Category: BEST POSITIVE PSYCH

Best ideas of positive psychology: happiness, intuition, optimism, health, flow, decision-making, mind and body, goals, habits, great living!

Links about the Brain

Posted on by Senia

Hi, today’s post is a few links to research about the brain.

Sharpbrains.com – I’m a big fan of this site, especially the resources section, and within the resources section, scroll down past the “books” section to the “articles,” and click on:
* “Change or Die” – Which of these three is the greatest contributor to health – lifestyle, genetics, or environment? The answer may surprise you.
* “Juggling Juggles the Brain” – The brain can physically change.

Emotion vs. logic in investing. A couple of articles:
* Lizards, rats & the investor’s primitive brain – Some examples of emotions winning out over logic.
* Emotion rules the brain’s decisions – What does the brain reveal about your motivation when you think about investing? As shown through brain imaging.

Consistency

Posted on by Senia

Two Ways
There are two ways to live life:
1) like a fast lottery ticket – by having one-time-payoff goals and going after them, and
2) like a squirrel gathering for the winter – by surely and consistently going after your plans.

Here are some arguments for the benefits of consistency. Sure, the lottery ticket is a draw – it is exciting, it is potential, and it can be huge! The squirrel, however, will always make her nest for the winter.

The Lottery Ticket. A friend of mine is a film reviewer. (I love dance movies: you name me a dance movie, and I’ve probably seen it!) My film-reviewer friend and I were talking about dance movies recently, and he said, “Senia, doesn’t it seem that most dance movies give the performer one chance or one performance or one try-out, and that that is the one that counts? And that things better be right for that one dance because it’s the one big chance?” And I thought about it, and he’s right – typically, dance movies are structured towards one dance or one night or one show or one try-out. It’s the lottery ticket – it’s the one chance to get things right. It’s what everything in your past training as a dancer has been moving you towards.
So you give it your all. And that’s the right thing to do. But it’s so hard to live life that way, anticipating one big hit every several years, and other than that, barely eeking by. It’s possible, but so hard. As Hugh MacLeod says (via Dave Seah’s post), “If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.” Living the lottery ticket is looking for big breaks all the time – looking for the job in which in a couple of years you can make enough money to retire, looking for the business contact that will bring in the company’s annual revenue for the entire year in January, looking for the book publisher who’ll love your idea for a novel and want to make it into a major motion picture.

The Squirrel. On the other hand, “slightly, lightly, and politely,” as I once heard a guy say at a dance club, the squirrel gets things done. She knows that she doesn’t have all summer to play, and so she builds and gathers for the winter. And the squirrel may be able to get even more things done while she rushes with the winter preparations. Yes, the lottery ticket is exciting. At the same time, a lottery ticket may not pay the bills. And if it does take 10 years to become successful at something, or if it takes 10,000 hours, then YES, start now, and consistently work at it. Just like after college, in your first job, some folks show you the benefits of investing early into a retirement account – that it is the amounts you put in earlier that reap the greatest gains later – just like that, the consistent attention to your chosen activity reaps the greatest gain from consistency. Just ask anyone who plays an instrument. Putting it down for a year definitely moves you back a bit.

There are two brief stories that illustrate the squirrel’s deliberate life of consistency:

The Fisherman
The story goes that a business school student was on his spring break in a small fishing village, and saw one fisherman who seemed to be more efficient than all the other fishermen. He watched him day after day, and just before returning to school, he approached the fisherman and said, “I’ve been watching you, and your catch is larger than all the other fishermen. I think if I help you out, we could get a few more boats out here, and you could train me and my friends, and we could make a lot of money very fast, and then, just think, you could retire very soon.” The fisherman just looked at him. And the business school student continued, “Just think, if you could retire, what would you do?” And the fisherman replied, “I would fish.”

“Sew a Little at Night”
There was a man who was the main tailor to the king, but one day a genie came to him and told the man that he would now be rich beyond all his beliefs, and the king would let him go as his servant because the king would have a tailor who could do things magically for the king, and that the man was free to go and enjoy his life. The man thought that was fine. Then the genie asked him, “What will you do all the day long now that you don’t have any cares and now that you have all the money that you want?” The man answered that he would live a relaxed life during the day, including walking, reading, eating, and then, he added, “I would sew a little at night.”

It’s what he does well – he would “sew a little.” Plus, even at that point, a little more money wouldn’t hurt. Of course, both these tales are exaggerated tales that show two things: the benefit of doing what you like to do and the benefit of consistency. I bet you would argue with me, “Well, Senia, why wouldn’t I want to do both? Shoot for the lottery and keep consistently improving at what I’m doing?” Actually, YOU WOULD! That would be the ideal!

DO BOTH – Shoot for the Moon and Keep the Day Job

Dana Gioia One of my heroes in this sense is Dana Gioia (pronounced “JOY-a”). Dana Gioia has a Stanford MBA and worked for General Foods for 15 years, becoming a Vice President. Currently, he heads the National Endowment for the Arts, and here is his bio on the NEA site.

For years, Dana Gioia did both – published poetry books and worked a corporate job. I find that wonderful and incredible and inspiring. That’s the whole point. That’s what Hugh MacLeod means by “Keep your day job” and “Put the hours in.”

Dana Gioia has been masterful on two levels – at work with a corporate managerial role and in his spare time with poetry. That’s incredible! That’s like a story I heard from my friend that you are what you do in your spare time. If you consistently work at a hobby (or work more at your job like most entrepreneurs) in your spare time, you will be good at it. You will be good – whether it’s guitar-playing or rock-climbing or golf or running or writing. Whatever you consistently do, you will be good at. There are other ways to push yourself to improve at your chosen activity (through incremental challenges, asking raw questions, etc.), but you are already good at it if you do it consistently.

I heard once that John Grisham wrote his first few legal thrillers by getting to his law firm at 5am and writing from 5 to 8am. That is consistency. That is perseverance.

“Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.”
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

You are sure to wake up somebody. Like the little squirrel who finishes all her preparations for the winter, and then goes to the store to buy a lottery ticket … just in case. Although her affairs are in order, she thinks, “Why not?”

First, You Copy

Posted on by Senia

What did Willa Cather do when she wanted to become a great writer? She took Henry James’ books and she copied entire sections, entire sentences from them. She felt the music of each sentence, and its richness, and the fall of the words. Then, Willa Cather wrote many stories in Henry James’ literary style. And then she wrote her own stories and novels.

First, you copy.

Alex Ross describes Mozart’s early work in music in this issue of the New Yorker in an article called “The Storm of Style.” Between the ages of eight and ten, Ross writes, “Young Mozart shows an uncanny ability to mimic the styles and forms of the day: Baroque sacred music, opera buffa, and opera seria, Gluckian reform opera, Haydn’s classicism, the Mannhein symphonic school, Strum und Drang agitation, and so on.”

This is the 10,000 hours of practice, practice, practice (some of which is copy, copy, copy) that I mentioned here.

Ross continues, “Hearing so many premonitions of future masterpieces, I got the feeling that Mozart’s brain contained an array of musical archetypes that were connected to particular dramatic situations or emotional states—figures connoting vengeance, reconciliation, longing, and so on. One example appears in “La Finta Semplice,” the merry little opera buffa that Mozart wrote when he was twelve. In the finale, when all misunderstandings are resolved, there is a passage marked “un poco Adagio,” in which Giacinta and her maid Ninetta ask forgiveness for an elaborate ruse that they have pulled on Giacinta’s brothers. “Perdono,” they sing—“Forgive.” Not just the words but the music prefigures the tremendous final scene of “The Marriage of Figaro,” in which the wayward Count asks the Countess’s forgiveness—“Contessa, perdono!”—and she grants it, in a half-hopeful, half-heartbroken phrase. I looked at the New Mozart Edition scores side by side, and noticed that the two passages not only waver between the same happy-sad chords (G major and E minor) but pivot on the same rising bass line (B-C-D-E). It is unlikely that Mozart thought back to “La Finta Semplice” when he composed “Figaro,” but the idea of forgiveness apparently triggered certain sounds in his mind.”

Programmer and writer Paul Graham says, don’t copy things mindlessly: copy what you like. He points out that it’s very important to copy those things that you like and not those in fashion to copy or those that it may be useful or good for you to copy. Plus, he says, when you copy, copy the good things about the item, not the bad things (such as when artists used to draw with a brownish haze to copy Rembrant’s colorings that just made paintings look a little muddier).

Expertise Is Trainable!

Posted on by Senia

Two friends of mine both just pointed me to one of the best articles that I’ve read in a long time. It’s called The Expert Mind by Philip Ross in the Aug 06 issue of Scientific American.

The main points are:
* Expertise is Trainable (in the argument of nature vs. nurture, nurture appears to often win in developing experts)
* Expertise is Developed through Practice
* The Practice That Has the Best Results is Repetition with Increased Difficulty (This article emphasizes Anders Ericsson‘s words of “continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence.”)

Expertise is Trainable (Nurture Wins!)

In the argument of nature vs. nurture, it seems that each side is always looking for evidence to support it. In this article, the author Ross several times repeats that nurture wins. He bases most of the article on the work of Herbert Simon and on the work of Anders Ericsson, and uses chess throughout as the study case.

Here are some examples of practice proving to lead to expertise (the first two are from a 2001 Economist article):
1) A 26-year-old man could in a few seconds find the fifth root of a ten-digit numeral or could raise a two-digit number to its ninth power. The most interesting part is that he had taught himself how to do such calculation-intensive math by studying math-specific memorization for four hours a day – but having started this only at age 20!

Nature vs. Nurture 2) Ericsson trained volunteers to increase the size of their memory significantly. Regular people can remember up to about seven digits easily. Ericsson trained volunteers in increasing their memory, and after one year of practice, two of the volunteers could remember up to 80 and 100 digits at a time.
3) A third example in both the Economist and the Scientific American article is of Laszlo Polgar, who trained his three daughters to become one masters and two grandmaster at chess. Interestingly, Polgar wrote a book called “Bring Up Genius!” before he had children. Then he followed his own techniques, including giving his daughters six hours of chess exercises per day. The youngest is now the 14th best chess player in the world.

Expertise Through Practice. (Not All Practice is the Same.)

Increasing “Chunking”. Increasing the Quality of Connections.

neural connections Now the article gets a little more involved, but I’ll give you just the summary here. How are experts able to remember and recall so much more information, and with such detail and complexity? There’s the Herbert Simon concept of chunking: this means, for example, grouping several different chess game openings into one. Or if you’re a chef, grouping several different ways that you might serve tomatoes into a list of the five best ways.

Using chunking, you are creating a memory “well-organized system of connections,” describes Philip Ross. And the brain remembers best in maps.

Using those well-organized connections, expert chess players are able to look quickly at a chess board that’s had a game in process and even if you were to overturn the pieces, the experts would be able to quickly reconstruct where the pieces had been. But…! (and here’s an example from the article) if you “asked players of various strengths to reconstruct chess positions that had been artificially devised–that is, with the pieces placed randomly on the board–rather than reached as the result of master play,” the opposite would happen! When it came to randomly arranged pieces, the chess experts did not recall the placement of the pieces any better than the amateurs, and in fact, they recalled the placement worse than the amateurs! Because the chess experts were used to recalling piece placements in chunks.

(Here I’m not summarizing, but this is my favorite example from the entire article!)

Mary Had a Little Lamb “Take the sentence “Mary had a little lamb.” The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one’s knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.”

10,000 Hours and 10 Years

In this 1994 NYTimes article on Peak Performance, author Daniel Goleman describes Herbert Simon’s and Anders Ericsson’s research on expertise. Goleman writes, “The old joke — How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice — is getting a scientific spin.” Ericsson’s research led him to conclude that virtuoso violin performers often have 10,000 hours of practice by the time they are in their early 20’s. Ross in the SA article writes, “Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. ”

10,000 hours or 10 years. This has come to be a calling card for expert knowledge: the 10/10,000 rule.

Dave Seah breaks down the 10,000 hours into more manageable groupings, and he has fun ideas on how to use those hours towards becoming your own “niche” of expert. Alvin describes the trainable structure of expertise and discusses how to increase the impact of your training through – suprisingly and very interestingly to me – your five senses.

Best Practice: Repetition with Increased Difficulty

Nadia Comaneci Tiger Woods

Larry Bird One of my friends who pointed out this article to me said, “it’s not about hitting a golf ball 100 times, it’s about hitting each time at the edge of your abilities.” At that edge, at the brink of challenge, that’s where you can grow. So the best thing you can do to improve within a field is to have an incredible coach, who can lead you along your brink of challenge – or to keep yourself on a very increasingly difficult carefully-paced training system.

Ericsson says that what matters is not experience but “effortful study” and specifically “continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence.”

So, in summary,
expertise is trainable at any age,
practice, practice, practice,
and increase the difficulty continuously!

SUMMARY: JULY, 2006 (One Month – Thanks, Guys!)

Posted on by Senia

First month of blogging! Thanks, guys! This has been very, very fun! So great to read your thoughts – in the questions section, and all over!!! Merci! The parts of the blog from this month that I’ve liked the most have been the topics about the brain, the answers that you guys put down to the questions, and the stories. Highlights from July:

The Brain
Write Like a Map! – super interesting comments to this post!
You Are What You Say
Thinking Styles: “You Talkin’ to Me?!”
This is the section I’m most psyched about this month. I started off writing about Positive Psychology, and went toward the brain and expertise.

Positive Psychology
James and James: SNAP Habit Training (habits)
In a Bad Mood? Pretend You’re Giving Advice to Your Friend
Introducing … ASSESSMENTS!

Intuition & Fun
Three Components of Intuition
Tanabata – Make a Wish Today! – see the stupendous streamers Dave made for Tanabata!

Stories (Tuesdays)
Wasn’t Your ‘Maybe’ a ‘Yes’? by Senia
The Girl Who Became a Flower by Senia
Vito’s Treasure by Vito (a guest author for this blog’s stories!)
Warm Fuzzies by Claude Steiner

Quotes (Thursdays)
The past just-over-a-month includes quotes on courage, action, details, self-knowledge, the universe, and freedom.

Questions (Fridays+)
What actions have you spend the most TIME developing?
How do you become an expert? – super interesting comments!
Why? – beautiful answers
Which is your favorite room in your house?
Who are you happiest around?
What’s the best thing in the world? – gorgeous answers

Picture of the Month

growing up

More to come especially about the Brain, Expertise, and Intuition. Mucho thank you!

:) S.

You Are What You Say

Posted on by Senia

If you tend to describe a friend by saying, “she’s nice, but a real gossip,” then people may start to associate “gossip” with you. If you call someone dumb, people may start to associate dumbness with you. If you decribe how beautiful your friend is, then people may think of you as beautiful.

She's hot

So shows the research by Mae, Carlston, and Skowronski (1998). David Myers summarizes the Mae et. al. research as a particular tendency that people have “when hearing someone say something good or bad about another, to associate the good or bad trait with the speaker.” Furthermore, Myers points out that this could mean that bearers of bad news get disliked, as do strangers that may remind someone of a disliked person.

This is part of a set of research called “spontaneous trait inference,” which includes infering something about a person based on how you may hear that person describe others. (Also within this field, researchers study the effects of describing, for example, a sad event while drinking coffee, and then the trait of sadness being spontaneously from that point on associated unconsciously with coffee).

One study in this field by Mae, Carlston, Skowronski, and Crawford (1999) works like this: participants are asked to memorize some photo and text pairings, such as a photo of a woman and a description about her character, and then later participants are asked to rank the woman on her character. In the same study, another group is asked to memorize pairings of a photo of a woman and a quote that she uses to describe a friend of hers, and then later participants are asked to rank the woman on her character, and the conclusions drawn about the speaker’s character are the same as if she had been describing herself and not her friend.

Even when in a different study, participants are told that pairings of photos and text are random, participants still describe (when asked two days later) the person in the photo as “cruel” or “kind” depending on the random text that had been written next to the photo. Another study in the Mae et. al. (1999) paper is when participants watch a videotape of actors pretending to be college students that describe their friends. Again, people tranfer those descriptions of friends onto the “college students” themselves.

Here is a cute article in Self-Help Magazine about being careful with gosssip. In the Mae et. al. (1999) study, the authors end the paper with their thoughts, “This has significant practical and theoretical implications. It suggests that gossip and other forms of social discourse may have rather surprising, and often unintended, implications for a communicator. Thus, it supports the cliche that if one cannot say something nice about someone, one ought not to say anything at all. It also indicates that self-presenters may achieve desired trait attributions merely by talking about others who have the desired traits.”

Here, here, and here are some additional articles in this field. Could it then be that you are what you say?

Thinking Styles: “You Talkin’ to Me?!”

Posted on by Senia

If you’re at a loud party and someone says your name from across the room, you will usually turn. There are things that your mind pays attention to, and things it doesn’t pay attention to. And this is different for different people. So if you “wanna be talkin’ to me,” for each particular person, it can help to know how that person thinks best.

Lila mentioned in her comments here that different people have different ways of remember things. For example, she said, for best retention, some people need to see a list of items while others need to hear them. True that, double true.

I was thinking, “What are the different dimensions along which people learn and think differently?” When you search for “learning styles,” the two main topics that you’ll find are Visual-Auditory-Kinesthetic and MBTI, but there are so many others. Today, we check out some of the dimensions along which people think differently!

MOST WELL-KNOWN CATEGORIES OF THINKING STYLES

eyeearhand
* Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic
You may have heard this when you were in college: some people absorb information best when it is seen (visual), heard (auditory), or touched/sensed/experienced (kinesthetic). The typical examples are the equation that is written on the board, the equation that is repeatedly spoken in the classroom, and the lab experiment that you perform. Here and here are summaries of the three different styles. Here is a quick assessment you can take to determine your style among the three.

* Myers-Briggs dimensions
I was surprised that there is a lot written about teaching to the four different dimensions of the MBTI type. I was introduced to the MBTI in a business context, and so I’ve never thought of it as a thinking styles assessment, but more as an overall personality assessment – especially for the business context. However there are some sites out there that particularly discuss the learning styles of the MBTI: here and here.
Continue reading “Thinking Styles: “You Talkin’ to Me?!””

Write Like a Map!

Posted on by Senia

Write as if you, yourself, are a map. Interweave how you come to discover conclusions with the conclusions themselves. I’m reading a book that does this wonderfully.

People remember best in maps. This was the first and most important point of long-time coach David Rock when he spoke at the International Positive Psycholgy Conference last year. We remember best if we can touch it or walk it.

THE TV CARTOONS AND NO HAND GESTURES STUDY
A lot of childhood learning is based on associating learning with body kinesthetics: sing a nursery rhyme and bounce the child up and down, and suddenly, the child learns the rhyme easily. There was a study done with children where researchers asked children to sit in front of a tv and watch a cartoon, and afterwards, the researchers asked the children to explain what happened in the cartoon. The children used their hands to demonstrate while they talked and talked and described the whole story. Then in the test group in same study, the researchers sat children down in front of a tv, and tied their hands to the sofa chair while they watched the cartoon. Afterwards, they asked the children to describe the cartoon (while still not being able to use their hands to gesture since the hands were tied down), and they found the children remembered very, very little of the content of the cartoon. Using the physical space, such as gesturing with hands – and even imagining using the physical space – allows us to remember better.

THE MAP MEMORY TRICK
This is a trick that my friend (whom I sometimes call “the memory guy” because he competes in memory competitions) told me once. He uses this to remember long strings of words. Here, I’ll show you how this works. But first, let’s see how fast you can memorize something anyway.
1) Memorize this list in order fast (actually, get a watch with a second hand, or open up the Date and Time Properties on your computer. ) Keep looking at this list until you can repeat it, in order, without looking. Stop when you can repeat the list having turned your back to the computer and with your eyes closed. Highlight the following line with your cursor:
List (in order): lemon, teddy bear, watermelon, camel, rubik’s cube, rubber duck, baby pacifier, golf club

2) Now, let’s try it the mapping way. First, think of an apartment or house that you know well. Now, think of two specific rooms in the apartment. Now think of the four corners of the two rooms. When I show you the list, imagine walking into one room, looking at it and scanning clockwise each of the four corners, then going into the next room and scanning each of the four corners clockwise. Now, the way you’ll memorize this second list is in your head put one object each into each corner, so when you go to scan, you see that object there along with the other items that really exist in that corner. So, for example, if the first word were dinosaur, then you’d put a dinosaur in the first corner of the first room, setting the dinosaur in your head on top of your real bookshelf in that corner, and seeing him surrounded by those books. And keep setting objects around the corners of room. After the first room, you immediately go into the second room…
Ok, ready? Get ready to time it. Again, you can stop when you can repeat the list in order turned away from the computer and with your eyes closed. Here is the second list:
List (in order): water slide, yoyo, ice cream, white tshirt, strawberry, basketball, scissors, lollipop

Ok, which one did you do faster?
I would bet it’s the second one. Why? Because you used a map. You used the map of the two rooms. And you used your visual and memory processes together to remember the list in order. Associating learning with body kinesthethics.

Another map memory trick is to see in your head the route you take from your home to the grocery store (or any other frequent destination). Then, if you want to memorize a list of items, place those items along the road in your path to the grocery store: at turns and at stop signs. For example, you might place a huge oversized avocado at the corner gas station before you turn left, and three full red tomatoes perched on the following stoplight before you turn right, and so on.

HOW NEUROSCIENTIST GOLDBERG DOES IT
I’m reading The Executive Brain by Elkhonon Goldberg. He’s a clinical neuropsychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. The last paragraph of his introduction is so simple and clear: it tells how he will be describing how he came to some conclusions at the same time as describing those conclusions. So, in essence, he gives us a map for following and understanding when and how he reaches his conclusions in neuroscience. And that map is the timeline of his life.

Goldberg says, “I believe that ideas are best understood when considered in the context in which they arise. Therefore, interwoven with the discussion of various topics of cognitive neuroscience are personal vignettes about my teachers, about my friends, about myself, and about the times in which we live.”

Enjoy mapping things out, and playing map-memory games with yourself whenever you have a four-item or eight-item grocery store list (you know, you could do non-multiples of four as well: just don’t fill every corner of each room). :)

And play with writing about ideas in the manner in which they had come to you – unpacking the way in which you figured something out – that story of how you figured it out is sometimes the driver of what it was that you figured out.

Take-away: Write as if you are a map, and as if you’re describing yourself.

Three Components of Intuition

Posted on by Senia

I’ve been thinking about how I would define intuition. And in thinking about this, I’ve been looking into the commonly-held beliefs about intuition. This post is about the components of intuition. A post later in the week will be about the definition. Enjoy!

1) Lack of rationalization.
If you look up “rational” in the dictionary, you’ll find it means having reason, and if you then look up “reason,” you’ll find that it means thinking in an orderly way. Many researchers and writers on the topic of intuition define intuition as not being orderly, as having no rationalization. Here are some excerpts from intuition definitions: “without observation or reason” (Myers), “little or no conscious deliberation” (Hogarth), and “independently of any reasoning process” (Schultz).

2) Non-sequential.
Furthermore, many researchers many intuition researchers also confirm that intuition is not sequential. As described by Hayashi (2001), economics Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon says, “All the time, we are reaching conclusions on the basis of things that go on in our perceptual system, where we’re aware of the result of the perception but we’re not aware of the steps.” Economics Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman describes the reasoning processes as serial, i.e. in reasoning processes, there is one process that follows another. I would add to Kahneman’s description that each such process is a series of rational processes: giving someone directions is a series of step-by-step explanations. Therefore, rational processes are step-by-step and sequential in nature whereas intuition-based processes are not. Additionally, Day (1996), an intuition practitioner and trainer, includes the terms “nonlinear, nonempirical process” in her definition of intuition.

3) Includes insight.
Dijksterhuis et al., who write many articles about unconscious thought like intuition, describe the manner in which an intuitive thought “pop[s] into consciousness” as deliberation-without-attention, i.e. that the mind is deliberating without any attention to that process, and at the end of that deliberating in the unconscious thought process, there is an insight from the unconscious to the conscious. A sudden transition to a conscious preference characterizes intuition’s shortcut qualities. Many intuition researchers use a definition of intuition that includes the concept of directness and speed inherent in shortcuts; for example, intuition definitions include the following: “direct knowledge [and] immediate insight” (Myers), “sudden appearance” (Welling), and “directly perceive” (Schultz).

Intuition is a shortcut in that it bypasses the step-by-step process, just like finding a shortcut through the woods rather than taking the trail. To view this from the literary angle, Myers describes that the poet Amy Lowell was asked, “How are poems made?” She replied, “I don’t know … I meet them where they touch consciousness and that is already a considerable distance along the road of evolution.”

There can be a sense of revelation when the conscious mind realizes something that was already obvious to the unconscious mind, writes Hayashi, in describing Henry Mintzberg, who studies intuitive decision-making. Hayashi writes about Mintzberg’s conclusions, “This helps explain the “aha” sensation you experience when you learn something that you actually already knew.” In this sense, intuition is a shortcut through the process of rationalization.

Keywords: Psychology. Intuition. Rational. Reason.
Sources:
* Day, L. (1996). Practical Intuition. New York: Broadway Books.
* Dijksterhuis, A., Bos, M., Nordgren, L. and van Baaren, R. (2006) On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect. Science, 311(17), 1005-1007.
* Hayashi, A. (2001). When to Trust Your Gut. In Harvard Business Review on Decision Making (pp. 169-187). Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
* Hogarth, R. (2001). Educating Intuition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

* Kahneman, D. (2002) Maps of bounded rationality: A perspective on intuitive judgment and choice. Nobel Prize Lecture.
* Myers, D. (2002). Intuition: Its Power and Perils. New Haven: Yale University Press.
* Schultz, M.L. (1998). Awakening Intuition: Using Your Mind-Body Network for Insight and Healing. New York: Random House Press.
* Welling, H. (2006). The Intuitive Process: The Case of Psychotherapy. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 15(1), 19–47.