7. Effortless skill takes a lot of effort
I was talking the other day to someone who said that they practiced Chi Kung, but they didn’t do any formal movements or set breathing. They did it intuitively, they said. They also allowed their body’s needs for nutrition to guide their eating and their own instincts would be a better guide to martial arts techniques in the event of having to fight. Now this got me thinking. This idea of intuition needs some unpacking. In the case of this particular person it took a couple of questions to establish that they knew almost nothing about Chi Kung and whatever they thought they were doing; their use of Chi Kung was limited to the name. However, it did make me wonder, how much can we listen to our body, rely on intuition and follow our instincts?
I found myself remembering musicians who did, it seemed, play by intuition. They could make up the melody as they played it, totally improvised, spontaneous, fitting the mood of the listeners and apparently utterly inspired. Ah, but hold on. Did they pick up an instrument for the first time and do that? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. What they did was, they practiced with their instrument until it became as extension of their own body, until they played it unconsciously. They learned how music is structured so that they would stay within a key without giving it a second thought and if they moved from a major to a minor key and changed the tempo during a piece, it would be unconsciously deliberate to change the mood. Their understanding of what order of notes would ‘work’ was also perfectly unconscious. Such playing is not really intuitive and instinctive, it is the result of years of learned method and technique, but learned so well that it can be done without the effort of the cerebral cortex. It is the cerebellum, an area of the brain whose functions we are not conscious of, that is responsible for such actions; much the way most people can walk, use a knife and fork or indeed the way typists don’t need to consider the keys, but simply look at the screen and choose their words.
What we consider intuition is principally the ability to know or do something unconsciously. For example, you realise that you are aware of a person in a crowded room who is feeling nervous or out of place. Is that intuition or did you simply notice some body language that implied such feelings, but you were not aware of the initial perception because that happened at an unconscious level. Of course, the amount of our perceptions that reach the conscious level is truly tiny, in the region of a billionth of the actual information that comes in through our various senses. The bits of information that reach the conscious part of the mind will depend on what we are habitually tuned in to. The same will be true for those who just know what the weather is going to do etc.
So, what about intuitively knowing how to eat, exercise or even fight? Ask yourself this, does your appetite always direct you to the right balance of nutrition? We appear to have evolved over millennia while sufficient nutrition was a rarity. As a result, we all have an inbuilt tendency to fill up when we get the chance. We ‘intuitively’ know that fat has a lot of potential energy, so are automatically drawn to it. We know ‘intuitively’ that a fruit that is ripe won’t give you a bad stomach, is sweet and also full of energy, so again we are drawn to it. During the millions of years of scarcity these were useful survival instincts, but today, when we have access to unlimited fat and sweet foods, following our intuition, our instincts, will kill us. Whenever I hear someone say they just intuitively know what is a healthy diet, it always turns out to be a combination of what they were fed as children and what they have learned since. What they really mean is that they don’t consciously consider it, but of course their unconscious, learned knowledge is guiding them. It may be that their learned knowledge is, fortunately, correct and in which case, they may well appear to have ‘good intuition’.
It seems therefore that if, and only if, you have a thoroughly learned skill, you will likely reach the point of using it unconsciously, which will seem to you as if you are not thinking about it, because consciously, you’re not. You may well think of that as intuition or indeed it may feel like inspiration but actually it just means that you are very proficient. One person may certainly aggressively fight with what they think of as instinct, but it is most likely just a few moves that they have seen others do, have imagined doing them (which the unconscious brain will have remembered as if real) and they aren’t consciously thinking about what they are doing because they are simply in a fight or flight state. Such a person will likely lose to anyone with real skill, but they may well do okay against another untrained person by a combination of a simple technique and a lot of aggression.
It is always going to be the case that what seems to be intuitive, instinctive, unconscious skills are always the result of many hours of training. Shifting skills back to the unconscious cerebellum is the normal process of learning. Effortless skill, takes a lot of effort.