The more we learn, the more intelligent we become.
The more intelligent we become, the more we come to rely on our intelligence to make quick decisions.
It is also assumed that the more intelligent you are, the quicker would be your decision-making capability – a sign that you are now an expert!
It is true that after spending a considerable amount of time, one does become quicker at decision-making. These decisions come out of sheer repetition of doing the things over and over again, thereby, making you an expert.
Being an expert is not just limited to the really difficult subjects, or Nobel Prize winning scientific research, or the disruptive innovations – they are also in the realm of doing day-to-day activities.
For example, most of us adults, can tie our shoelaces without even looking at them. As children we would need to look carefully, hold them properly, remember which lace goes over and which one comes under and then pull it enough just to form the equal bows.
In fact the phrase, “I can do it blind-folded” has come to mean that a person is an expert.
When making quick decisions our brain searches our memories and co-relates the presented situation with those memories, calls upon our skills and sets us into actions (or words) by finding the fastest-possible way of dealing with the situation.
These almost unconscious and automatic routines (often called heuristics, from the Greek word heuriskein, meaning “find”) help us to quickly understand, and de-code, complex situations.
Finding the fastest way to deal with routine situations is an extremely efficient use of our brain, as we don’t have to deliberate on each and every step that we take for each and every action that we do, every minute of every day.
Being the very same humans as we are, and using the very same brains that we have, we apply heuristics in our professional work too!
But here’s a word of caution: Such decision-making is often prone to errors and one must be aware of the hidden, decision-making “traps” that we can fall into.
