If I were to choose one word for what I experience, I think it would have to be intuition. I wouldn’t call it psychic, because I don’t think it involves anything extrasensory. Rather, it seems to deeply involve the work of my ordinary senses. I’m speaking only for myself here, as those I’ve interviewed have described much that I haven’t experinced. But in my case, intuition is like a sudden, rapid jump through the process of making observations to reach a conclusion—one that feels like it skips over the process entirely. So I might define it, at least as I’ve experienced it, as something like this: knowing what the parts add up to without being able to identify the individual parts.
When I began researching intuition, I was surprised to discover that there is a significant body of research that offers insights about the phenomenon without ever discussing it in spiritual or supernatural terms. There appears to be a kind of conversational siloing going on, between scientific and spiritual takes on intuition. My friend Elizabeth Greenwood, whose book Everyday Intuition comes out in May, told me that for the neuroscientists who study it, intuition is simply pattern recognition. Or more specifically, it’s a super-high-speed recognition process drawing on various bits of memory and expertise—the complex knowledge base, she says, of “everything that’s ever happened to you.”
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that intuition is commonly discussed online in business-related contexts, where the focus is not on reading other people but on making effective choices. In my own research, I think the clearest definition I’ve found is that provided by the twentieth-century Nobel Prize–winning social scientist Herbert Simon, who studied decision-making in organizations. As he put it, intuitions are “analyses frozen into habit,” which enable “rapid response.” This means, as psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has written, that intuition is “a form of unconscious intelligence”—something that, he noted, is as necessary as the conscious kind.
This makes me think of the famous analogy of the physicist and the outfielder. Both are asked: Where will the baseball land? To find the answer, the physicist measures all the angles, the velocities, distances, wind direction, and so on. She does a series of calculations, arriving at the exact spot where the ball will meet the earth. But how does the outfielder know? He takes no measurements, conjures no numbers, scribbles no equations. Instead he’ll know it empirically. He’ll know, through thousands of hours of practice, repetition after repetition, the physical experience of watching the ball rise, seeing it float across the sky as he runs beneath it, feeling the wind turn, making adjustments. He’ll know, through the cumulative learning of all those catches, and all the misses, on so many different days, on different fields, at different temperatures, just how much to run toward it and yet not quite at it, to intercept it just in time.
How does he know where the ball will land? As Bea told me: You know things in your body.
Seen in this light, intuition can seem like little more than educated guessing. But it’s bigger and deeper than that. It’s an extremely effective method of handling large volumes of information quickly. And the more experienced the individual is in the specific arena in which intuition is being applied, the better their reckoning. I’m talking about the firefighter whose gut says a blaze will become deadly, the trainer who knows when a dog will bite, the commander who senses that a battle will turn. Because here’s the other thing about intuition: When you have a complex array of details to consider, unconscious processing tends to be not only more efficient than conscious thought but also more accurate.
This aligns strikingly well with not only my own experience but also some of what my sister and cousin have described—and others as well. Magnus Carlsen, the thirty-four-year-old Norwegian chess grandmaster who is widely regarded as the best player in the history of the game, has said that he usually knows immediately which move is the best one. It just sort of jumps out at him. In a 2012 60 Minutes interview, he explained that he’d often spend half an hour doing calculations to verify that initial impulse, but a lot of the time it felt pointless because he already knew he was right. Consider what underlies this: Carlsen, who is estimated to have an IQ of about 190, possesses such a capacity for memorization that he walks around every day with ten thousand full chess games inside his head. And, as he demonstrated on 60 Minutes, he can identify them at a glance. This is the pool of knowledge from which his brain draws forth that best move.
Still, in the context of reading others—when one’s arena of expertise is not chess or baseball but people’s thoughts, feelings, and life circumstances—this leaves the question of what is being processed. If intuition is pattern recognition, then what patterns are we recognizing? What specific sorts of information are we gathering, and how exactly are we gathering them?