Consider the car mechanic who glances at your engine, listens for a few seconds, and declares exactly what’s wrong—with almost no data. When you press him for how he knows, he just shrugs: “I just do.” We often treat such intuition as mystical, or inferior to deliberate reasoning. But it’s simply tacit knowledge - processing that has moved backstage. We all rely on it constantly: when driving, speaking, or navigating daily life. What once required conscious effort becomes automatic.

As far as I know, the unconscious mind doesn’t have access to any special circuitry, but it does have access to more information, processing power and time. Robin Hanson calls your conscious self the “press secretary of the brain”, tasked with making things seem good to the outside world, and working on a need-to-know basis in order to do its job more efficiently. The logic here is that the best liars don’t know that they’re lying, and so, on the assumption that evolution stumbled upon the best solution, it made us all into clueless liars - especially about our own true motives. This is one of the most robust findings from modern psychology (which admittedly doesn’t say much, but it IS hard to make sense of confabulation without this theory). Thus, we are dumb people making excuses for a smart guy living in the back of our head.

Have you heard the claim that we only use 10% of our brain power? It’s strictly untrue; the brain obviously uses all of its available power all the time. But something like that may very well be true of our conscious mind, the rest of the compute being eaten up by the unconscious. Intuition, then, can be considered whispers from the boardroom, intimations about truths from someone who sits on more information than you, and has more resources than you to sift through it all and find patterns.

This is not merely a fancy metaphor. The split brain experiments in the 50’s demonstrated rather forcefully that human minds consist of at least two agents with the ability to think independently. (The leap to imagining a committee of agents discussing in the background has inspired a promising treatment method in psychotherapy; the Internal Family Systems (IFS)). Even with the most cautious interpretation of these experiments, it is still true to say that you do have an unconscious mind, that it does hide knowledge from you, some of which it does share with you from time to time.

As a side note, this perspective opens the door to rationalize some more mystic sounding practices, such as the interpretation of dreams, and hypnosis, though that may be for some other article.

I don’t know if anyone else has this experience, but I do not feel like I am very creative or a good thinker. I do have some good ideas, from time to time, but they just show up in my head, as a simple proposition or the sense that one thing is related to another. I can read about a topic in economics, and with no inkling of why, I get the sense that some theory in biology is relevant. Over time, I have learned to take such intuitions seriously, and just about every time, some further analysis uncovers treasure. I feel like I have a smart person in the back of my car, whispering hints to its clumsy driver.

Now, as a number of popular books and articles on human irrationality will tell you, learning is often the process of proving your intuitions wrong. Getting a degree in physics or engineering, means a persistent struggle to get into your head the fact that the world often works in very different ways than it seems to. Things do not “fall down”, but follow the straightest path in curved space-time. Hot water can sometimes freeze faster than cold water. In a classroom, there is over a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday. And so on. Things are not as they seem, intuitively.

But thinking slowly and analyzing carefully only has this decisive advantage when dealing with things our prefrontal cortex can handle. When we go past the merely complicated, and into complex systems, this advantage becomes muted, and our intuition can become on par with, if not superior to, our conscious deliberations. Understanding complexity itself may still be the domain of careful analysis, but acting within complex systems, knowing what to pay attention to, and seeding the conscious theorizing about them, is what our unconscious minds evolved to do. Raw pattern recognition, hunches and rules of thumb, these are all necessary fuel for those who wish to understand the world - simply because there are too many things out there to think about. We need a sorting mechanism to penetrate the noise, and intuition is its name.

The point many people take from Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, is that thinking slow is better, and we should do more of it. I take the opposite view. Our slow thinking is there to solve the problems that our fast thinking crash into at 200 mph. We think slow so that we may go back to thinking fast. Faster is better, ceteris paribus. Our slow thinking is excellent for solving contradictions when they are discovered, but it does no good taking the lead in discovering them. As an analogy, consider the fact that speed chess has led to the discovery of far more brilliant, counter-intuitive moves than classical chess. The latter has a lot higher accuracy, but the ground breaking, brilliant sacrifices and positional moves, come about when intuition reigns supreme and risks appetite is high.

This all ties neatly into a lot of folk wisdom and popular science on the dangers of rumination, doers vs. thinkers, discipline and leadership - as well as the distinction between exploration and exploitation that I outlined in an earlier piece. It also connects well with what the philosopher David Deutsch calls the “fun criterion”, which says that what we call ‘fun’ is merely the feeling we have when the conscious and unconscious mind are in agreement about an action, and which we would do well to listen to.

This leads me to the topic of my next article, which explores what complexity theory can tell us about how to lead a fulfilling life. There, more than perhaps anywhere else, a sound understanding of complex systems gives us powerful sorting criteria for the plethora of advice found online.