The intuitive mind

How happy are you these days? As remarked in Thinking, Fast and Slow, this is a hard question! It tells us that we typically think in one of two ways: fast, or slow. The fast system is the intuitive “gut” response, the slow system is the rational part of the brain which takes more effort and which is often bypassed. The most lovely example of the two systems is the following riddle,

A bat and a ball cost \$1.10 in total. The bat costs \$1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Well, obviously, \$0.10! That’s the answer that feels intuitively correct.
…
But wait, that gives a total cost of \$0.10+\$1.10=\$1.20, which is wrong!
As told in the book, people who give the correct answer do not skip the intuitive wrong answer, they’re merely better at suppressing their gut feeling for a moment!

There is another interesting point in Thinking, Fast and Slow, which remarks the ease at which the fast system can answer dimensional questions. One example to show the flexibility we have in this regard:

If Sam were as tall as he is intelligent, how tall would he be?

Say, this Sam would be a rather intelligent person. We would perhaps think

180 cm?

No, that feels too small

220 cm?

No, that seems a bit outlandish,

about 195 cm.

Yeah, that feels about right.
This gut-response is entirely effortlessly. Illogical, but effortless.

The key aspect is that we are given a frame that the answer should conform to: human tallness. Giving such answers is, apparently, remarkably simple for our minds!

In the same way, answering the question “how happy are you these days” is pretty hard. There are so many things to consider that our “fast” system cannot possibly help us out here. But if you had to give an answer to the question “how happy am I at this very moment, on a scale of 0 to 10”, you would get an immediate response quickly and intuitively. The answer may even sometimes surprise you, despite “feeling” that it is right! Our exact emotional state may only be revealed to us when we interrogate ourselves. (Note that I don’t claim that you cannot be aware of feeling good or bad without these steps. Merely, knowing “exactly” how you feel is not something that happens automatically. Only by supplying a mental framework (e.g., testing for specific emotions, rating them from 0 to 10, …) can we start to understand how we feel in any detail.)

Changing the scales

The above section has given us a way to make your inner emotional state tractable. You ask yourself a question (“how happy/angry/sad/hurt/overwhelmed/… do I feel at this moment, on a scale of 0 to 10?”), and you know the answer instantaneously, somehow, in a way and detail you didn’t know before. In a one-liner: the dashboard to your feelings works by touch, not by vision. I think that it’s important to have such a tool available to yourself. Sometimes we think we feel a certain “hard” way (say, angry), when in reality a “soft” emotion lies underneath (say, we are feeling stressed, not listened to, insecure, or …), but we simply miss our actual emotional state and do not address it appropriately.

Different emotions cause different actions (note the word motion within emotion!), so a better handle on your emotions can cause more pro-active and productive outcomes. That changing your inner world can change your behavior is the main assumption underlying cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT gives several methods to try and change one’s behavior by challenging thoughts and feelings that cause negative effects. In so-called “third-wave psychotherapies”, influences from Eastern philosophies are included in CBT. These psychotherapy methods claim that the CBT method of trying to control the intensity of negative emotions only makes them stronger. This leads to paradoxical outcomes, e.g., trying to be happy makes you miserable.

So, what is the opposite of trying to control your thoughts/feelings? The answer is accepting your thoughts/feelings. That can be pretty hard in and by itself. But the third-wave methods go about this by projecting your feelings onto physical and personal scales, rather than graded scales. What that means is that the question

“how do I feel X right now, on a scale of 0 to 10?”,

gets replaced with

“how do I feel X right now, as a bodily sensation?”,

or

“how do I feel X right now, if it were a person?”.

The fact that people can answer these questions at all shows the magic of the intuitive mind. We can produce answers quickly, projected onto arbitrary dimensions. Despite the lack of logic in the questions, there is a gut response. An answer. One that feels right.

The key aspect of the latter two questions is two-fold.

  1. First of all, the answers are not graded. If one day you feel your stress as a knot in the pit of your stomach, and another you feel your stress as a heaviness pressing on your lungs, then any comparison between the two is essentially meaningless. The bodily sensation just “is” what it is, today. This massively aids with an acceptance of your feelings.
  2. Second of all, it gives you a way to approach your feelings.
    • For example, you can realize that your stress is just a knot in your stomach! The rest of your body still works as it did before. Emotions don’t have to overwhelm you. You’re bigger than what’s bugging you, physically!
    • Or, if you imagine your emotions as characters living within you, as in the Pixar movie Inside Out (2015), you can see whether these characters are really trying to tell you something (in the way that angry emotions may actually reflect underlying emotions of insecurity) and whether there is something positive that can be done with it.

In other words, third-wave psychotherapies ask different questions about feelings. What we care about is not how we grade our emotions (not “a little”, or “a lot”, or “7/10”), but how we can conceptualize them as physical or personal features. The effect is real and significant. I can attest to this.