The Intuition Toolkit by Joel Pearson
This was one of those, hey it looks good, airport buys. Plus I’m a sucker for things about pop psychology. Now is it any good?
Flyability. High, we are talking a domestic return trip and you are done kind of read. Font is reasonably large. Not too much text per page; now you could read into that its a bit of a skim on content when its like that, still not like I didn’t open the pages when I bought it.
Ah ha moments? A few, but not about intuition oddly. The intuition stuff is ok, don’t use it when stressed, don’t use it when you have no clue about the topic and so on, basically a bit of common sense. But back to those ah ha moments, as ever in page order:
Eight senses. Never knew this. Which is a touch odd as I’ve read so much, but never seen it argued this way. The extra three are proprioception, vestibular and interoception.1 Which does mean when people are talking about woo woo senses, it should actually be the ninth sense, and not the sixth one!!
Continuous Flash Suppression.2 Just a curiosity on how the brain works really, and how you can see with your eyes, but its your brain that does the heavy lifting. And there are cool (dangerous) ways that it can be messed with.
Depression explanation. I’ve read so much about depression for my own reasons, and yet this has a really good succinct way of saying what is happening, “People suffering major depression often cannot make up their own minds. They tend to get stuck on negative thoughts, often overthinking the causes and consequences of their state, situation or mood.”3 Yup. That’s me.
Hardwired to fear uncertainty.4 Links back to the depression point above, hard to not be fearful when the monkey brain is so craving certainty. Has a nice call out to why Uber is successful; took away the uncertainty of getting a taxi. Finishes with how this is working “The fear you feel of the unknown is not your intuition telling you something is wrong, it’s an instinct and instincts are innate.”
Five star rating. Three out of five. If travelling through an airport and you see the bright yellow book cover and at a loss of what to read, then you could do a lot, lot worse.
Page 21.
Page 55.
Page 84.
Pages 128, 129 & 130.