Expert Intuition

The knowledge required to ride a bicycle can’t be fully captured in words and conveyed to others. We need “tacit knowledge,” the sort we only get from bruising experience.

Mētis knowledge is often so implicit and automatic that its bearer is at a loss to explain it. ... A staple of early medical training, I have been told, is the story of a physician who, at the turn of the century, had a spectacularly high success rate in diagnosing syphilis in its early stages. Laboratory tests confirmed his diagnoses, but he himself did not know precisely what it was that he detected in the physical exams that led him to his conclusions. Intrigued by his success, hospital administrators asked two other doctors to closely observe his examination of patients over several weeks and to see if they could spot what he was picking up. At long last, they and the doctor realized that he was unconsciously registering the patients slight eye tremor.

The Universal Turing Machine of 1936 gets all the attention, but Turing’s O-machines of 1939 may be closer to the way intelligence (real and artificial) works: logical sequences are followed for a certain number of steps, with intuition bridging the intervening gaps. “Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity,” Turing explained. “Intuition consists in making spontaneous judgments which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. These judgments are often but by no means invariably correct (leaving aside the question what is meant by ‘correct’).”

I have noticed over the years, the really good code I would write was when I'm in complete flow—just totally unaware of time: not even really thinking about the program, just sitting there in a relaxed state just typing this stuff and watching it come out on the screen as I type it in. That code's going to be OK. The stuff where you can't concentrate and something's saying, “No, no, no, this is wrong, wrong, wrong”—I was ignoring that years ago.

Byron Howard, one of our directors at Disney, told me that when he was learning to play the guitar, a teacher taught him the phrase, “If you think, you stink.” The idea resonated with him—and it informs his work as a director to this day. “The goal is to get so comfortable and relaxed with your instrument, or process, that you can just get Zen with it and let the music flow without thinking,” he told me.

The one element of the stroke Paul had tried to remember was the one thing he didn’t do! Everything else had been absorbed and reproduced without a word being uttered or an instruction being given! I was beginning to learn what all good pros and students of tennis must learn: that images are better than words, showing better than telling, too much instruction worse than none, and that trying often produces negative results.

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment.