Yesterday I was reflecting on Thad Starner's distinction between mutlitasking and multiplexing. It reminded me that not too long ago I made made the statement "most things worth thinking about are counter-intuitive, because human intuition is wrong about just about everything."
To which my smart friend Alicia promptly replied that she strongly disagreed. Smart because it got me thinking that there are in fact at least two different kinds of intuition.
There's a first kind of intuition that I was originally thinking about when making the statement - this is intuition based on biological and evolutionary process. This is the kind of intuition that is captured on my favorite page of all the internet, Wikipedia's list of human cognitive biases. This is a list commonly referred to as "all the ways that you could be completely wrong about everything."
So, well-designed environments (both physical and cognitive) - the kind I mentioned are worth thinking about - are the types that recognize that humans are constrained by these limitations, as seemingly unnecessary their design elements may be. The Mother Bear Proverbial Wallet for example, shown below - it's seemingly counter-intuitive to build a product that is intentionally hard to use (the opening mechanism is wirelessly synced to your bank account - becoming more tense as your funds get lower). Though, like great architects might masterfully make use of physical limitations to create efficient physical space, great interaction designers use human cognitive limitations as design constraints for better behaviors.
But there's also a second kind of intuition, the kind Alicia reminded me of - which is more akin to muscle memory or something from the Gladwell-popularized idea of "10,000 hours." This kind of complex intuition is developed by way of individual microexperiences, over time, perhaps through Starner's notion of multiplexing. The kind of intuition that gets me wondering if perhaps much of the charge of long-term memory mechanisms can be characterized by the process of reconstructing neural pathways from disconnected to synergetic, when long-term experience and exposure shape them to do so. (sorry, that statement's a mouthful; see David Linden's The Accidental Mind for a nice primer on the biochemical basis of experience-based memory.)
This kind of intuition is what makes a magician's slight of hand truly "magic" - magic is impressive not because there's some secret that could be divulged, rather it's because the magician has put in the hundreds of hours of work necessary to make 15 seconds of performance seamlessly invisible.
This is the kind of intuition that is behind the original charge of this blog: "how to break anything? observe everything" - a statement about pattern recognition through broad and unrestricted exposure.
