Analytical/Intuitive Thinking: PART I, Know Yourself!

Find out whether you are an analytical or intutive thinker!

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. That was quite remarkable because he is a psychologist. In his acceptance speech in Stockholm, Sweden, he talked about people relying on reasoning out answers or intuitively knowing answers.
Shane Fredericks designed a short quiz to try to identify a person's thinking mode between analytical and intuitive processes. To determine your thinking mode, take his Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). Quickly jot down your answers to these three questions:

1) If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? _______ minutes

2) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Everyday, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake? _________ days

3) A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? _________ cents

 

      

How good are you at finding what's best? Test your intution and brains

Good decision makers often wind up with the best things available. But how do they do they do it? Finding the best thing involves searching, but it also involves knowing when to stop searching. How good a searcher are you? Do you search too much, or just the right amount?

Psychologists and economists have extensively studied problems of "sequential search" and “optimal stopping”. Fancy terms for a basic idea. Consider this simple game

You have been captured by an evil  dictator. He forces you to play a game. He brings you into a room with many brightly colored gift boxes. Each box has a different amount of money in it. You can open any number of boxes in any order. After opening each box, you can decide to open another box or you can stop. If you say “stop” after opening the box with the most money in it (of all the boxes) you get to live and keep the money. However, if you stop at any other time, you lose and the evil dictator will kill you.
If you were in this situation, what would your strategy be? How likely would you be to survive?
There’s much academic interest in this simple game because it is analogous to many real life situations in which once you pass something, there’s no going back. It’s even been compared to finding the love of your life: people date a number of others looking for that special someone, but if they pass somebody up, there’s no guarantee that he or she will still be single in the future.
So that you can test your brains and intuition  for searching and stopping search, I’ve created a little game:

Intuition Helps Us Let Go of Fear of Death

As a physician, I see fear of death permeating our health care system. Doctors shy away from patients who are dying or resort to technical language. Patients are afraid of making the passage. Relatives don't know what to say or do around the death bed. Intuition--our deepest gut feelings and knowing--can guide us if we listen.

All About Fear

Fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger—if we didn't feel it, we couldn't protect ourselves from legitimate threats. But often we fear situations that are far from life-or-death, and thus hang back for no good reason. Traumas or bad experiences can trigger a fear response within us that is hard to quell. Yet exposing ourselves to our personal demons is the best way to move past them.


DENIAL OF DEATH
I'm always surprised by people who say they're not afraid to die. Most are usually quick to point out they are afraid to die painfully—but not of the idea of no longer being alive. I continue to be mystified not only by this answer but by the number of people who give it. Though I can imagine there are indeed people who, because of their age, character, or religious beliefs, truly do feel this way, I've always wondered if that answer hides a denial so deeply seated it cannot be faced by most.
Certainly, this has been the case with me. I love being here and don't want to leave. I've always spoken openly of my fear of death to anyone who's ever asked (not that many have—I suppose even the question is uncomfortable for most), but I've rarely experienced moments where I actually felt afraid. Whenever I've tried wrapping my mind around the concept of my own demise—truly envisioned the world continuing on without me, the essence of what I am utterly gone forever—I've unearthed a fear so overwhelming my mind has been turned aside as if my imagination and the idea of my own end were two magnets of identical polarity, unwilling to meet no matter how hard I tried to make them.


THE SHATTERING OF A DELUSION
The true significance of my denial wasn't made clear to me, however, until I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The anxiety that began to envelop me at that point was of an entirely different order than I'd ever experienced before. It began to interfere with my ability to function, which made plain to me that what my brush with death—twice—had taken from me was my ability to believe I would never die. Knowing intellectually that death awaits us is quite clearly a different thing from believing it, much in the same way knowing intellectually gravity will make you fall is a different experience from actually swooning at the edge of a parapet at the top of tall building. Ultimately, being ill brought me to the realization, contrary to what I'd always believed in my heart, that there was nothing special about me at all. Like everyone else, I was only a piece of meat that would eventually spoil.
From that point forward, whenever I'd feel a minor twinge in my chest or develop a rash on my arms or my hand would shake for no reason I would become paralyzed with anxiety. Even though I recognized intellectually that my reaction was overblown, every new random symptom I felt caused my doctor's brain to leap to horrifying conclusions simply because I now knew in a way I hadn't before that bad things could actually happen to me. I felt like one of my long-time patients who for as long as I've known him has been consumed by an anxiety so great he'd become like a child in his need for constant reassurance that he would be all right. His anxiety had made him inconsolable and his life a joyless nightmare.
PTSD is often diagnosed in men (and now women) who return from the battlefield, women who've been raped, people who witnessed natural tragedy—in short, in anyone who either has an intense traumatic experience themselves or witnesses one occurring to someone else.


WHAT TO DO NEXT
I'd always considered the shattering of delusion in my life to be a good thing, something that's always brought me more happiness rather than less. And yet here seemed to be an example that contradicted that rule, for around the time I was diagnosed with PTSD I was surely suffering to a degree I never had. Frankly, I was happier before living in denial.
Over time, though, the crippling anxiety of PTSD resolved and I returned to my previous level of functioning. However, even minor injuries or transient symptoms that I would have ignored before now stir up vague feelings of worry. I remain acutely aware to this day that my ability to believe in my invulnerability has been irrevocably ruined.
I've decided, however, that this is a good thing: I've been given the opportunity to challenge my fear of death without actually having to be actively dying. Many others aren't so lucky. I began practicing my religion 20 years ago because I was intrigued by the notion that enlightenment might actually be a real thing, attainable if only the correct path was followed. I've continued because I've had experiences with the practice that have convinced me it has real power to shatter delusions about life.
For me, three things are certain: First, my experiences with my religion so far have inclined me to think that enlightenment is a real thing, and that it might be the solution to my problem with fear of death. But, second, for me to become convinced that life is eternal ("there is no beginning called birth or ending called death"), I must have an experience that proves it to me beyond a shadow of a doubt. I need to know it the way I know gravity is real. I must confess I can't today even conceive of what that experience could be. Yet I must remember that every time I've gained real wisdom  from my Buddhist practice and become genuinely happier, it's always come as a result of having an experience I could never have predicted. And lastly, because I hope the establishment of indestructible happiness based on a belief in the eternity of life is possible, I must remain on guard against the seductive tendency to convince myself of it. Belief that arises from a desire to believe is usually, in my experience, too flimsy to withstand a genuine challenge. And I can think of no more genuine a challenge to a belief in life after death (whether through reincarnation or an ascension to Heaven or anything else) than the actual imminent approach of death itself.
I fully recognize that my current belief about death—that it is truly the final end of the self—is likely to be correct. Which makes me wonder if I wouldn't be better off throwing my energies into re-embracing denial and simply accepting that when it comes my time to die, if I'm given the chance to see it coming, I'll suffer however many moments, hours, days, or weeks of fear there are to suffer and then be granted a final release.
If only I could. Once a delusion has been shattered, I've found there's no going back. And even if there were, at some point I'm certain to be re-confronted with a denial-eradicating sickness or injury. Everyone will. Depending on your current life stage this might not seem like a pressing issue. But shouldn't it be? An experience like mine could become yours at any moment. And even more desirable than being able to die peacefully is being able to live fearlessly. In fact, one of the supposed benefits of manifesting the life-condition of the Buddha is freedom from all fear.
I've tried to resolve my fear of death intellectually and come to the conclusion that it can't be done, at least not by me. Some kind of practice that actually has the power to awaken me to the truth is required (assuming, of course, the truth ends up being what I hope it to be).
Thus, my grand experiment continues. What about yours?

Trusting Intuition

Sometimes we think too much, then become paralyzed in the process.
How do we become effective human beings? It takes the right
combination of thinking, including thinking about others and action. And,
often enough, the right ways of thinking.
The ability to think, to reflect on ourselves and our behavior and
to plan ahead, may be the feature that most defines us as humans, the
crowning glory of evolution. But thinking is not an unmitigated
blessing.
Sometimes people get stuck in it. People are often consumed with
the past, ruminating about events and chewing them over and over. Others
get paralyzed thinking about what lies ahead. Both forms of overthinking
consume the brain 's limited capacity for attention, bring the mind
to a halt and compromise mental health . One form is known as depression ,
the other anxiety. And both conditions are rampant in our culture
today.

Intuition  can be thought of as almost the polar opposite of either.
And it is a reliable way of knowing, and valuable in many
circumstances.
There are many ways to define intuition, but all present a kind of
conundrum. The act of reflecting on intuition is precisely what intuition
isn't. Intuition is really your brain on autopilot, performing its
actions of processing information outside of your awareness that
it's operating. It's nonconscious thinking.
Can you trust intuition? It helps to know that the kind of
automatic information processing that underlies intuition is something
you probably experience all the time.
Consider that phenomenon known as "highway hypnosis."
You drive the car for miles without a conscious thought. You're
steering the car, reacting to road conditions and the actions of other
cars, so obviously your brain is processing incoming information.
You're just not aware of yourself. Or you walk down a street, get
lost in thought and find yourself at your destination without awareness
of the processes that got you there.
It's often safe to rely on automatic nonconscious processes
for rote tasks, but what about more complex situations?
Nonconscious processes operate all the time in complex
decision-making  Often enough, we just don't give them credit.
Often we cite rational-sounding criteria for our feelings and actions and
do not disclose the subjective preferences of feelings that arise
spontaneously.
Sometimes we override our intuitive gut-level reactions altogether,
ignoring our native responses in favor of ways we think, for external
reasons—such as to coincide with the judgments of others—we
should be reacting. Studies have shown that we are capable of making
sound judgments about food and, often, people based on nonconscious
processes, but if we deliberately think about our preferences and
decisions we can actually make them worse. The truth is that all of the
factors that influence our reactions just aren't available to our
conscious selves.
There is no substitute for gathering information about any task or
situation before us. But neither should we be afraid of not knowing every
reason why we feel the way we do in every situation.

Big Purchases Benefit from Intuition, but not Stock Picks

Our brains have a number of innate capacities, but they grow out of ancestral, not modern, problems, says Terry Burnham, author of Mean Markets and Lizard Brains. The types of dilemmas we are good at solving intuitively are ones in which the old machinery lines up well to produce positive contemporary outcomes. Investing is not among these.
Any gut feeling you may have about where to put your money is probably very similar to many others' gut feelings (say, going with a stock that has been on the upswing for a while). It's simply not investment-savvy to pick the same stocks as everyone else—you will not stand to gain.
Burnham advises that you set up a system to ensure that your prefrontal cortex, and not your gut, is firmly in charge of financial decisions. You need to analyze investment strategies and information about different companies. Just as Burnham refuses to get the key to the mini bar in hotel rooms lest he give in to a late-night junk-food craving, he "locks in" his money by making sure he can't change his allocations without an adviser's authorization. That way, he won't move his money around on a whim.
Intuition, however, is a reliable source of purchasing decisions, at least for big-ticket items. The only goal of investing money is to make a profit; cold calculations count. Material possessions, on the other hand, have a subjective value—you want products to bring some ease, comfort, or happiness.
When it comes to complex acquisitions such as homes and cars, consumer satisfaction is greater among buyers who decide with their gut. The experience of living in a house is ultimately an emotional and unpredictable one; so throw away your spreadsheet and rely on your "old brain" to assess whether or not you'll get more pleasure than pain out of the purchase. Resume rational deliberation for the little stuff; research shows it is superior to intuition for picking items such as oven mitts and shampoo.
It's comforting to know you can lean on your unconscious when facing big life questions. And, even better, you've got a mind that can both listen to the gut and keep it in line

MORALITY COMES FROM THE GUT

We think of moral decisions as the raw material of great drama—as warring internal desires or puzzles to solve via logical arguments. But most people actually determine whether an action is right or wrong automatically, finds Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt likens moral intuitions to aesthetic judgments: We instantly know whether we think something is beautiful, but we don't necessarily know why. "The rational mind is like a press secretary that spins reasons for our intuitive moral decisions," he says.
The "press secretary" is all about advancing our own interests, prosecuting those we don't like and defending ourselves. Haidt theorizes that we have evolved this way because of the competitive advantage attached to being able to navigate society's dense web of gossip . Because what people think you do is just as important as what you do, it pays to be able to explain your behaviors in a rosy light. That makes the internal machinery inherently self-deceiving. You may have no qualms about cheating on  your taxes, but you'll probably think twice after speaking with friends about it (if you dare even bring it up).
That's why Haidt does not advocate going with your gut when contemplating a moral decision. "The general advice I would give is to check with others to see what they think." We can see the splinter in our neighbor's eye, after all, but not the plank in our own.

A Strong Hunch can be the Beginning of a Beautiful Relationship

We've all heard stories of couples who "just knew" the moment they met that something serious was going to develop between them. (David Myers, professor of psychology at Hope College and the author of Intuition, had that feeling about a young woman as a teenager; they've been married for more than 40 years now.) The heart has reasons which reason does not know. But maybe the "heart" is governed by the unconscious emotional pattern matching that produces intuitions.
The phenomenon  is as an overall feeling that someone would be "good for you," perhaps even irrespective of passion. "It's tapping into your unconscious and triggering prior emotional experiences. We need to trust that this is a survival system that has evolved to our benefit," he says.
As choosing a mate is rife with unknowns, it's not best arrived at by number crunching. Here is a story of how Ben Franklin advised his nephew, torn between two sweethearts, to list each woman's qualities, place a numeric value on the importance of those qualities, and total each column. But when a friend did just that and calculated the winner, his heart sank. That's how the friend knew he really wanted the other woman

GUT FEELINGS

Intuition really does come from the gut. It's also a kind of matching game based on experience. There are times when trusting your gut is the smartest move—and times you'd better think twice.


You "know" things. You don't even know how you know them. Yet you have a sense of certainty when driving down a strange street that you really must make a left turn. Or comfort a co-worker who insists she's fine. Or quit your job and move to Paris.
Intuitions, or gut feelings , are sudden, strong judgments whose origin we can't immediately explain. Although they seem to emerge from an obscure inner force, they actually begin with a perception of something outside—a facial expression, a tone of voice, a visual inconsistency so fleeting you're not even aware you noticed.

Think of them as rapid cognition  or condensed reasoning that takes advantage of the brain's built-in shortcuts. Or think of intuition as an unconscious associative process. Long dismissed as magical or beneath the dignity of science, intuition turns out to muster some fancy and fast mental operations. The best explanation psychologists now offer is that intuition is a mental matching game. The brain takes in a situation, does a very quick search of its files, and then finds its best analogue among the stored sprawl of memories and knowledge. Based on that analogy, you ascribe meaning to the situation in front of you. A doctor might simply glance at a pallid young woman complaining of fatigue and shortness of breath and immediately intuit she suffers from anemia.
The gut itself literally feeds gut feelings; think of butterflies in the stomach when a decision is pending. The gut has millions of nerve cells and, through them, a "mind of its own," Still, gut feelings do not originate there, but in signals from the brain.
That visceral punch in the paunch is testament that emotions are an intrinsic part of all gut feelings. "I don't think that emotion and intuition can be separated," says cognitive scientist Alexandre Linhares at the Brazilian School of Business and Public Administration. Emotion guides how we learn from experience; if you witness something while your adrenaline is pumping, for instance, it will be remembered very vividly.
Experience is encoded in our brains as a web of fact and feeling. When a new experience calls up a similar pattern, it doesn't unleash just stored knowledge but also an emotional state of mind and a predisposition to respond in a certain way. Imagine meeting a date who reminds you of loved ones and also of the emotions you've felt toward those people. Suddenly you begin to fall for him or her. "Intuition, can be described as 'almost immediate situation understanding as opposed to 'immediate knowledge.' Understanding is filled with emotion. We don't obtain knowledge of love , danger, or joy; we feel them in a meaningful way."
Encased in certainty, intuitions compel us to act in specific ways, and those who lack intuition are essentially cognitively paralyzed. Psychologist Antoine Bechara at the University of Southern California studied brain-damaged patients who could not form emotional intuitions when making a decision. They were left to decide purely via deliberate reasoning. "They ended up doing such a complicated analysis, factoring everything in, that it could take them hours to decide between two kinds of cereal," he says.
While endless reasoning in the absence of guiding intuitions is unproductive, some people, including President Bush, champion the other extreme—"going with the gut" at all times. Intuition, however, is best used as the first step in solving a problem or deciding what to do. The more experience you have in a particular domain, the more reliable your intuitions, because they arise out of the richest array of collected patterns of experience. But even in your area of expertise, it's wisest to test out your hunches—you could easily have latched on to the wrong detail and pulled up the wrong web of associations in your brain.
When researcher Douglas Hofstadter is starting a knotty math problem, for instance, he begins with a hunch. Then he hunkers down and calculates. After two weeks, perhaps he'll see a roadblock and give up. Another hunch pushes him to a new tack, and perhaps it is the right one.
It's time to declare an end to the battle between gut and mind—and to the belief that intuitions are parapsychological fluff. Better to explore how the internalized experiences from which gut feelings arise best interact with the deliberate calculations of the conscious mind.