Intuition

Don't try this at home.

### Cold Open

"You rely on your brain every day to solve problems and make decisions. That's the kind of conscious thinking you're aware of. But there's another kind of thinking that happens beneath your awareness. Whether it's love at first sight, a sixth sense or that tiny voice guiding your decisions, we've all experienced intuition. Think about how many lightning fast calculation you need to make every time you take a left turn into oncoming traffic. How fast are the oncoming cars traveling? How quickly is the car closing the gap? Has it been raining? How familiar am I with the turn? How fast is my car? When will the light change? What is my tolerance for risk? You'd need a degree in physics to calculate it all out. But with thousands of hours of experience behind the wheel, your intuition kicks in and you know in an instant how to safely make a turn. While this kind of intuition comes from past experience, there's another kind of intuition that we're all born with, and you've already used it in our opening game."

### Questions

Why does intuition feel like it's coming out of nowhere?

## Games

### Game #1: School of Fish

Make a blind guess on how many fish there are based on a split-second animation.

Result: Your brain still comes surprisingly close to the correct answer.

How: Your brain only needs milliseconds to make sense of small numbers, which is call subitizing. When you made a guess, a number probably just came to you and you didn't know why. Intuition responses come by unnoticed. You can know something is wrong, even if you don't know why.

### Game #2: Close-Up

Figure out something based on a close up of three images.

Result: You probably got at least one right.

How: You just knew what it was despite not knowing how. However, you didn't realize how much was going on in your brain. It's above a reflex and new information is matching stuff you already know.

### Game #3: Blank Blank Blank

Find the word that fits with the other three.

Result: You weren't thinking about the right answer, you just knew it when you got it. You only had 3 seconds for each puzzle.

So: We forced your brain to rely on intuition instead of regular thinking. Intuition is linked to a different set of brain structures. It guides our decision-making even though we don't know it. It's called Ordinary Intuition. However, another type, expert intuition, can only be gained through training.

### Game #4: Find the Thief

Try and bust a car thief. Will you intuition work?

Result: You may have missed it because you don't have expert intuition of Sgt. Curtis Yet.

So: Over time, we go from slow, reasoned, thinking, to fast thinking called intuition.

### Game #5: Pool Party!

Use random items to get across the pool without using your arms, with only 30 seconds. Who's intuition will come out on top?

Result: Out of 8 ideas, only 1 worked. The volunteer with the special strategic intuition was able to get across.

So: The volunteer with the special strategic intuition was able to get across.

### Game #6: Spiders

Which color of spiders has the most?

Result: You probably chose blue, but they were all the same amount.

So: Even though your brain uses spatial relationships to determine quantity, it shows that sometimes intuition can leap to conclusions. When should we use Intuition?

## List of Experts

* Jim Coan
* Sgt. Curtis(Guest)