Behind the Brain

So what is intuition? We all have felt it before, that “gut” feeling in our stomach, warning us. But what exactly is it. The more you think about it, the harder it becomes to define. Neuroscientists have defined it as the results of memories, emotions, and unconscious cognition. So we can define memories and emotions in scientific terms, though it is a complex process. But how can we define unconscious cognition? Let’s start with emotions and memories.

Emotions:

According to the American Psychological Association (APA), emotion is defined as “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral and physiological elements.” Well honestly, that’s quite tough to understand so let’s break it down. The experiential elements of emotion are experiencing the event that caused a emotion. The physiological elements referred to simply talk about the part of the brain that deals with emotions, the temporal lobe of the cerebrum, and more specifically, the hippocampus as well as neurotransmitters such as dopamine that convey a certain feeling. Behavior elements is just talking about the signs of emotion, such as a smile, or tears, or shouting. So to summarize, emotions are just experiencing an event, our brains releasing certain neurotransmitters to convey certain feelings based on whether the event was good or bad, and our behavior communicating that feeling to others through the use of facial/ hand gestures, and actions.

Memory:

There are three major parts to memory: Encoding, Storage, Retrieval. Encoding refers to recording any memory, storage refers to storing the memory, while retrieval refers to remembering, or recalling the memory.

Encoding & Storage:

Memories are formed when slight changes are made in connections between neurons. These changes are stored in the hippocampus. The hippocampus mostly stores general details while the prefrontal cortex stores the specific details. Memories are stored in three categories: Sensory, short-term, and long-term. Most sensory memories are quickly forgotten, while short-term and long-term memories last longer.

Retrieving:

Retrieving memories is a more complex process. To remember something, from short-term or long-term is easier, because those memories are organized much better. For sensory memories, any clue such as scent or sound or sight will help us. This sensory clue will link us to the all memories involving the same sensory clue. From there we can easily remember whichever memory we were trying to remember.

Unconscious Cognition & Chess:

So now that we have covered emotion and memory, let’s move on to unconscious cognition. Cognition, as a definition is simply, “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” Or in other words, “thinking or reasoning based on your environment“. That makes sense. What about the unconscious part? Well unconscious literally means, “unaware of and not responding to your surroundings“. Okay so now we have both the definitions so…

Wait. Don’t those definitions contradict themselves? And here is the problem with defining unconscious cognition. Scientists have struggled to define it, yet we see it appear everywhere, from implicit bias, to dreaming, to the subject of this article, intuition.

So, to define intuition, we need to find anything that use cognition without being conscious, and then analyze its behavior. Viola! Lc0!

Leela (Lc0) Chess Engine

For a lot of you, that last sentence may have been confusing. So let me explain. We all know the board game chess. Chess, by nature, is an abstract strategy game. This means that there is no hidden information (like cards), or any chance of luck (like monopoly).

Because of this property of chess, several chess enthusiasts began to develop an computer at IBM in 1985, a chess engine, that could play chess by itself. They named this chess engine DeepBlue.

DeepBlue used a method known as tree-searching, where it would analyze several moves into the future, before actually playing its move. After a few years of development, DeepBlue eventually beat the world chess champion of the time, Garry Kasparov. Ever since then, several other companies have made their own tree-searching chess engines. But then, Google changed the game by introducing AI to the chess engine field, with their AlphaZero. AlphaZero was extremely successful, defeating the best tree-searching engine of its time, Stockfish 8.

Now, Lc0 is a community based AI chess engine. But what’s special about Lc0 is that you can edit its settings to perform 0 calculations. It would look 0 total moves into the future, and instead just use its intuition! And the best part? Lc0 is a machine, so it has no consciousness!

So, what is Lc0’s secret? Pattern recognition. Leela has very poor calculating power compared to other engines, so rather than actually calculating variations, Lc0 identifies characteristics of a position that make it better or worse due to its past experiences (memory), and then is able to identify whether its current position would be better after playing a certain move, or worse. This helps Lc0 calculate efficiently and allows it to play much more instinctively/intuitively.

Back to Intuition

Disclaimer: Though all the above content has been scientifically proven, everything below is an hypothesis I have made. It does have some scientific merit, but not enough to call it a fact.

Now let’s step out of the world of chess engines, and go back to ourselves. Now with all of this knowledge, what is intuition? In my opinion, intuition is the result of us recognizing sensory cues in the present, mistakenly remembering past experiences where we had the same sensory cue, and recalling the feeling that we felt from the past experience. AKA, pattern recognition.

Now I say “mistakenly” but this process actually helps us not repeat the same mistakes, over and over again. You might argue saying that you have felt a gut feeling about something that you never did before. And yes, maybe you didn’t do it before. But my theory still holds. Let me give you an example:

Example

Let’s say you are walking down a dark alley. Your intuition tells you are being followed and your heart begins to beat faster. Now why did this happen? For the sake of the example, let’s assume before this incident, you were never followed, and you never thought you were being followed. Also let’s assume no one was even in the alley, so your eyes couldn’t have seen someone. If you want, try to figure this out yourself. Answer is below.

Answer:

As I mentioned before, there are three steps to intuition. Sensory cue, mistakenly remembering another memory (pattern recognition), sending out neurotransmitter to convey feeling you felt during that other memory.

Step 1: Dark alley is the only sensory cue you needed

Step 2: You watched a movie/ read a book/ heard a story in which someone was followed in a dark alley.

Step 3: The MOST important step is right here. BECAUSE you felt scared while watching the movie/ reading the book/ hearing the story, those same neurotransmitters were sent out while you were walking down the dark alley, resulting in you feeling scared and thus your heart beating faster.