On Intuition

When I'm playing tennis, I'm often amazed by my own speed of thought! As the ball is speeding towards me, my racket hand adjusts the angle of the racket, loosens its grip and is poised to strike before I can say the words 'drop shot'. At what point did I make that decision?

Something similar sometimes occurs when I am solving a killer sudoku. I look at a cell and arrive instantly at the right conclusion (it's a 4!) without having any idea how I got there. I'm too cautious to take such inspiration at face value and must spend time working out how I came up with the answer.

A study in Germany suggests that such inspiration is not unusual. Researchers monitored the brain activity of people who were asked to watch streams of letters on a screen and press different buttons, at intervals, of their own choice. It transpired that certain patterns of brain activity occurred up to 10 seconds before the participants were aware of having made any decision – and these could be used to predict with great accuracy what they would do next.

It is good to know how intuition works. What I'd really like to know is how far it can be trusted. I will still go for a drop shot when I should have gone down the line. I'll still occasionally think 'it's a 4' when, in actual fact, it is a 6. Ah, well, happy puzzling…