This article is in continuation to an article I wrote earlier titled, “Intuition – When to trust it, When not to“.
Recap
Our brain is a pattern recognising machine. Right from birth, a child learns by connecting dots, making patterns, remembering them and using them as thumb rules. Our brain is making patterns all the time, drawing linkages, continuously learning from all successes & failures of events that we have lived through and borne the consequences.
Thus, right from very simple tasks like coordinating body movements for walking, to forming one’s own behaviour and comprehending others’ behaviour to taking complex decisions like marrying, or business decisions, driving on highways, dealing with high pressure complex situations like riots, trading and Sports. This of course, helps us to not shorten decision making & response time and not reinventing the proverbial wheel each time. In the absence of this pattern making ability, we’ll be stuck on tasks like the Bangalore traffic!
What Intuition does is, it stacks up base rates – We stack up a library of patterns in our subconscious. As we go about doing our daily chores, even a sliver of resemblance from any of these stored patterns, pops out the entire pattern file for our reference. Instead of spending time analysing the current situation at hand afresh, we draw linkages from the past patterns and, sort of, jump to conclusions. It is this kind of ability that helps husbands sense a tense moment of silence from their wives to quickly assess something’s amiss and take prompt corrective action, like immediately switching off the football match!
…Thus, we form thumb rules.
| Observation | Base Rate Pattern | Response |
| Wife’s silence | Something’s amiss; can potentially ruin the weekend | Switch off the football match. Immediately zero in all the attention to the clear & present danger |
| The red lights of the car moving ahead of you flashes | The car ahead is slowing down or even stopping abruptly | Apply brakes yourself such that you maintain zero relative velocity with the car in front, slow down if the car ahead slows down, stop hard, if the car ahead stops hard |
| A gentle stroll with spouse at the beach at a tourist place. A rowdy gang of boys seen approaching far away | A small probability that the gang may cause some trouble, as it happened once when you were holidaying with your parents decades back. | You cut short your stroll, change the direction and sit in a beach shack for a drink, where there are some more tourists for company. |
| Boss looks happy & relaxed | He’s more amenable when he’s relaxed | Talk to him about a raise or promotion or leave application |
These thumb rules make our lives more efficient and productive. We’re able to do more & more in less time. As we go through our activities, scanning the environment, these thumb rules keep popping up from our subconscious as gut-feelings or intuition and help us in making decisions.
But, go back to Day 1, when as a newborn, you’ve just started making patterns. You start creating patterns, one at a time, stacking them in the library of subconscious. However, the library racks soon start evolving into an interconnected web of patterns. This formation of the complex web of patterns is not a linear one way street; rather such complex patterns grow in a series of formations & corrections.
Bias – The Oops Moments
Our biases serve us well most of the time….at least in usual, linear domains. However, every now & then, we are caught wrong footed by external circumstances which turn out differently than what our intuition predicted. When we have a well established pattern in our subconscious, we develop a tendency to fit the pattern on the forthcoming data (new events) rather than testing the fitment of the new data to the existing pattern. In other words, we tend to force the pattern. This forceful fitment is known as the curve fitting and also confirmation bias.
My favourite philosopher, Karl Popper, puts it very succinctly.
“Observation is theory laden.”
This often leads us to what we are looking for, rather than what the incremental data point wants to lead us to. We see what we want to see, rather than what’s there to be seen. And we resist altering our patterns. Diane Vaughan, American Sociologist, explains this:
“[In the situations we deal with as humans, we use] a frame of reference constructed from integrated sets of assumptions, expectations, and experiences. Everything is perceived on the basis of this framework. The framework becomes self-confirming because, whenever we can, we tend to impose it on experiences and events, creating incidents and relationships that conform to it. And we tend to ignore, misperceive, or deny events that do not fit it. As a consequence, it generally leads us to what we are looking for. This frame of reference is not easily altered or dismantled, because the way we tend to see the world is intimately linked to how we see and define ourselves in relation to the world. Thus, we have a vested interest in maintaining consistency because our own identity is at risk.”
Story so far – We learn & grow by making patterns. Once the patterns are well established, we tend to curve fit the patterns and resist updating them or making new patterns. This creates problems.
…And problems are where Insights enter…
“We start with a problem – unjustified knowledge and a problem.”
– David Deutsch’s interview to Jed Lea-Henry titled, ‘Karl Popper and the beginning of Infinity’
Insights
Problems, challenges and failures are a signal that something is wrong. This activates our curiosity mode. We cease to blindly trust our existing belief frameworks and seek to add, tweak, delete, mend them or form a new framework altogether.
“Perception,” it has been recently said, may be regarded as primarily the modification of an anticipation.” It is always an active process, conditioned by our expectations and adapted to situations. Instead of talking of seeing and knowing, we might do a little better to talk of seeing and noticing. We notice only when we look for something, and we look when our attention is aroused by some disequilibrium, a difference between our expectation and the incoming message. We cannot take in all we see in a room, but we notice if something has changed.
– E. M. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 1956
Faced with problems, we look around and seek solutions – new patterns, new connections, new frameworks – that better explain the situation. It is a more exhaustive world view.
These new patterns, new connections, and new frameworks are collectively called Insights.
Gary Klein, in his book, “Seeing What Others Don’t”, defines Insight as,
“An unexpected shift to a better story….Intuition is the use of patterns they’ve already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns.”
Intuition-Bias-Problem-Insight
Thus, we create a virtuous loop. We start on Day 1, with zero intuitions or frameworks and infinite curiosities and insights…and we keep stashing them in our subconscious. As the frameworks get complex, we start drawing connections, building patterns. In due course of the time, the frameworks of patterns start becoming so elaborate and reliable, that we start trusting it more & more, and stop being curious and vigilant for new insights … .until we run into problems. Problems tell us that our existing framework is either wrong, inadequate or irrelevant. Those, who still remain shut to insights or feedback, face major setbacks or failures, as against minor ones, and falter. Those who pay attention to insights, update their framework of patterns, wriggle out of their problems, learn & grow to a higher/better level of understanding. They cross the hurdles and forge ahead to greater success & prosperity.
Pattern for Patterns
What we eventually end up doing here is forming a metapattern – a pattern for updating patterns.
A wise person needs a framework for updating the existing framework. When you have new data, you need to possess an ability to the the following:
- tell information from noise, to discern insight from aberration, to know when to stick to your tried & tested patterns (intuition) and when to update the existing patterns (insight)
- Ability to stay firm with your intuition, if the new data is noise; even if everyone around you seems to be falling for it (eg financial scams, cults)
- Humility to course correct, if the insight catches you wrong footed. (eg. encountering Black Swan Events)
- Updating your existing patterns. Becoming a learning machine.
What leads to Insights?
Problems – Everything’s working well, until you bump into a problem. (eg. your work is getting recognised in the office, but you’re not getting a promotion). Problems set you on a path of finding solutions; driven by curiosities and creative desperation, you stumble on new patterns, i.e. insights.
Contradictions – You have an existing belief system. You have an encounter with a reality that contradicts with what you believe (Einstein saw contradictions in his train approaching a clock thought-experiments and got an insight that the speed of light is constant, space & time is relative!)
Connections – Your existing framework leads you to a deductive conclusion by connecting the dots in the existing pattern. This deductive conclusion offers an insight. (Charles Darwin spent years on a nature expedition. He read “An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Thomas Malthus, and stumbled into the idea of competition for resources and drew the insight for his seminal theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
TLDR
We all stack up our lessons in the subconscious mind in a complex network of patterns. These patterns make us intuitive thereby making us take quick decisions. Every once in a while, we stumble on Insights, which are nothing but new patterns. These insights help us update our intuitive framework and make us better equipped. This updating forms a pattern of pattern, consisting of consistently updating our intuition with insights. That’s how we ratchet-up in life into a New & Improved You! (Hey, that’s another article of mine, related to the matter!)