What is more important reason or intuition? Magnus Carlsen is one of the best chess players of all time. Surely, chess is a rational game so he probably relies more on his ability to reason and calculate moves than on his intuition. You would be forgiven if you thought that. However, according to his own explanation on how he plays, he relies on his intuition to tell him what the best moves may be. How is that possible? And if intuition is so important, how can it be developed?
In Episode 8 of Beautiful Ghosts we discuss intuition (YouTube or website), inspired by a documentary on Magnus Carlsen where he mentions how he relies on intuition. Is this a supernatural power? Intuition can feel like a supernatural power, where does that knowledge come from that allows us to make decisions in the face of uncertainty? Whether you think of it as a supernatural power or as pattern recognition, the fact is that you know more than you think. More often than not, we should listen to and trust our intuition.
There are two types of intuition, the innate intuition and the acquired intuition. The innate intuition is knowledge you are born with. When Mariana was 6 years old, she didn’t manage to cross the street with her sister and was waiting for the traffic light to be able to cross. A man who was a stranger called her to come with him, her intuition told her to run away. She doesn’t know how she knew to run away but her innate intuition told her to and she did well to trust that intuition. When my son was about 2 years old, there was a kid playing with a remote-control spider. I couldn’t resist the experiment and asked the kid to walk the spider towards my son. I wanted to see whether he had an innate fear of spiders. The way he screamed told me that effectively he did. We are born with innate knowledge and intuition, the result of billions of years of evolution. Trust that intuition.
Does that mean Magnus Carlsen was born with chess intuition? No, there is a second type of intuition which is developed or acquired. This intuition comes as a result of extensive practice of a particular skill. It is clear that Magnus was born with the talent to play chess, the way his brain is “wired” for spatial-temporal analysis, but he would not be one of the best chess players in history if he hadn’t spent uncountable hours playing chess and developing that intuition. That’s because we acquire more knowledge than we think, our brains are processing information in ways we don’t understand. When the soccer player David Beckham came to New Zealand, one of the coaches commented he was impressed how he would always position himself perfectly. David Beckham didn’t need to think about it, he had developed the intuition of where he needed to be. Whether you think it is by pattern recognition or by some supernatural capability, continuous practice of a particular skill will help you develop your intuition in that field.
Having the intuition is one thing, listening to and trusting your intuition is another thing. A few years ago I heard the story of a woman that was walking on the street when she saw a man coming towards her. She had the impulse to run away. “Why?” she asked herself. She didn’t find a reason to run away so she decided to continue walking. The man attacked her in a very bad way. When she reflected on her experience, she realised that she had previously seen the man doing something suspicious. Her intuition told her to run away but her reason interfered. Her reason did not know as much as her intuition. She should have trusted her intuition and so should we. I read the case of a warship captain who did trust his intuition. When monitoring the radar he saw an object following the same path as ally planes coming back from attacking the enemy. He didn’t know why but his body tensed, his palms got sweaty, and he ordered to fire. Had he made a mistake? Analysis of the wreckage showed it was a missile. Although he didn’t know it, the pattern in the radar was slightly different. Following his instinct saved his warship and the lives of the crew.
You know more than you think. You have innate intuition you are born with and acquired intuition through deliberate practice. Keep working on developing and trusting your intuition. It has the potential to keep you out of trouble and to help you make extraordinary decisions, perhaps as good as Magnus Carlsen’s chess moves.
Make an impact,
Pablo
Image by John Hain from Pixabay
This post was originally published in Beautiful Ghosts.