During World War II, S.L.A. Marshall, a war historian, interviewed fighting men immediately after battle – Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Washington DC: Infantry Journal Press, 1947). To the astonishment of all, he observed that at most, only 25% of the men actually engaged in the battle, either firing a rifle or in hand-to-hand combat.  The vast majority were, understandably, frightened and hiding in the trenches.  Although the military at first criticized the findings, they eventually embraced them and hired psychologists to specifically develop men’s likelihood to fight in combat.  The result was intensive “kill” training, not unlike conditioning mice to take a certain path to find cheese in a maze, that, through repetitive practice, it eventually became an automatic reflex for a man to kill.  Marshall conducted the same interviews in Vietnam and the results were an astounding turn-around, with over 95% of the men engaging in battle.

So, can you develop “intuition” from conditioning – or, is it one in the same?  Taking the game of chess as an example, can repetitive practice of pattern recognition and other chess themes bring one to the point of it becoming an automatic reflex?  In Roger Penrose’s book “The New Emperor’s Mind”, he asserts that it is physically impossible for the human brain to respond intelligently to an external stimulus in less than a second (he used examples from responding while driving a car, as I recall).  But, in observing online chess play that shows moves in increments of 1/10th of a second, the moves are played with great accuracy within this time interval. If it is physically impossible for the brain to take in the information, process it and tell the hand to move appropriately within that time frame, then what is going on?  Is it, as per the US military’s response to the S.L.A. Marshall findings, a conditioned reflex developed from intense repetitive practice?  Perhaps.  This may be part of the underlying mechanism related to Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule”, whereby on average it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in a given field.

Perhaps in some distant dystopia, humans will be identified from birth for certain functional societal roles, and introduced to such training to efficiently distribute our workload, no doubt to free scciety’s “elite” to better enjoy their freedom from intuition.

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