We go about our day happily letting our unconscious mind handle routine functions. This normal and let’s our conscious mind rest for those important decisions that have to be made, like where you are going to have lunch today. If you did not have those mental subroutines to handle all your daily actions, could you imagine all the conscious thoughts needed to control your muscles to catch a ball being tossed to you? Instead, the intuitive thinking part of your mind triggers the established subroutine of actions and takes care of it without expending the mental energy required for concentrated or attentive thought.
Our minds are continually try to apply mental shortcuts for every problem that it encounters, including complex ones. Sure you might pause to consider, but those first moments are your brain comparing stored subroutines that fit perceived issue. If the right one is there, hooray! You initiate the actions and happily continue on.
Consider this next situation intuitively and do not apply the math right away. A baseball bat and ball cost $22. The bat costs 20 bucks more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Remember what number intuitively popped into your head first. Was it $2? Checking to see if that answer is correct, and you see that if the bat was $20 more than $2 it would be $22, making cost of both of them together $24.
What happened? It was not a complex problem and can be solved in our heads within a few moments with minimal effort. But our minds can be lazy will not engage concentrated thinking if the intuitive solution can be found. Understanding how these modes of thinking interact is crucial at the beginning of solving complex problems or making important decisions. Critical thinkers understand this and can avoid that pitfall by not latching onto those intuitive solutions right away without some evaluation first.
Please give me a “like” and share with others. Thank you for reading.
Comments