Unlocking your Intuition

problem-solvingpsychologyintuition

Slow Brain vs. Fast Brain

The slow brain deals with reasoning and conscious thinking, whereas the fast brain is for intuition, feel-based thinking, patterns and unconscious thinking.

Make them work together.

Get ideas from intuition, and details from reasoning

— Colin Galen

How to improve intuition

  • Pick some problems that are too hard for me
  • Immediately read the solution
  • This creates a mental map of problem components and solution ideas
  • Make the components easy to remember plain English

Solving vs. Mental Mapping

The time you spend on a problem matters.

Slow solving (solve problem yourself)

  • Deeper understanding of problems
  • improves logic/reasoning
  • Improves intuition

Fast mapping (see solution)

  • improves intuition faster

Remarks

  • You need to have both
  • Learn proof techniques to validate the ideas from your intuition

Problem to solve

  • competitive programming
  • architecture show cases

Youtube: Unlocking Your Intuition: How to Solve Hard Problems Easily