BINGE THINKING

Dick Pountain/Mon 18 April 2005/5:30 pm/

I'm a very indifferent pool player but nevertheless on two occasions (New York 1970 and Ladbroke Grove 1975 if you must know) I've won money/drinks by totally thrashing the local hustler. Both times I had to thank a moderate application of ethyl alcohol: *precisely* three pints of beer induced a state of elation so perfect that I stopped thinking about angles and Newtonian dynamics and just sank every shot with the invincibility of a Zen archer. I'm sure most of you have had similar experiences, whether at pool, snooker, darts or whatever. One more drink and alcohol-induced latency banishes the effect - the right amount frees you to play by instinct or intuition.

A lot of research has been done in this area in recent years, often by economists studying the way that markets work. For example the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer asked random passers-by in the street to name the first business that came into their heads. His team then constructed an investment portfolio based on these firms, and it comfortably outperformed both the Index and portfolios constructed by professional money managers. Bypassing the usual analysis of historic yields, market fundamentals and macro-economic trends, this portfolio tapped into a single measure - name recognition - which intuitively condensed equivalent information in the minds of the interviewees.   

Intuition, as the word is commonly used, has a whiff of irrationality about it. It's often attributed in a condescending way to women (as a poor consolation prize for not being good with maps and spanners). My dictionary defines it as 'knowledge or belief obtained neither by reason nor by perception', a definition that I can't possibly accept because I've come to believe that intuition *is* a kind of reason, and is also intimately involved in perception. This is supported by neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg, who devoted a recent book to talking about how the brain accumulates 'wisdom': when very similar experiences are encountered repeatedly, the brain slowly wires-together neural networks to recognize instances of these experiences. A task that's at first difficult and requires deep concentration becomes progressively easier, and eventually non-conscious, like riding a bike or swimming. The brain in effect assembles its own custom hardware to tackle commonly needed tasks.

Goldberg believes that the well-known left-brain/right-brain split needs reinterpreting, as it's not so much that left hemisphere handles language and the right hemisphere handles visual/spatial, but rather that right brain tackles new experiences that require fresh visual/spatial reasoning, while left brain handles familar experiences (via its accumulation of pattern-recognition networks). Intuition is the deployment of such 'hardware-assisted' circuits to bypass the more flexible but less efficient verbal reasoning of the right hemisphere. So my left brain long-ago trained a bunch of networks to pot pool balls, but my bossy right brain keeps spoiling things by trying to calculate geometries: the perfect amount of beer elbows it aside and lets my wisdom shine through (for an all too brief interval).

Intuition in this sense forms the very basis of perception. For example our eyes are effectively bitmapped capture devices, like organic CCDs, and as Tom Arah so often reminds us in his graphics column, bitmaps don't differentiate their content into separate objects. But we do, because we don't 'see' that raw image on our retinas. Instead layer-upon-layer of connected neural nets in the visual cortex process the raw data to extract features like horizontal and vertical edges, motion, light and shade. The results get integrated with memory, time and our other sense data to split the world up into individual, persistent moving objects. The brain learns the most familiar objects, so that sometimes our imagination can fill in non-crucial parts of the visual field to save on visual bandwidth (a bit like MPEG compression).  

As a result we humans have a split-level consciousness. Primary consciousness, the state of being awake, alert and attentive, we share with other mobile animals, certainly with all mammals, birds and reptiles. Secondary or 'higher' consciousness involves our verbal abilities and may well be unique to us (evidence that chimpanzees or dolphins share it is shakier than pop culture would like you to believe). It's what makes us self-conscious, aware of time and able to plan ahead (not to mention do science). And it's much, much slower than intuition, in rather the way that a Virtual PC simulation is slower than native code.

Whenever primary consciousness makes a decision (say to step around a puddle) that fact gets reflected in secondary consciousness a split-second later, just as your PC's monitor screen displays the result of a calculation it didn't actually calculate itself (the CPU did that). This gives rise to the illusion that's been leading Western Philosophy astray ever since Descartes, namely that our lives are ruled by verbal reason, or even that such reason controls the whole universe. It doesn't. However while intuition may be fast and efficient it's also inflexible and 'unthinking', underlying prejudice and bigotry as much as it underlies wisdom. But it's a fact that rules more of our lives than you'd ever believe. We desperately need to stop kidding ourselves that we're wholly rational beings, and to take seriously the investigation of these pre-rational aspects of the mind. As for giving all our statesmen three pints before they go into the conference room, I'm afraid that most of them have tried it already...