visions, and all the stuff that mysticism evokes, because everybody has that capacity in everyday life.

This is one of the fascinating messages of Blink, a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell that a friend gave me, along with two other books by Gladwell that I'd never read before. 

Its subtitle is "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." This too is a notion that mystically inclined people like to claim as their own. Actually, it is an integral part of human nature. Of course, early on in his book Gladwell points out several caveats.

Yes, "decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. But, "it's not the case that our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the 'truth' of a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled."

What's surprising, though, is how often our intuition understands what's going on in the blink of an eye, no time-consuming thinking or reasoning required. 

This morning I finished the book's second chapter, "The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions." It starts off with the story of how Vic Braden, a top tennis coach (and former star player) found that he could tell whether an expert tennis player was doing to double-fault. 

Meaning, fail to get a serve in twice in a row, which gives a point to the opponent. Tennis pros might serve hundreds of times in a match and double-fault only three or four times. Yet in one tournament Braden correctly predicted sixteen out of seventeen double faults in the matches he watched.

But here's the catch: much to Braden's frustration, he simply cannot figure out how he knows.

Gladwell goes on to say this.

This is the second critical fact about the thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious. Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious. 

...Snap judgments and rapid cognition take place behind a locked door. Vic Braden tried to look inside that room. He stayed up at night, trying to figure out what it is in the delivery of a tennis serve that primes his judgment. But he couldn't.

...If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that -- sometimes -- we're better off that way.

...In high stakes, fast-moving situations, we don't want to be as dispassionate and purely rational as the Iowa ventromedial patients. We don't want to stand there endlessly talking through our options. Sometimes we're better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us.

...Ted Williams could hit a baseball as well as anyone in history, and he could explain with utter confidence how to do it. But his explanation did not match his actions, just as Mary's explanation for what she wanted in a man did not necessarily match who she was attracted to in the moment.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

...After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute confidence, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision," psychologist Joshua Aronson says. "But how on earth could she know that? What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh's research with the interrupters, and Maier's experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often."

Of course, there is a second, equally valuable, lesson in the Maier experiment. His subjects were stumped. They were frustrated. They were sitting there for ten minutes, and no doubt many of them felt that they were failing an important test, that they had been exposed as stupid. But they weren't stupid. Why not?

Because everyone in that room had not one mind but two, and all the while their conscious mind was blocked, their unconscious was scanning the room, sifting through possibilities, processing every possible clue. And the instant it found the answer, it guided them -- silently and surely -- to the solution. 

Beautiful. Religious believers like to ask God to give them a sign as to what to do. Or they pray for guidance. 

There's no need for any of that. Each of us has an astounding piece of intelligence within us: the human brain's unconscious workings. Sure, often we need to use our conscious intelligence to wend our way through life's many problems and opportunities. 

But we also need to trust the much vaster part of our cognition, the unconscious that has ways of knowing beyond our ability to know what those ways are. All we can do is be grateful for that often right-on intuitive capability.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

Ummm... not sure I get it. That is, how does one distinguish the right choice from the wrong one?

To show your work, so to say, by making your thoughts explicit, which is what rationality is about, is how you test your thinking, and see if your working's right, and so ensure that you've done the best you could.

This, on the other hand, seems ...well, hit and miss, isn't it?

That guy gets intuitions, acts on them, and gets them all wrong. That girl there acts on *her* intutions, and gets them all right. And that third guy there, he acts on *his* intuitions, and around half the times it works, and half the times it doesn't. How do you make out which is which? Without first seeing how it all turns out, that is --- because by then it's much too late to do anything about anything?

This, I don't know, it seems so ...random? I mean, if it works, when it works, great. But just as likely it might not?

Does he spell out how one is to separate out right intutions from wrong ones? (Sounds very unlikely that such a thing would even be possible, but since he's written a whole book about it?)

-------

This book seems very familiar, although I can't for the life of me remember why. Have I read it? Doubt it, I don't think I'd have forgotten the contents of it so completely. Maybe read a review some place, that's stayed with me? Or discussed it with someone? ...Can't remember, but somehow it seems very familiar --- the book itself I mean, not so much the contents of it

[Brian Hines]

Appreciative Reader, much of the rest of the book, which I haven't read yet, deals with how to improve the quality of our snap judgments/decisions. I gather that because the unconscious part of our brain makes those sorts of fast assessments anyway -- nothing we can do about this -- it makes sense to try to assure that the raw material the unconscious has to work with is as good as possible.

In the chapter I read this morning, about biases related to sex/race, which can be accurately measured via psychological tests on a computer, it was mentioned that exposing ourselves to encounters with people, such as African Americans in my case, who we don't often associate with, can prime the unconscious to overcome its habitual judgments about race based on longstanding exposure to societal norms and influences. Many Blacks, it turns out, have an unconscious bias against other Black people for that reason.

[Appreciative Reader]

Should be interesting, if he's got any actionable tips on specifics.

(Generally broadening one's worldview, and working on one's biases, that's a great, generally speaking, but I don't see that it speaks specifically to sharpening one's intuitions per se, at least to the point that one can fall on them without the safety net of explicitly worked-out reasoning.)

...Haha, that thing about many blacks apparently having a bias against other blacks, while it comes across as completely weird at first blush, but it makes sense actually once you think about it. Cool point, that. In fact, I remember now, this is an important argument that's used to ask for better representation of different races in movies and TV, in roles that aren't stereotypical (and for revisiting/reinterpreting the racist/sexist elements of existing narratives and tropes, along more inclusive lines). The idea is, many people of other ethnicities, not seeing their own kind represented in popular media, end up feeling alienated ...something like that. Makes sense.

[Kranvir]

@I'm still enthralled with hidden secrets being revealed in a mysterious way, but now I realize that there's no need to invoke gurus, meditation, god, inner visions, and all the stuff that mysticism evokes, because everybody has that capacity in everyday life.

What does that make of RSSB and Gurinder Singh Dhillon? It makes their so called religion complete and utter bull shite. In fact if they are misleading it makes them as employees of kaal himself, who is the liar, the hypocrite, the control freak that wants to be god over humanity. How else has desperate dhillon been able to fool 5 million people ,some of who are professors and doctors.

[Dungeness]

@Brian Ji [ Because everyone in that room had not one mind but two, and all the while their conscious mind was blocked, their unconscious was scanning the room, sifting through possibilities, processing every possible clue. And the instant it found the answer, it guided them -- silently and surely -- to the solution. ]

Aha, the whole of human intuition reduced to a mega quick AI processor
within the brain doling out insights to feed slower brain backwaters. Sort
of like a trained seal hidden within wowing the crowd with its tricks.

But what if those intuitive flashes reveal insights about "god", spiritual
cosmology, who we really are... presto they're completely personae
non grata, unpalatable rogue offspring of that great AI god in the brain.
What... you say with a course of mindfulness/devotion you can confirm
these revelations within? Fairy dust! Wait, my intuition has the answer:
Security... show that nutcase the door outta here!

[Di]

Psychologists use the term "heuristics" in decision making: Representative (stereotypes) and availability (likelihood) heuristics.
A surgeon who had a poor outcome will decide differently than a surgeon who hasn't had a poor outcome although they both have the same likelihood of a complication.

[Goswami]

Why then are American cities coast to coast (especially in states like Oregon) becoming ever more filled with people who are drug dependent wastrels with only a charitable resemblance to real human beings? Why did innate spiritual intuition fail these poor souls?

Why don't we see such dysfunction in the ranks of the followers of mystical gurus?

If the Guru principle and the God principle are things to really get up in arms about, we should at least see some evidence of how people who followed these ideas saw their lives go down the drain into despair, substance abuse and social corrosion. But we see just the opposite. We see the people in places like the RSSB dera giving much time to selfless service to their fellows.

The same is certainly true of religious folks at most churches and temples. Whatever the faults of religion, it can't be denied that they provide a positive structure to life.

On the other hand, simple "freedom" from religious ideology, while seemingly rational and egalitarian, has resulted in compounded misery.

People need authority and direction to prosper. You can pretend that isn't so all you like, but the results to the contrary speak for themselves.

[um]

@ Goswami

Maybe ... I write .... maybe ..... it is all a complicated social cultural issue as to how in a given culture spirituality and science interact / cooperate.

The mentality of towards these matters is quite different say, in India and the west, say Europe, UK and Northern America.

The eagerness to enfold, to develop, to expand to be found in both systems is remarkable different. Just look as an example at the faces of the children that go to school, the students that go to higher education institutes, In the USA and India.

Or listen to the difference in the kind of questions asked at guru's. ... hahaha ....free will etc. ... all sorts of questions that have no meaning in and relation to everyday life.

I feel and it seems to me that in India no one, no expert, in the religious / spiritual side of culture will even for a moment, interfere with their counterparts in Science. Nor will any scientist in India make statements about the worldview of religious people..

People in their own circle of interest, be they women or man, scientist or believer, will do their best to enlarge the welfare and well being of their group and not investing their energy in fighting the other ... for that reason the emancipation of women in India is quite different, from what there is to be seen in Europe and america.

Their need not be an controversy between science and religion / spirituality, they can go hand in hand as we can see in Asia and particular in India.

In Europe and the USA much of the creative energy, that could and should be used for development of social and cultural welfare, is leaking away in endless controversies.

The maintenance of culture and its traditions is a sine qua non for material welfare.

It is the Christian curse we suffer from, whether we are believers or not. The Christian clergy that has forced science to make their development suit the doctrine of the church.

Bur maybe what I am pointing at is due to the coffee I was drinking.

[um]

And ...

What the RC clergy did with science in the past is now done by scientists, interfering with the affairs of religion, to such an extent that, religion in a couple of years, certainly in Europe, has lost its value and meaning. ... due to the inquisition of science.

In India they try to sell their traditional medicine, and religion to the world, together with the science based counterparts.

And what have we done ... "grace" to the inquisition of science, we have completely lost our own traditional medicinal knowledge..

The same holds for many a craft

and we ... we have made ouselve into slave of the machine., IA etc

[Goswami]

After having seen the light that there's no light and concluded the all religion is a farce, why this incessant inward search to "find the self," "figure out life," or whatever it is you're trying to do?