In to intuition

I wanted to comment about the story from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that I excerpted here on the blog. Namely, I wanted to highlight the fact that the author of the story has an implicit mistrust of intuition. This is a continual source of frustration for me as a former, and successful, professional investor. Our culture is one that does not respect the powerful information that comes from intuition. In fact, I was having lunch with a former colleague of mine recently and asked him for a definition of intuition and he more or less said that it was a euphemism for luck.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Intuition is the source of intelligence that comes from the right brain, whereas intellect is the intelligence that comes from the left brain. There are moments in life where there are many facts present in a situation that calls for you to make a decision. In these moments, such as comparing two firm mortgage offers, it makes sense to use the analytical faculties afforded to us by our left brains. However, when it comes to making judgments about the future, when the facts are unknowable ahead of time, and making judgments about people, whose future behaviors are unknowable ahead of time also, then our intuition is all that we have at our disposal.

The right brain is excellent at synthesizing information and seeing pertinence in certain pieces of information when a plethora of data confronts us before making a decision. Unfortunately, in my experience it is actually the “rational” brain that oftentimes short circuits the accurate evaluations of the right brain. How often has each of us found ourselves saying, “I should have trusted my gut about that?” The author of yesterday’s article in all likelihood had reservations about his investment with Madoff, but his rational brain undercut the powerful signals being sent to him by his right brain. In fact, I am certain of it. The signals would have come to him in the form of feelings of ill ease. We all get these feelings but most of us choose to ignore them, don’t we?

The problem is that we go to school to learn how to think and not how to feel. So how do we as a culture change this situation so that we are making full use of our brain’s capacity to accurately perceive the world around us? A start would be to begin to teach people how to recognize the difference between a thought and a feeling. Unfortunately, for most of us, we have sharp and strong feelings in response to the world but we are so used to immediately assigning a word to that feeling in order to describe it. The problem is that we then have converted the feeling into a thought and the essence of the information contained within the feeling is lost.

The second thing that we each need to learn is how to tell the difference between our minds and our egos. I describe the egoic brain as being the one that is actually populated with and driven by irrational thoughts and emotions. The source of these emotions and thoughts is usually an intricate and labyrinthine combination of fears and desires. Many of these fears and desires have taken on a life of their own and have coalesced into actual behaviors. Behaviors are of course practically autonomic programs that we have constructed to compensate for our feelings of vulnerability/insecurity when stimuli expose our fears and desires. The mind, as I define it, is the observer of all of this brain chatter. Through meditation you can eventually learn to tell the difference between your ego and your mind in a real-time and conscious fashion. Once consciousness of the ego is attained then the apparatuses of the ego can begin to be dismantled. Why is this important? It is important because the right brain communicates information to us in the form of feelings all of the time. However, those feelings are very, very, very, very difficult to distinguish from the noise of the egoic brain. If the ego can be tamed then the intuition, instead of being derided and ignored, is celebrated and welcomed as a decision-making tool.

This is one of the reasons why the “Anything For A Dollar” culture of the United States is so very destructive for each of us. As we have created a near-religious pursuit of money we have provided an acceptable forum to engage in desires that power our egos and obscure and pollute one half of our brain’s power. If you are looking for evidence of the short-circuiting of our intuition then look no further than our current financial disaster where very intelligent people made very poor decisions, despite actually having all of the necessary information to avoid it. The ignorance and derision of our intuitions needs to stop if we are to avoid more such disasters in the future.

I hope that each of you has a good day!

Jason

PS – In my biography it mentions that I am writing a book about investing…the book garnering the most interest from publishers is about the very subject of today’s posting. If you would like to see the full exposition of these ideas then keep your fingers crossed that the book finds a publisher and shelf-space in a bookstore near you.