What is Intuition? Part 2: Psychology and Physics
We all know that one student. The one that always seems to know how physics works while everyone else is busy trying to figure out how to draw the force diagram. But isn’t physics supposed to be something natural? After all, we can literally see objects in front of our very own eyes, so should we not be able to understand how things work?
As it turns out, like many other things in life, some people just seem to “get it.” Physics is a subject that often requires us to make the familiar strange, asking us to understand the underlying concepts that explain why things act the way they do. In other words, there is a bit of intuition involved in understanding physical processes.
Similar to language acquisition, there have been theories formulated to explain why we can grasp physical concepts intuitively. In this second part of a multipart series on intuition, we will look into some of the reasons that can account for this.
physical intuition?
The Confluence of Psychology and Physics
“Class, we are going to analyze the role of torque in explaining the reason that it is easier to swing a door open by pushing further away from the hinge. Let us start by drawing force diagrams,” your physics teacher might say.
You start out drawing your diagrams, yet are still stymied as you struggle to make sense of what is given in front of you. Your friend at the desk next to you seems to get it without a problem. But why?
Like language acquisition, intuition plays a role. I will not get too deep into this question because I admittedly do not have a deep understanding of this either. However, I will mention an interesting study done by psychologist Renée Baillargeon with babies.
In the study, Baillargeon presented drawings of a hand pushing a box on a surface. In the different drawings, the box is in various different places along the imaginary surface. In one drawing, the box is completely off the surface, which is physically impossible as many of us know.
While it is difficult to understand why babies act the way they do, during the study, the babies stared at the drawing where the box was floating in midair the longest, with one possible explanation being that the babies understood intuitively that that drawing was physically impossible.
While this might not explain why your friend is rocking the assignment while you are still trying to figure out the problem, it is interesting because it states that there is a possibility that people understand how the physical world works at a basic level, providing us with a framework to work with instead of being left completely in the dark and learning it algorithmically the way computers would have to.
collective consciousness?
Have you ever felt that someone was staring at you? Or that someone was talking about you behind your back? Or just had a feeling that something was off right when you walked into the room?
Many of us likely have experienced this, yet it can be difficult to explain. After all, why is it that you can feel it when no one is telling you any of this? Why can you sense things when you are not even in the same room? While I cannot say that I know the answer to this, an interesting concept of collective consciousness is something that I will explore here.
What is Collective Consciousness?
Before we begin to dive into the answer to that question, let us look into what it means to be conscious. After all, how are you aware of what is going on? Can you even be aware of what is going on?
To date, consciousness is one of the most difficult concepts for scientists to understand. We cannot observe consciousness the way that we can observe a supernova happening light-years away using a telescope. Prying open a human brain would alter the state of mind of the brain that we are observing, if not downright killing it. We likely know less about what it means to be conscious than we do about how quantum physics works. However, a simplistic definition, which I will use, is that being conscious means being aware of your actions and thoughts.
“If I am aware of my own thoughts, then how can we all share this awareness collectively?” you might ask.
This question is admittedly difficult to understand, but there are various theories as to why it occurs. An interesting theory is that this consciousness is all around the universe, that is, even non-humans have this collective consciousness. This psychic energy permeates the universe, yet it is not directly observable yet, in a similar manner to which we cannot observe dark energy or antimatter the way that we observe ‘normal’ matter.
This idea struck me because it suggests that there is likely a deep connection between physics and psychology in understanding consciousness. While I am no expert on this issue, I thought this was an interesting idea because that might explain how we gain physical intuition, through the brain waves sent from other people.
Before I end, I did want to make a note that the idea of collective consciousness is also used within sociological circles to describe a common understanding of social norms. This idea is connected to the idea I proposed above.
conclusion
Physical intuition is a tricky subject, but it is one that I find fascinating. Like its language counterpart, there are aspects of the human mind that allow for this to occur. While you might still be stuck on that physics problem or still wondering why you feel someone is talking about you behind your back, I hope that this discussion on physical and psychological intuition has been interesting!