Is the power of intuition overrated?

The Washington Post:

Much has been written in the last 10 years about intuition, especially expert intuition. What’s so fascinating about intuition, of course, is the idea that one’s mind may work on a problem without one being aware of it.

Keith Richards put it this way:

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you’re thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell’s going on. You might be getting shot at, and you’ll still be ‘Oh! That’s the bridge!’ And there’s nothing you can do; you don’t realize its happening. It’s totally subconscious, unconscious, or whatever.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink was largely devoted to this phenomenon. Other books — e.g., Tim Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves and Danny Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow — have summarized some of the research showing that such unconscious cognition occurs, but Gladwell differed in suggesting that at times we’d be better off relying on intuition than in thinking. Some researchers — most consistently Gerd Gigerenzer at the Max Planck institute, but others, including Kahneman at times — suggest that advice might be sound.

Read the whole story: The Washington Post