Does intuition matter in studying science or solving problems in general? I’ve been trying to arrive at a conclusion to this question since I was in high school. I summarize my personal thoughts as follows, which, as a disclaimer, are not meant to be rigorously justified.
Why did I care about intuition?
During my high-school life, I had several friends who did maths very well, partly due to their hard work and on the other hand because of their inborn talent in dealing with abstract ideas. But soon I realized that I had missed something. When we did some hard problems together, they could easily “guess” an efficient way of solving the maths. To emphasize, I meant, they really just made guesses without rigorous logical reasoning and most of the time the guess turned out to be indeed correct. This couldn’t be by pure luck and there must be some magic in their mind. So I started to think: does someone have better intuition than others?
Is intuition simply a guess?
Intuition is totally different from pure guessing. Guessing is just like gambling and there is certainly no promise to whether the said answer is right or not. But in my opinion, giving an answer by intuition does involve logical reasoning but even we ourselves don’t know our minds are doing such work. You may be thinking how it is even possible. But do we really fully understand how our brain works? If you ask a sophisticated musician who can play the song after listening to it once only, I bet he or she can’t answer you in a scientifically logical way and simply tells you that it’s due to experience. So the next natural question is: does intuition have something to do with experience?
Does an experienced person have better intuition?
I believe experience can be a factor that affects one’s intuition. I always do certain kinds of maths using a lot more time than solving other types of questions. The reason is that most of the time I start working on the problem in an incorrect way and I’ll say that I have bad intuition in this area. Perhaps it’s due to my lack of in-depth domain knowledge and insufficient experience in tackling similar problems.
Does experience solely lead us to better intuition? I think not. There’s still something more. Some managers in a large company have been working for many years but they still always make “guesses” incorrectly, such as giving a wrong direction for kicking off a project. Why do they have bad intuition despite their years of experience? I think this is because they lack the ability to put fragments together. Some people are good at connecting things together. We may know the same ideas but there are just someone who can put the seemingly irrelevant ideas together to arrive at something different, which I’ll call it talent.
So to briefly wrap up my thoughts, intuition is not any magic but rather is kind of a combination of experience and talent. Wait, do I still miss something?
Can good intuition be developed?
Experience can be accumulated over time but it seems not to be the case for talent. In other words, can we develop our talent to lead us to better intuition? My answer is no because talent is inborn and you can never become talented in an area in any way. BUT, we can develop a better way to think. In the past, I always struggled to know the finest details of any maths or science problems without trying to get known of the full picture, perhaps due to my personality and also perhaps owing to the style of Asian education which urges you to dig into every detail or otherwise your marks will be deducted.
In recent years, when I study some theories, I feel better to have a high-level understanding first as well as the relevant history. Knowing the motivation and the big picture of the theories does guide me to solve problems in a better direction. I don’t mean that technical details are not important. But to me, it’s much better to get the picture first and fill the details afterwards. This thinking style helps me to have a better intuition.
Is talent that important?
In the past, I always thought that my friends who did maths well were just talented, allowing them to have good intuition and giving me an excuse not to work hard because I’m just not talented. But as I summarize my thoughts, I realize that good intuition is not simply an inborn ability, but is indeed reflecting the time and effort you have devoted to gaining the experience and strengthening your skills as well.
Image sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/19/the-habits-of-highly-intu_n_4958778.html
http://www.jdlstrategies.com.au/intuition-vs-logic-use-instincts-make-better-decisions/
http://upliftconnect.com/the-five-pillars-of-intuition/
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Sometimes, when I've got problem solving to do, instead of focusing on the problem at hand, I make sure I've absorbed all the information regarding it, then just 'sit on it' push it out of my conscious mind for some other part of me to work on. Then, after a while DING, the metaphorical light bulb goes on. Would that be called intuition?
I think there may be some more formal definition of intuition but I'm not the expert in philosophy / psychology so I dare not to give a rigorous definition. In my own words, intuition is a process of thinking unconsciously and arriving at the conclusion without step-by-step analytics. It seems like you undergo some sort of thinking on the problem and get the solution after the "ding". In my opinion, intuition is more like getting the solution which we don't know how and which may not be but most of the time is correct. So it seems like your case is a little bit not the same as intuition. I can't really formalize my thoughts and so sorry for not being able to write in simple words : )
The book "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" describes this process and really got my problem-solving skills to a whole new level. I think it will also provide a lot of background for better understanding intuition, @manfredcml
You raise an interesting point. I've always felt myself to be a relatively sensitive/intuitive person but I've also met people who seem way more or less intuitive, which leads me to wonder if it's something innate or something people can develop but your line of reasoning makes me wonder if it isn't possible for people to be sensitive to different things?
For example, the person who taught me how to meditate once admitted to me that he doesn't have very vivid dreams but he always kind of figured his overly-vivid meditation made up for it. Maybe he's more sensitive to conscious stimuli whereas others may be more sensitive to the unconscious.
I use my intuition every day, when choosing a parking spot that will save my car door from being dented by another driver. :D ... But seriously, I never considered intuition having anything to do either talent or education, or maybe even experience in a field of study...but I suppose it can be said that children generally aren't seen as having good intuition. Is it because they lack life experience? If so, the conclusion could be that people with good intuition aren't drawing upon some "magic power" but upon their Life Experience.
It is said that children generally aren't seen as having a good intuition, but there are tons of intelligent kids out there. If you see what they do, you'd be amazed about their intuition, whilst they still have a small Life Experience. And believe me, I've seen a lot of dumb and smart kids too, not being capable of doing anything without reading in their book what they were going to do, but I've seen enough adults like that also.
I also don't think it's "magic power", but it's not simply explained by "Life Experience" either. It's a complicated thing and I don't think we'll be able to solve it with simple reasoning. Real research is needed for this to be solved.