Learned Intuition: Patrick Schwerdtfeger at TEDxSacramentoSalon

[Music] [Applause] [Music] I'm sure most of us including myself by the way fantasize his children about becoming a superhero one day well it turns out that it actually is possible to do just that let me give you a few examples in his book entitled the social animal David Brooks discussed u.s. soldiers who had been to Iraq and Afghanistan on multiple deployments and got to a point some of them where they could look down a street just like this and be able to predict with incredible accuracy if there was an AED an improvised explosive device they could predict if there was a bomb on that street that's like magic to me and the most interesting part is when you ask these soldiers how they did it they couldn't answer the question they didn't know themselves they said things like it felt cold or it felt wrong it's like magic to me in his book entitled blink Malcolm Gladwell discussed a very well-known tennis coach by the name of Victor Aden been coaching and playing tennis for 20 30 even 40 years got to a point where he could watch a tennis match on television and be able to predict with near 100% accuracy if the player was about to double fault but before the player had even touched the ball that's like superhuman but yet again he went through the video footage afterwards to try to determine the patterns that he was seeing with his eyes to make those predictions and he could not find those patterns or maybe closer to home any parent can look at her child and know in an instant what she's thinking and of course we've all driven on these California freeways and we see a car in front of us in traffic and we know that that car is about to change lanes but before they've even activated their blinker we saw something we didn't know what it was but we knew that car was about to change lanes and then sure enough the car changes lanes these are intuitions these are intuitions that we develop when we have familiarity with a given situation so it turns out that the subconscious mind can make roughly 10 million observations in any given setting even all of you here today you've made countless observations 10 million perhaps the seat you're sitting in the people around you a piece of lint on the floor a cent in the air if it's hot or cold how you feel indifferent with different thoughts these are all observations that you're making all the time but at the same time your conscious mind can only keep track of about 40 it's incredible it actually depends on the research it ranges from 40 to about a hundred and fifty but let's just use ten million in this unconscious mind to a hundred in the conscious mind to make the numbers easy that means that 99.999% of the observations you make you're not even consciously aware of well it turns out that there's a lot of research there's literally been an explosion of research in this area over the past 15 years or so under umbrellas like neuroscience and cognitive psychology behavioral economics and the scientists who are conducting these studies and doing this research and also the authors who are writing about this research tend to focus on number one understanding the immense capacity of our unconscious mind or to the implications for companies who are trying to use this information to help them market their products and services more effectively or three how we can in fact protect ourselves from the snap decisions in the snap judgments that we make as a result of these unconscious observations right these intuitions come from the 10 million unconscious observations not the 100 conscious ones but those reasons aren't the reasons for my presentation today the reasons for my present presentation today is to use it let's leverage it let's leverage the capabilities of her unconscious mind in our aware earnest of how it actually functions to further our own goals and our own aspirations Adrienne de Groot was famous for doing a series of studies in the 1940s 50s and 60s around the game of chess and in one study in particular he had chess novices and chess masters involved and in both cases they were shown a chess board of a chess game halfway in progress but they were only allowed to see that chess board for five seconds then the curtain went down and they got a fresh board and they had to recreate what they saw in the chest novices this was a this is really a difficult task and they got on average four or five maybe six pieces right after that they couldn't remember any more but of course for the chess masters this was easy because they had the familiarity they could chunk the information down they saw this storyline of the game in progress they saw the strategy of both sides so for them it was very easy to recreate what they saw and so what we learn is that intuition these intuitions are in fact a combination of experience and expertise when you have experience and expertise in a given area these intuitions these almost superhuman intuitions come automatically so the question is what's the fastest way to get experience in expertise in a given setting and the answer to that question is immersion when you immerse yourself into something you automatically get that experience and expertise much much quicker so intuitively it makes a lot of sense that if you want to learn French the best way to do that is to go to France and live there for a period of time you would learn far more by living in France than by taking French lessons every week for months or even years or if you wanted to learn to become a snowboarder this one's fascinating if you want to learn to snowboard you're much better off going five days in a row then going one day every week for five weeks in both cases you're on the mountain for five days but you see when you do it all at one time it your unconscious mind an opportunity to see those patterns to organize all that new information and start to understand you move up that learning curve way way quicker and so my challenge to all of you is to take a more active role in your own lives with this knowledge take a more active role and use immersion and incorporate intentional immersion into your lives in the areas in which you're passionate because if you do that you're gonna develop superhuman intuitions that will allow you to advance much much quicker and in doing that you will take one giant step to becoming a superhero of your own thank you [Music] [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 110,214

Rating: 4.765708 out of 5

Keywords: subconcious, English Language (Human Language), ted, motivational, TEDx, ted talk, inspiring, salon, ted x, tedx talks, tedxsacramento2012, english, tedxsacramento, United States Of America (Country), imersion, tedx, 2012, intuition, blink, sacramento, tedxsacramentosalon, tedx talk, ted talks

Id: _FfypyFsGhk

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2013