Page 105 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

mental capacities to an astonishi ng degree of intensity in life-or-de ath
moments. B ut can we do this at will?

When I started thinking about ho w I coul d cons istently make my
perception of time be different from my oppo nen ts’, I realized tha t I ha d to
delve into the operating mechanism of int ui tion. I sus pect we have all ha d the
experience of being stumped by somethi ng, eventual ly moving on to

something else, and then suddenly kno wing the answer to the ini tial pr obl em.
Most of us have also had the experience of meeting someone and ha ving a
powerfully good or bad feeling abo ut them , witho ut kno wing why. I ha ve
found that, even if a few times it has taken years to pan out , the se gui di ng

instincts have been on the money. Along the same lines, in my che ss da ys,
nearly all of my revelatory moments emerged from the unco ns cious . My numbers
to leave numbers approach to chess study was my way of having a worki ng
relationship with the unconscious parts of my mind. I woul d take in vast

amounts of technical information that my br ain somehow put toge the r int o
bursts of insight that felt more like mus ic or wind than mathe matical
combinations. Increasingly, I had the sense that the key to thes e leaps was
interconnectedness—some part of my bei ng was har moni zing all my relevant

knowledge, making it gel into one po tent erupt ion, and sudde nl y the
enigmatic was crystal-clear. B ut what was really hap pen ing?
The question of intuition is ho tly deb ated among ps ycho logi sts,
philosophers, and artists, and it has been a sour ce of much research and tho ught

in my life. My grandmother, Stella Waitzkin, a boldl y creative Abs tract
Expressionist painter and sculptor, us ed to tell me that int ui tion was the ha nd
of God. Artists often refer to int ui tion as a mus e. In the introduc tion, I
mentioned that one philosophy professor of mine at Colum bi a Uni versity told

me, rather proudly, that the very notion of intui tion is incoher ent—i t do esn’t
exist. In my opinion, intuition is our most valuable compas s in thi s world. It is
the bridge between the unconscious and the cons cious mind, and it is huge ly
important to keep in touch with what makes it tick. If we get so caught up in

narcissistic academic literalism that we di smiss intui tion as nonex istent be caus e
we don’t fully understand it, or if we bl ithel y cons ider the unco ns cious to be a
piece of machinery that operates mystically in a realm that we ha ve no
connection to, then we lose the rich oppo rtuni ty to have open communi cation

with the wellspring of our creativity.