Betting On Intuition

The intuition is a concept difficult to explain but easy to understand with just name it . How many times have we solved a problem based on our intuition?

We all know what intuition is. If we do an exercise in reflection, we will discover how intuition has helped us on a large number of occasions, especially when we did not have too much information, on some topic in our life to which we had to give answers.

And if we think about it, we have not done so badly with intuition. Thousands of questions that are posed to us in life such as the choice of the partner, whether or not we can trust a certain person we have just met, whether we should choose this or another job, we have solved with intuition in a correct way.

Well, that good concept that most of us have about intuition, is now reaffirmed by an important German neuroscientist, Gerd Gigerenzer. If it weren’t thanks to our intuition, to our unconscious brain, we would think everything so much that we would end up doing nothing, he says.

Gerd Gigerebzer is a psychologist, currently 67 years old. In addition to directing the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, he is an expert in the study of decision-making and has published books, some of which are widely disseminated, including “Gut feelings” translated into Spanish as “Instinctive decisions”, the book is already in no less than 17 other languages.

For Gigerenzer, intuition starts from evolution, like almost everything in life. Our brain has been learning rules of thumb over thousands of years, which we turn to when we need answers. Curious, right? This is what is called a “general rule” or “heuristic.”

What a heuristic does is ignore information to make a faster decision. And it is that for Gerd Gigerenzer, intuition leads us to make decisions more quickly and correctly in most cases, than if we rationalize too much.

As proof of this, the neuroscientist tells us a funny anecdote, related to the fact of choosing a partner.

If when we meet someone we begin to imagine the possible future that awaits us with her, finally we may not do so; In fact, Gigerenzer affirms that he only knows one person who did rationalize his choice of partner as much as possible. “I have only found one who did so, and he was an economist. Now he is divorced “

In the Redes television program, presented by Eduardo Punset, Gerd Gigerenzer in the interview with him, said:

“ Yes. There are many corroborating examples, but let me cite a very simple one: imagine you are in the contest Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the million-euro question comes, which is the following: which city has more inhabitants, Detroit or Milwaukee? What do
you think? Time is running out … well, we asked the Americans this question, and opinions were divided: 60% favored Detroit (which is the correct answer), but the rest opted for Milwaukee. Then we did this same test with Germans, who knew little about Detroit, and most hadn’t even heard of Milwaukee. What do you think that happened? What proportion of Germans do you think got the answer right? The surprising thing is that practically all of them. Many more: 90% “

“At sea, as in love, it is usually better to follow a hunch than to obey a library” (John R. Hale)