INFINITUDE:
When I lost my intuition: For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t. (Ronald W Dworkin, 3/03/25, Aeon)
Researchers have long recognised intuition’s relevance to professional judgment. In 1938, the businessman Chester Barnard wrote the now-classic book The Functions of the Executive, in which he described two distinct forms of managerial decision-making, logical and non-logical, with intuition an example of the latter. In 1957, the scholar Herbert Simon coined the phrase ‘bounded rationality’ to illustrate the same division. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman spoke of two systems for decision-making: ‘System 1’ for intuition, and ‘System 2’ for deliberate and analytical thought. In the 1960s, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry attributed logic and reason to the brain’s left side, and intuition to the brain’s right. More recently, the division has been used to distinguish between personality types, as in the Myers-Briggs personality model, where a person can be ‘intuitive’ or ‘analytical’.
Intuition was pigeonholed in this way not merely to try to understand it, but also to control it. For, within the secular world, intuition is the sole survivor from those primitive days when people credited human behaviour to mystical and spiritual forces, and science was inseparable from divine doctrine. Most of those forces were elbowed out of existence in modern life, and consigned to the religious sphere. But intuitive thinking was too useful a professional tool to simply be tossed aside. Even today, more than 60 per cent of CEOs rely on intuition, or ‘gut feeling’, to guide their decisions. Under some circumstances, 90 per cent of intuitive decisions prove correct. Nevertheless, the concept of intuition threatens science, upon which much of modern professional life is based. Science uses logic, observation and measurement to find truth, while intuition, derived from the word intueri, which means ‘to look within’, seeks truth through inner contemplation. The latter method harkens back to a dark age before clarity and frankness came to dominate the realm of thought. Thus, while given its due, intuition had to be contained within a well-ordered system that downplayed its connection with mystical thinking.
‘Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition’ prompted by a cue, Simon wrote. In the mind sit memories stored away in oblivion, which, when cued, return to consciousness because a temporary use for them has been found. Simultaneously, a feeling of certitude arises. There is nothing miraculous about any of this, researchers insist.
Yet, it is when professionals lose their intuition that its mystical value shines through. For, in tough cases, when facts are lacking and the path forward is unclear, intuition arrives like a revelation. Intuition is an article of faith we assent to when reason has reached its limits. Belief in that revelation is what puts intuition on an altogether different plane of cognitive experience. There can be no relation between intuition and reason, not because they work through different sides of the brain. Instead, it is like the difference between the infinite and the finite; the infinite is out of all proportion to the finite, so that no comparison or analogy can be established between them.