Experience and Intuition

Jonah Lehrer on chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, the youngest number one player ever:

At first glance, there is something surprising about a teenager weaned on chess software extolling the wonders of intuition. It's as if we expect Carlsen to act like his software, to be as explicit in his strategic decisions as Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer. But that misses the real purpose of practice and the real genius of the human brain. When we practice properly - and this means engaging in deliberate practice - we aren't just accumulating factual knowledge. Instead, we're embedding our experience into our unconscious, so that even insanely complicated calculations - and Carlsen can regularly plan twenty chess moves in advance - become mostly automatic.

This is a truism of expertise. Although we tend to think of experts as being weighted down by information, their intelligence dependent on a vast set of facts, experts are actually profoundly intuitive. When experts evaluate a situation, they don't systematically compare all the available options or consciously analyze the relevant information. Carlsen, for instance, doesn't compute the probabilities of winning if he moves his rook to the left rather than the right. Instead, experts naturally depend on the emotions generated by their experience. Their prediction errors - all those mistakes they made in the past - have been translated into useful knowledge, which allows them to tap into a set of accurate feelings they can't begin to explain. Neils Bohr said it best: an expert is "a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." From the perspective of the brain, Bohr was absolutely right.

I have been sitting here wondering if this is true for me about anything. Do I have any intuition? The closest I can claim for myself is a feel for sentences. I don't analyze them, I just listen to how they sound, and I have had some success with the results.