The Intuitive Mind

So how smart is intelligence, really?

A recent Dutch study has shown that when decisions are very complicated, people are better off “sleeping on it,” a piece of folk wisdom that until recently was scoffed at.11

“People can only focus on a limited amount of information,” says the study which is cited in the journal Science. “The conscious brain should be reserved for simple choices like picking between towels and shampoos.”

Especially when it came to more complicated decisions involving 12 or more criteria, conscious deciders were at a loss; they succeeded only 23 percent of the time, while the unconscious decision makers succeeded 60 percent of the time.

Lead researcher Dr. Ap Dijksterhuis suggests that when you have to make a complex decision, you should gather all the information you can and consciously reflect on it; but then, he says, you should sleep on the information, letting your unconscious mind make the decision for you.

In short, there is another kind of intelligence, too. It is the more ancient variety—the intelligence of animals, the intelligence that distills experience and instinct into an intuition about things. It is the intelligence it takes to read people and to have a feeling about a situation. It is the intelligence that draws not only from words and symbols, but from the weather, the way people smile, and the way they talk. You might call it “social intelligence,” as opposed to the other sort, which is “techno intelligence” or “literary ...

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