Imagine you’re going for a hike with your friends. At a certain point on your walk, conditions turn for the worse and you realise you are lost. Whose intuition do you trust to get the group to safety? The experienced hiker or the beginner? Of course, you will turn to the former, even if they can’t fully explain why they think a certain route is safer than another.
Our intuitions guide us every day. It could be as simple as forming an opinion about a new acquaintance. You might have gotten a strange feeling from them, without any discernible cause. Most of us have a vast amount of experience in social contexts – and so, like the experienced hiker, we often feel justified in trusting our gut when it comes to other people.
But what does it mean, to trust your gut? Historically, intuition has often been viewed as containing an individualised or collective truth, one that emerges from a spiritual or mystical place, disconnected from anything grounded in the material world. This could lead to “intuitive” actions being seen as good and righteous, or even divinely warranted.
Even today, people often view intuition as something mysterious. Like warm mud bubbling up from a geothermal pool, it emerges from a foreign world, and is therefore often cast as something outside the natural realm. It can be very appealing to view our intuitions in this way, especially when they guide our decisions in a manner that may be convenient to our own self-interest.
But let’s return to the group lost on the hike. There’s a reason that we trust the experienced hiker. Under the hood they are likely making unconscious evaluations of different variables – slope, erosion, visibility – that together might make the difference between a terrible accident and a safe journey home. In a similar way, we are likely to arrive at split-second judgements about other people, through body language, facial expressions, vocal tone and eye contact, that we might not consciously perceive unless they become glaringly obvious.
Less divine inspiration, then, and more a different kind of thinking.
In modern psychology, intuitive and reflective thinking have been separated and categorised a number of times: implicit vs explicit, heuristic vs systematic, automatic vs controlled, and type 1 and type 2 thinking. Essentially, these types of thinking are contrasted by how much effort we put into making a decision. For intuitive, implicit, heuristic, automatic and type 1 thinking, decisions are made instinctively, where people rely on cues and rapid judgements. Whereas with reflective, explicit, systematic, controlled and type 2 thinking, decisions are made with more conscious effort, where we might weigh positives and negatives, or take the time to evaluate the different options we are choosing from.
We now understand intuition as something that people develop over time, informed by unconscious learning and memory. As we move through the world, only a sliver of what our minds process moves through the medium of our conscious experiences. But our brains are constantly absorbing information, and generating models of the world. You could say that intuition is a way for the wisdom of our subconscious to “knock on the door” of our waking conscious experience – pointing us in the right direction, or, at least, in a direction that has served us well before.
When intuition meets science
If intuition were a sort of knowledge that becomes self-evident in the mind’s eye, then we would expect little to no variation in the content of people’s intuitive knowledge. But this, obviously, is not what we see. Some people might think the statement “God exists” is intuitively true, for example, while there is no shortage of people who would disagree. (It’s also interesting to note that self-defined “intuitive thinkers” are more likely to believe in God.) What we find intuitive as individuals is deeply shaped by our own nuanced experiences, and the cultural and societal belief systems in which we are embedded.
The phenomenology, or feeling, of intuition has been described by psychologists as involving a sense of coherence in the sensory signals that someone is receiving from the world, mandating a specific course of action when a reasoned path is either absent or impractical: a sense of knowing without knowing how one knows. No doubt, this strange phenomenology has pushed interpretations into spiritual waters, but this disregards the role of lived experiences and norms.
Viewing intuition as a type of skill suggests it is something that can be pragmatically applied in contexts where we have cultivated it, as in the case of the experienced hiker. But one field where intuition might seem out of place is in the practice of science. Scientists are encouraged to remove their assumptions and biases from their theories, and to let the data do the talking. Theories are developed over time, with extensive thought being invested into their limitations and strengths. But can we really discount the role of intuition in science entirely?
Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist working on a theory of quantum gravity, sees intuition as a necessary creative ingredient of the scientific process. With reason and rigour alone, nobody would ever have a good idea, but without them we would never recognise anything useful. In other words, science, for Rovelli, is “the simultaneous triumph of intuition and the active limiting of intuition”.
Rovelli, who is the author of numerous popular science books like The Order of Time and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, also takes intuition seriously when it comes to teaching and communication. He tells me that he tries to cultivate the skill on a daily basis. “Every morning I meet my student, we discuss ‘new ideas’, or ‘new intuitions’; that is, things we think we know but we don’t know where the idea came from. But then science is about always remembering that there is nothing we know for sure.”
Sometimes we have to work from “feelings” or “hints”, he says, because they might give us an indication that we are headed in the right or wrong direction. “This is how we think, this is how great scientists think,” he adds. “Einstein thinks about riding a light ray, [Johannes] Kepler writes about flying through the Solar System. This is using intuition; connecting the dots courageously on the basis of analogies.”
Filter, analyse, check
It may seem surprising that a scientist like Rovelli takes intuition so seriously. He is working in experimental quantum physics – a field beyond the parameters of our direct human experience, and on the cutting edge of our understanding. Particles at extremely small scales can act in ways that are alien to our everyday experiences of how objects move and interact with one another and the world. They can spontaneously disappear and reappear, some can share information across vast distances instantaneously, and some can move straight through anything without interacting at all.
In the field of quantum physics, therefore, our expectations of how things should and could behave can break down. It might even seem like a warning against giving too much weight to our intuitions when drawing conclusions about the structure of the world. For Rovelli, however, who works with this scale of reality everyday, things have started to become familiar. He’s developed an intuitive skill for predicting and describing phenomena at this level. But it has to be a process, of appealing to evidence to check to see if intuitions can really stick.
“So we have to filter, analyse, go back, check, be critical, to filter out the good products of our intuition,” Rovelli says. “Failing to do so is to be a crackpot, a useless dreamer, it is to lose the way. Humanity has done everything it has precisely because it has navigated smartly between intuition and critical thinking.”
History is filled with examples where a scientist’s intuition has taken them beyond the accepted body of knowledge and revolutionised how we understood the world. In his book Helgoland, Rovelli details the intellectual journey of Werner Heisenberg in his development of quantum theory, a journey that involved stepping outside the confines of accepted thought, and following a hunch of his own.
By focusing on the subatomic quantities of particles that were observable, such as the energy an atom emits when electrons jump, Heisenberg made it possible to build a consistent theory of the atomic world. At the forefronts of human knowledge, such as in the world of quantum physics, a carefully honed sense of intuition can make the difference between a great scientist and a genius.
Sara Walker is an astrobiologist from Arizona State University. For the past decade she has been working to uncover “laws of life” to help guide our search for extraterrestrial life. Recently, Walker has been developing a theory called “assembly theory”, which aims to describe the conditions where selective processes emerge and abiotic chemistry transitions into chemistry that we might call living.
Essentially, Walker is trying to build a physical theory that can describe the difference between living things and non-living things. She hopes the theory could be used as a barometer in our search for extraterrestrial life, if we encounter life that is vastly different to the types we are familiar with. She also hopes assembly theory could help identify the moment in Earth’s deep past where geochemical cycles transitioned into the first living organisms.
Walker, like Rovelli, acknowledges that we have to be careful when it comes to intuition. It’s easy to confuse it with “common sense”, she points out.
We once knew “intuitively” that the Earth was the centre of the cosmos, and that time moved in a universally linear direction. It’s easy for concepts that seem like the natural conclusion to make, based on our understanding of the world at the time, to become “deeply rooted in our psyche, and then it becomes hard for us to change the paradigm because we have been taught to accept the world as a certain way.”
Jewels and garbage
It could be argued, then, that science is the enemy of intuition. Scientists have consistently proven our “intuitions” about the structure of the physical world to be wrong. But rather than being a mode of thinking that only leads us to drawing false conclusions about reality, intuition can help us when we step out into the unknown, where we don’t have observation and theory available to guide our decision making. It can therefore be a corrective force, one that helps us see things in a new light when we are too far down the rabbit hole.
Walker believes that making use of new intuitions is useful, even crucial, when it comes to breaking ground in relatively new fields like her own or Rovelli’s. Astrobiologists are involved in speculating about life that could be completely different to Earth-based life, stepping out into a territory that is untethered from previous models. “When you are coming up with new concepts to try to figure out fields we don’t yet understand, intuition becomes really important to help map out that foreign territory,” she says. “It’s relevant in astrobiology now because astrobiology has leading edge questions that we don’t fully understand.”
“Usually we go off our observations or historical knowledge,” she adds, “but they are obviously not always accurate. We have had inaccurate models for a long time and the whole point of science is to build a deeper, more powerful model.”
While our intuition may stem from our subconscious experience of the world, its intangible nature no doubt plays a crucial role in the unfurling narrative of our attempts to understand ourselves and the world around us. It might be tempting to distance science from intuitive thinking, since our intuitions about the world are so often misguided. To admit that one of our greatest inventions – the scientific method – is subject to what might seem like a flash from the dark or a wandering whim could seem like an admission of epistemological frailty. Especially when we are still trying to understand the mysterious nature from which these very whims emerge.
But that would be a mischaracterisation of the role that intuition can serve within science. Intuition is what humanises science, and what separates great scientists from the rest. Like the experienced hiker, scientists draw on their intuition like a skill, one that can lead them to new worlds of understanding.
It can seem like a contradiction. The correct use of intuition has been at the heart of many of the great leaps forward in the history of science. But in order for it to be useful, its limits have to be understood. As Rovelli puts it, “The point is not to be fooled by intuition. It is our most powerful tool for creativity, but it is often very wrong. It gives us jewels, but only rarely. Most of the time it gives us garbage.”
This piece is from the New Humanist summer 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
