Stress Leaks Through Skin and Is Contagious - Dr. Tara Swart Neuroscientist

 

Should you trust your sixth sense?

Hannah Ewens in The Guardian

To escape an unresolved work challenge, Archimedes went to the local baths. As he got into the water and noticed the liquid spilling over the edge, it happened. The mathematician jumped up and ran home naked, crying “Eureka! I’ve found it!” Over two millennia later, in 2010, it is Gwyneth Paltrow’s 38th birthday weekend in Italy. Her eureka moment is involuntary, like “the ring of a bell that has sounded and cannot be undone”. She knew her marriage was over. Soon after I read about this incident in her infamous conscious uncoupling essay, I saw a name on an email and knew I’d date that person, without knowing who they were or what they looked like. Whether it’s the Archimedes principle or a divorce from Chris Martin or love-at-first-email, intuition is a funny, evasive thing with human consequences.

Following these sudden realisations or hits of intuition used to be the way I lived: a bell would ring out and I’d run fully clothed but without fear from one opportunity to the next. It’s hard to quantify a “just knowing” in the body. If forced to, I’d say my intuition would be instant, inexplicable and irrational. Like if you told the nearest person what you’d just learned, they’d rigidly smile, get up and change seats. For example, I’ve known I’d work at a specific company after hearing it mentioned in a classroom; as with Archimedes, the idea for my first book dropped into my head fully formed; and like Paltrow, I’ve known jarringly, in an otherwise content moment, that a relationship was absolutely over. I’d get it with small, seemingly unimportant things, too. I’d think of a loved one I hadn’t spoken to in months and a minute later they’d call needing my help. This could sound like magical thinking or a collection of unremarkable coincidences. I sincerely don’t know how damning this phenomenon is to write about because, until recently, I hadn’t spoken in depth to anyone about it. But I do suspect that for many of us, intuition is not a completely foreign experience.


About 10 months ago, my internal workings changed. A year prior, I’d followed these moments of intuition into a dream job, new neighbourhood, new friends and a relationship with the person I thought was the love of my life. I was blissfully happy. My world felt so big, as though if I kept using this medium, anything was possible. But almost immediately, it all disappeared in an abrupt and undignified manner. This lightning bolt of change seemed to bring with it the loss of my intuition. 

I have the uncanny feeling of existing outside the flow of life. It’s different to being depressed, it’s more energetic and esoteric: an awareness that everything is growing, flourishing and dying, connections and signs are being traded, and you’ve slipped out of nature’s systemisation. I’m watching the sky for a signal and nothingness stares back at me. I’m not without purpose, but I feel stagnant, disoriented. It seems impossible to make future plans without the inner guidance I once trusted.

Then I realised that if intuition is real, I can study it and try to bring it back.

Despite intuition being one of the most significant concepts in western philosophy, central to the ancient Greeks (Plato and Aristotle), through to thinkers of the early modern period (Descartes) and romanticism (Kant), ideas about it differ. Science and psychology don’t conclusively know what it is either, with research typically building on the work of Nobel prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman, who proposed that we have two different thought systems: one is fast and intuitive, the other is slower and analytical. These various disciplines do, however, acknowledge that it’s important and they do believe it’s real.

Joel Pearson, a psychologist, neuroscientist and author of the forthcoming book The Intuition Toolkit, has given the subject a working definition in order to study it: the learned use of conscious information to improve decisions or actions. “Most people think of it as the gut response,” he tells me. “You feel it in the body and you don’t know where it comes from. It’s knowing what without knowing why.”

Through his research, Pearson has learned that intuition is incredibly useful in a number of situations – and potentially disastrous in others. He uses the acronym Smile. S is for self-awareness: if you’re feeling emotional, don’t trust your intuition. M is for mastery: you need to actually know about the area in which you’re being intuitive. Don’t take a lucky gamble on the stock market based on gut feeling when you know nothing about finance. I is for impulses: you’re not feeling an intuitive draw towards food, drugs, social media… those are cravings. L is for low probability: don’t use intuition for probabilistic judgments. “Anything with numbers or probabilities: whatever you feel is probably wrong,” Pearson says. And the last is E for environment: only trust your intuition in familiar – therefore fairly predictable – environments.

Gut instinct: it can be tremendously effective, but can you trust it? Illustration: Ana Yael


While Pearson insists there is nothing otherworldly about intuition, other branches of knowledge romanticise it in this way. Philosophers Henri Bergson and Carl Jung are famous for infusing something more into its origins. In multiple religious traditions, intuition is associated with a path to the divine. “There’s always been this mystical spiritual overlay, even in the very oldest senses of the term,” says Lisa Osbeck, professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia and co-editor ofthe philosophical book Rational Intuition.

Osbeck has noticed, as I have, that intuition is the latest popular wellness expression. Online courses, coaches and lifestyle influencers encourage followers to heed their intuition, “intuit” the information around them, and live an intuitive life. Together we hypothesise about why this is happening now: a lack of trust in the media, an abundance of information hitting us in our lives and on our screens – everyone telling us what to do to do life right – and a decline of organised religion leaving a spiritual hunger to be sated. “There’s a special appeal to just trusting this bedrock within us,” she says. If the messaging from outside us is stressful and contradictory, then at least there is this sanctified ideal of a trusted inner compass.

In my most discreet asking-for-a-friend voice, I question why people might typically say that they’ve lost their intuition. “They’ve lost confidence in their own judgment,” Osbeck answers. “It’s less threatening to attach it to some special ability that you can gain or lose, like ‘the muse’. It takes the responsibility away from the person.”

I take this eviscerating read of the situation on the chin, but part of me resists. Only I am responsible for acting blindly on intuition and I know that. I now needed to speak to someone who combines all the disciplines: philosophical, psychological and the spiritual. Someone like Fleur Leussink, who trained in neuroscience, became a spiritual adviser to the stars, and now works as an intuition teacher. When she mentioned on the phone she was doing an intuition retreat soon, the first intuitive hit in months arrived: I knew I had to be there.

To use intuition, you must go from the overthinking of the mind into the body and as such, Leussink’s week-long intuition retreats focus on nervous system regulation. This happens with relative ease when you’re deep enough in the Italian countryside with non-committal signal and no internet, the workshop room has the ambience of a church and you’re hugged by woodland from every direction. Days were bookended with various different breathing practices, meditations and somatic movements that forced our bodies to feeling more grounded. This, Leussink advised, “makes space for intuition to rise” up in us.

To benefit from a retreat, you have to see it as a container without the scaffolding of social mores and your own governing rules of embarrassment. Mealtimes were a chance to learn why other people were there. It was mostly women, of all ages, from Europe, the US and Canada. Some had been through paradigm-shattering losses that made mine look petty and provincial. I quickly gravitated towards one woman in her mid-20s, whose intuition had pushed her into a break-up and to consider changing her PhD entirely; she wanted to learn how to harness whatever that mystery force was. Everyone had the same barrier to action, they were seeking reassurance: this intuition thing is real, right?

In classes about the psychology and practice of intuition, we got closer to an answer. Leussink’s take on intuition felt true to my experience: “Energetic information translated by the body into conscious thought about you, for you.” The emotion-releasing meditations and movements we were doing made sense as the week progressed – the different feelings located in a body included echoes of trauma, spikes of anxiety, empathy for the moods of the people around us, all distinct from intuition. When you have all that going on, Leussink said, how can you possibly recognise the more subtle prompts?

In one session, she asked us to remember the times we experienced intuition in our lives. I listed them in my notebook. You may believe intuition accidentally happened to you, she explained, but you were in the space for it to happen: calm, most likely in theta brainwave (the brainwave found when meditating or doing something repetitive), crucially not thinking about the pressing questions you are now mulling over (see Archimedes’s moment of truth).

It doesn’t mean you have to take its guidance, it is just another perspective, she said. It’s then that I understood what my question had been all along: what was my intuition for? It led me through chaotic and extreme places and left me at square one emotionally and practically. When I asked, Leussink explained that it was a philosophical question that we had to answer for ourselves. “For me, intuition is for living your most expansive life,” adding that crucially, “that’s not necessarily the easiest road, but it can be the most transformative.” This is the moment everything slides into 20/20 clarity. Above anything else, intuition has led me to evolution and something like self-awareness. 

A dozen times over the week, I let myself think about the real reason I was there: through my intuition I had found a charged and true relationship, inside of which, suddenly, nothing was what it seemed. I remembered the moment I felt someone walking up behind me and knew they would change my life forever. Imagining that outdoor seating area, I could smell the cheap coffee in front of me, feel the warmth of Los Angeles in its coldest months, remember that knowledge landing in my body, then the heavy movement of his jacket as he strode around and sat down in front of me. I wanted to compel the past: don’t have that knowing, please don’t or do. I’m not sure. You don’t know what I know now.

One night while lying in my bed, I listened to a message my friend had sent me. She’d just finished an intense whirlwind romance, having missed what we now love to culturally diagnose as red flags. “At least you learned something valuable,” I stoically wrote back, after a long day of observing autumn leaves fall and anthropomorphising my own slow but inevitable ability to heal on to trees. She replied: “Fuck lessons, man.” It was fair enough.

On the last day, Leussink gave us an exercise with a pendulum to access our beliefs around intuition. Given why I’m here, I assumed my subconscious belief was that I don’t believe it’s safe to trust it – that would be keeping my intuition away. But it wasn’t.

Do I believe it is safe for me to follow my intuition? My subconscious mind gave a quiet but unwavering yes – following my intuition is safe for me. My conscious mind said no. Of course, deep down I believe my intuition is supportive of me in some way, because that’s been my default setting. It’s my conscious mind that is struggling with the lack of safety. I understand why that is, because I don’t want more change, I don’t want more pain. What Osbeck suggested, Leussink confirmed: the problem wasn’t with intuition, it was with me. There is no over-intellectualising something as straightforward and primeval as intuition. Imbue it with spiritual intention or don’t. It will run across the state lines of your body like a train in the night, and then it’s gone.

‘If you work hard and succeed, you’re a loser’: can you really wing it to the top?

Forget the spreadsheets and make it up as you go along – that’s the message of leaders from Elon Musk to Boris Johnson. But is acting on instinct really a good idea? Emma Beddington in The Guardian
There are, it seems, two types of “winging it” stories. First, there are the triumphant ones – the victories pulled, cheekily, improbably, from the jaws of defeat. Like the time a historian (who prefers to remain nameless) turned up to give a talk on one subject, only to discover her hosts were expecting, and had advertised, another. “I wrote the full thing – an hour-long show – in 10 panicked minutes,” she says. “At the end, a lady came up to congratulate me on how spontaneous my delivery was.”

Then there is the other kind of winging it story – the kind that ends in ignominy. Remember the safeguarding minister, Rachel Maclean, tying herself in factually inaccurate knots when asked about stop-and-search powers? The Australian journalist Matt Doran, who interviewed Adele without listening to her album? Or the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, claiming Channel 4 was publicly funded, then that Channel 5 had been privatised?

There are even worse examples. As a young journalist, Sarah Dempster was unwell when she was supposed to review a Meat Loaf concert, so she wrote the piece without attending. “An hour after publication, the paper called to inform me that the gig had, in fact, been cancelled. I was sacked,” she tweeted. “The Sun wrote a piece about it. The headline: ‘MEAT OAF’.”

Why does anyone wing it, and how do they dare? As a lifelong dreary prepper, I have been wondering this since reading a profile in the New York Times of winger extraordinaire Elon Musk. “To a degree unseen in any other mogul, the entrepreneur acts on whim, fancy and the certainty that he is 100% right,” it related, detailing how Musk wings even the biggest decisions, operating on gut feeling and without a business plan, rejecting expert advice.
Genius or graft? Apple founder Steve Jobs and Zhou Qunfei, China’s richest woman. Composite: Getty/Shutterstock/Guardian Design

What, I wonder, is the appeal of this strategy? And is it a legitimate – indeed, more successful – way of doing business? Can Musk, the CEO of Tesla (a company with a market capitalisation of £570bn) and the founder of SpaceX (the first private company to send humans into space) really be winging it?

Some are sceptical. “Is this self-presentation or an accurate statement?” asks Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organisational psychologist and the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? “Musk is probably way too smart to actually operate under that principle; he uses this arrogant self-presentation to his advantage. Brand Musk accounts for a big chunk of his success.” In contrast, he says, the recent Netflix SpaceX documentary shows Musk as “quite self-critical, quite humble”.

It is an idea echoed by Stefan Stern, a visiting professor at the Bayes Business School at City, University of London and the author of Myths of Management. “I can’t believe that he doesn’t draw on data; it’s a leading-edge thing he’s engaged in. When you promote yourself as a sort of visionary or hero, you absolutely want to try to claim that there’s something special about your insights – they’re not a petty, banal matter of data.” 

The implication is that Musk is like those schoolkids who claim not to have done a minute’s revision, then ace the exam. There is, the argument goes, something innately appealing about someone operating effortlessly on flair, instinct and inspiration: a Steve Jobs, not a Zhou Qunfei – the discreet founder of Lens Technology and the richest woman in China, who, Chamorro-Premuzic says, credits her success to “hard work and a relentless desire to learn”.

“There’s something romantic to the idea that there are mavericks who don’t need to work very hard,” adds Chamorro-Premuzic. “We say we value hard work and dedication, but, by definition, talent is more of an extraordinary gift and we celebrate that more.”

The leadership expert Eve Poole agrees. “No one wants to make it feel like hard work,” she says. “No one wants to say: ‘I slaved in front of a spreadsheet for 20 hours before I made that decision.’”

For Stern, Boris Johnson’s apparent penchant for winging it carries a similar message. “When he says: ‘We got the big calls right,’ he’s saying: ‘These small-minded people obsess about data and numbers and statistics, but with my instinct, my judgment, I – the uniquely gifted, insightful leader – got the big calls right.’ It’s not even true!”

His self-presentation as “a charismatic figure with panache who is apparently spontaneous” is particularly interesting, Stern says, given that “the other thing we know about Johnson is he’s not spontaneous, he doesn’t have good lines off the cuff”. (See that disastrous CBI Peppa Pig speech in November, recent prime minister’s questions performances or his testy, defensive responses in more probing interviews.)

Is there any foundation for the notion that gut feeling is superior to pedestrian, data-driven decision-making? The cognitive psychologist Gary Klein has spent his career researching intuition in decision-making; 35 years on, his research on how firefighters act swiftly under pressure in tough situations is still cited. “We weren’t looking for intuition,” he says. Rather, his team’s original theory was that firefighters might be rapidly evaluating two options when they decided how to tackle a fire. “They told us: ‘We don’t compare any options.’ More than that, they said: ‘We never make any decisions.’” Klein didn’t understand how firefighters could believe only one course of action was possible and land on it without making comparisons. 

Further digging revealed a different picture. With 15 to 20 years of experience, Klein explains, the firefighters were classifying the situation based on fires they had seen – a process known as “pattern matching”. The second step Klein called “mental simulation”: the firefighters would visualise how a course of action would run and adjust their model accordingly. “It’s a blend of intuition and analysis,” says Klein. The process was near-instantaneous. “Most decisions were made in less than a minute.”

So, what looks like winging it can, in fact, be instinctive decision-making backed up by experience – what Poole calls “really quick heuristics in your brain … synaptic connections established through years of conditioning”. Leaders who trust that, she says, “are just fucking excellent”.

This decision-making model is common in one of the areas where people are least comfortable with the idea of winging it: healthcare. No one wants to end up in the hands of a seat-of-the-pants neurosurgeon, but Klein’s research suggests medical professionals use intuitive decision-making and gut feeling as a matter of course.

His book The Power of Intuition tells the story of an experienced neonatal intensive care unit nurse accurately diagnosing a baby with sepsis just by walking past the incubator and getting a gut feeling, when a less experienced nurse who had been conscientiously tracking all the infant’s vitals had failed to spot it. “An experienced physician sees a cluster of cues and says sepsis. We’ve heard stories of someone who was just a resident; there was a tough case and they called the attending physician. The attending physician does not even enter the room and from the door just looks at the patient and sees there’s an issue and says: ‘Ah, congestive heart failure.’”
Firefighters in New York. Gary Klein’s research suggests they use ‘a blend of intuition and analysis’ to make quick decisions. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The experiences that feed intuition can be less concrete. Poole has been researching what humans still have to offer in a world in which AI is ever-more powerful, such as what she calls “witch-style intuition” – that sense of foreboding when you enter a room or meet someone. “We all know we have had those feelings and we tend to discount them and think they’re a bit silly and weird,” she says. “But I think it’s probably coming from the collective historical unconscious, trying to keep us safe as a species.” There are, she says, two strands: “your own, desperately hard-earned gut feeling, laid down in templates of data and knowledge, then the spooky ephemera that you can pick up through ‘spidey sense’, which I think can still be really reliable.”

It can, but it isn’t always. Intuition of any kind is not infallible. Klein describes it as a “data point”: something to take into consideration, not to accept uncritically. One area in which intuition gives demonstrably poor outcomes is recruitment. As Chamorro-Premuzic explains, unstructured interview processes increase and reinforce conscious and unconscious biases about candidates. We all believe our own intuition to be superior, he says: “In an interview situation, this is a big problem, because hiring managers think they have an ability to see through candidates and to understand whether they are competent.” Companies will spend large budgets on diversity and inclusion, “then tell you they hire for ‘culture fit’ – and the main way to evaluate culture fit is whether somebody ‘feels right’ in a job interview. Even if managers are well-meaning and open-minded, they will gravitate towards candidates who are like them and they are comfortable with.” 

Moreover, studies show that people tend to make up their mind in the first 60 or 90 seconds, he says. This is pattern recognition gone wrong, according to Stern. When decision-makers see someone who reminds them of themselves, they think: “Oh yeah, he’s got the right stuff. I used to be like him.”

Donald Trump springs to mind here. I read Klein a typical Trump pronouncement: “I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” It reminds Klein of two dangerous fallacies about intuition: “One, some people think intuition is innate ability, which I don’t think it is; it’s based on experience. Two, intuition is a general skill and will apply in lots of different situations. I don’t think that’s true.” Having decent intuition in an area where you have professional experience – “like real estate”, he says, pointedly – does not mean you have a transferable skill.

Talking to people who admit to winging it reveals that, mainly, they mean the “good” kind of intuition: calling on a wealth of relevant experience and deploying it in defined circumstances. That often involves an element of performance, where spontaneity can be the secret ingredient.

Susannah, who works in publishing, says: “I love to wing it in sales presentations. When I wing it, I suddenly find a new angle; it works every time. But only, I think, because I’m winging stuff I already know deeply.” Kathy, a senior financial services strategist, says: “If it’s something I don’t know at all, I won’t wing it, but in my area of expertise I’m the queen of prep five minutes before the meeting.”

These are the good wingers, but of course the bad ones are out there – the lazy, the grandiose blaggers and the bullshitters, too often in positions of power. “There are a lot of men, particularly, who do that,” says Poole. “I think it does appeal to people who don’t feel anything any more – it’s all so boring and that’s the way they get some feelings. It gives them a massive adrenaline rush; it makes them feel very powerful and victorious.” It is not usually a successful long-term strategy, she adds, comfortingly; what Chamorro-Premuzic calls “the sense of Teflon-style immunity” betrays them eventually. “I just think you get caught out. It’s the spin of the wheel and that’s why I hate it: it’s so risky for your organisation.”

But we still admire them, buy their products, even vote for them. Why do we fall for it? It is a lack of “followership maturity”, according to Chamorro-Premuzic, and varies from culture to culture. “I grew up in South America, where if you work hard and you succeed you’re automatically a loser,” he says. “Whereas if you bullshit and deceive people, we should worship you. There are cultures that truly value self-improvement, hard work and knowledge and there are cultures that value confidence.”

A country that wants to be entertained, he says, is likely to apply low standards for leadership, preferring self-belief to caution and hard work. “Whether it’s Trump, Boris, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk – they celebrate them because they challenge the establishment. When they behave in anarchic ways, disrespecting the rules, I think they can channel the anger that people have.” The kicker is that we assume there’s some competence behind the blagging and bluster, that the emperor is fully clothed. But how do we work out if it is true: spreadsheet or gut? 

3 lessons on decision-making from a poker champion | Liv Boeree

 

'Science has become Corrupted' - Delegitimising of Common Sense

 

Astrologer's Predictions for the Future

I was an astrologer – here's how it really works, and why I had to stop

Customers marvelled at my psychic abilities but was that really what was going on when I told their fortune? asks Felicity Carter in The Guardian 

 

‘It turned out what most people want is the chance to unload for an hour.’ Photograph: Fiorella Macor/Getty Images

The man was agitated, with red-rimmed eyes and clammy skin.

“Help me,” he said. “I’m under a curse.”

At first it was just flickering lights, he said. And then a figure, at the edge of his vision. Now something grabbed his fingers or stroked his arm. There was more – and it was happening more frequently.

“I saw a Catholic priest,” said the man. “But he couldn’t help. Can you?”

Yes, yes I could. I knew exactly what he needed to do.

I was a fortune teller. Every Sunday, I climbed the stairs of an old terrace house in Sydney’s historic Rocks district, to sit in the attic and divine the future. I would read Tarot cards or interpret horoscopes.

As a teenager, I’d devoured a book called Positive Magic. An instruction manual for witches, its central idea was that if you wanted something, and you had good intentions, you just told the universe and magic would happen. Although nothing I wanted (fame, money, hot boyfriend) actually arrived, one thing led to another and I taught myself to read Tarot cards. At the time I was a science student, and just considered it a fun game at parties.

That changed after I took my cards to my part-time job and read them for a colleague during the break. She picked the card for pregnancy, which we laughed about, because she wanted her tubes tied.

A week later she said, “Guess what the doctor told me this morning?”

She was pregnant, and I was officially psychic.

Deciding to develop my gift, I enrolled in a psychic class, where I learned to say the first thing that popped into my head. “Your first thoughts are the most psychic ones, before your rational mind interferes,” said the teacher.

I also learned that all things are connected, and everything is a symbol of something else. Suddenly, I saw signs and omens everywhere.

FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘The range of problems faced by people who can afford $50 for fortune telling turned out to be limited: troubles with romance, troubles at work, trouble mustering the courage for a much-needed change.’ Photograph: Busà Photography/Getty Images

To test my new skills, I volunteered to be a clairvoyant at the spiritualist church. Congregants would place a flower on the table, and the clairvoyants would choose one and “read” it at the microphone. Nervous, the first thing I grabbed was a packet of silver foil. The rose inside had been packed so tightly, its petals were crushed. I didn’t get a single vibe from it, so I just described the symbolism.

“You are feeling battered and bruised,” I said.

Afterwards, a woman approached and said she was a victim of domestic violence, and what should she do?

I was only 19 and had no idea, but my psychic reputation soared. The attention was intoxicating.

Then the universe told me I wasn’t cut out for science, by sending me my second-year results. I dropped out to pursue theatre and also signed up for a one-year course at the Sydney Astrology Centre, a cavernous commercial building in a seedy part of town.

The course began with the meanings of the zodiac, from Aries to Aquarius. Then the luminaries; the sun (what you will become), the moon (what you brought into this life) and planets. After that, how to calculate planetary positions and cast horoscopes.

Although astrologers use Nasa data for their calculations, horoscopes aren’t a true map of the heavens. The Babylonians who invented astrology believed the sun rotated round the Earth; modern astrologers still use Earth-centred charts, as if Copernicus had never existed. That’s only the start of the scientific problems.

The astrological meanings themselves derive from a principle called sympathetic magic, where things that look alike are linked together. Mars looks red, so it rules red things like blood. How do you get blood? You cut, so Mars rules surgery and war.

You forecast by combining meanings with planetary movements. Say Saturn, planet of restrictions, is about to transit the First House of self – your life will contract! You’re going to get more responsibilities than usual. Or maybe you’ll be denied the chance to take on more responsibilities. Or maybe a cold, critical person will come into your life. But anyway, it’s a good time to go on a diet.

Astrology is one big word association game.

I loved it, though I was losing interest in other mystical practices. Partly I didn’t have time, because I was now immersed in theatre while working as a temp typist at St Vincent’s, a Catholic hospital. But as I bounced from one department to another, my views changed. I’d understood organised religion to be something between an embarrassment and an evil. Yet as Aids did its dreadful work – this was the 1990s – I watched nuns offer compassionate care to the dying. Christian volunteers checked on derelict men with vomit down their clothes. I became uncomfortably aware that New Agers do not build hospitals or feed alcoholics – they buy self-actualisation at the cash register.

Finally, I was accepted into a music degree and my days filled with classes, my nights with rehearsals. This caused a cash crisis, because I could only do office work during academic holidays. When I saw the ad for a fortune teller, I pounced.

My credentials impressed the man on the counter (“My name is Ron,” he said. “My spirit guide is Blue Star. He’s on the intergalactic committee”) and I was hired.

We charged A$50 an hour, a significant sum at the time, and I wanted to offer value. No fishing for clues from me – I printed a horoscope or laid the cards and started interpreting immediately, intending to dazzle the customer with my insights.

Half the time, though, I couldn’t get a word in. It turned out what most people want is the chance to unload for an hour.

The range of problems faced by people who can afford $50 for fortune telling turned out to be limited: troubles with romance, troubles at work, trouble mustering the courage for a much-needed change. I heard these stories so often I could often guess what the problem was the moment someone walked in. Heartbroken young men, for example, talk about it to psychics, because it’s less risky than telling their friends. Sometimes I’d mischievously say, “Let her go. She’s not worth it,” as soon as one arrived. Once I heard, “Oh my God, oh my GOD!” as an amazed guy fell backwards down the stairs.

I also learned that intelligence and education do not protect against superstition. Many customers were stockbrokers, advertising executives or politicians, dealing with issues whose outcomes couldn’t be controlled. It’s uncertainty that drives people into woo, not stupidity, so I’m not surprised millennials are into astrology. They grew up with Harry Potter and graduated into a precarious economy, making them the ideal customers.

FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘Intelligence and education do not protect against superstition.’ Photograph: Alamy

What broke the spell for me was, oddly, people swearing by my gift. Some repeat customers claimed I’d made very specific predictions, of a kind I never made. It dawned on me that my readings were a co-creation – I would weave a story and, later, the customer’s memory would add new elements. I got to test this theory after a friend raved about a reading she’d had, full of astonishingly accurate predictions. She had a tape of the session, so I asked her to play it.

The clairvoyant had said none of the things my friend claimed. Not a single one. My friend’s imagination had done all the work.

Yet sometimes I could be uncannily accurate – wasn’t that proof I was psychic? One Sunday, I went straight from work to a party, before I’d had time to shuck off my psychic persona. A student there mentioned she wasn’t sure what to specialize in – photography, graphic design or maybe industrial design?

“Do photography,” I said.

She looked at me, wide-eyed. “How did you know?” she said, explaining photography was her real love, but her parents didn’t approve.

I couldn’t say, “because my third eye is open”, so I reflected for a moment. Then it hit me. “You sounded happier when you said ‘photography’,” I said. My psychic teacher was right – the signals we pick up before conscious awareness kicks in can be accurate and valuable.

Well, maybe I wasn’t psychic, but it didn’t matter. It was just entertainment, after all, until the cursed man came in. The one who’d seen the Catholic priest.

“Get to a doctor,” I told him. “Now.”

That very week, I’d typed letters for a neurologist who specialized in brain diseases. Some of those letters had documented strikingly similar symptoms to this man.

“Are you saying I’m crazy?” he said, his hands balled.

“No,” I reassured him. “But Catholic priests know what they’re doing. If he couldn’t help, this isn’t a curse.”

That made the man angrier.

“You’re a fraud!” he shouted, and stormed downstairs to demand his money back.

The encounter shook me, badly. Shortly afterwards, I packed my astrology books and Tarot cards away for good.

I can still make the odd forecast, though. Here’s one: the venture capital pouring into astrology apps will create a fortune telling system that works, because humans are predictable. As people follow the advice, the apps’ predictive powers will increase, creating an ever-tighter electronic leash. But they’ll be hugely popular – because if you sprinkle magic on top, you can sell people anything.

Why do so many incompetent men win at work?

 Emma Jacobs in The FT


 “Women are better leaders,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. “I am not neutral on this. I am sexist in favour of women. Women have better people skills, more altruistic, better able to control their impulses. They outperform men in university at graduate and undergraduate levels.” 

This subject is explored in his new book, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (And How to Fix It). In it, he writes that “traits like overconfidence and self-absorption should be seen as red flags”, when, in fact, the opposite tends to happen. As Prof Chamorro-Premuzic puts it: “They prompt us to say: ‘Ah, there’s a charismatic fellow! He’s probably leadership material.’” 

It is this mistaken insistence that confidence equates to greatness that is the reason so many ill-suited men get top jobs, he argues. “The result in both business and politics is a surplus of incompetent men in charge, and this surplus reduces opportunities for competent people — women and men — while keeping the standards of leadership depressingly low.” 

This book is based on a Harvard Business Review blog of the same title which was published in 2013, and which elicited more feedback than any of his previous books or articles. He is currently professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, as well as being the “chief talent scientist” at Manpower Group and co-founder of two companies that deploy technological tools to enhance staff retention. This book builds on two of his professional interests: data and confidence. 

Too often, he argues, we use intuition rather than metrics to judge whether someone is competent. In his book he argues that confidence may well be a “compensatory strategy for lower competence”. The modern mantra to just believe in yourself is possibly foolish. Perhaps, he suggests, modesty is not false but an accurate awareness of one’s talents and limitations. 

The book’s title has been “too provocative” for many, Prof Chamorro-Premuzic tells me on the phone from Brooklyn, where he spends most of his time, juggling his teaching and corporate roles. “A lot of female leaders said they can’t endorse it as [they are] worried about looking like man-haters.” Some female colleagues feel depressed that his message is being heard because he is a man, whereas if it came from them it would be “dismissed”. Men criticise him for “virtue-signalling”. 

He makes a convincing case for a more modest style of leader, focused on the team rather than advancing their own careers. Angela Merkel is the “most boring and best leader” in politics, he says. In the corporate sphere, he picks Warren Buffett who, he says, started off as a finance geek and taught himself leadership skills. David Cameron, the former British prime minister, is cited as an example of misplaced confidence in a leader — he held a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, sure that he would win, an assurance that, as it turned out, was misplaced. 

A quiet leadership style is often overlooked as heads are turned by bravado and narcissism. “There is a cult of confidence,” says Prof Chamorro-Premuzic. In part this is because confidence is “easier to observe”. It is harder to discern whether someone is a good leader. “What we see is what we rely on, what we see is visible.” 

People “overrate their intuition”, he says. Too often it turns out to be “nepotistic, self-serving choices . . . most organisations don’t have data to tell you if the leader is good.” 

Those leaders who are celebrated for their volatility and short fuses, such as the late Apple boss Steve Jobs, might have succeeded despite, not because of, their personality defects, he argues. 

One common narrative holds that women are held back by a lack of confidence, yet studies show this to be a fallacy. Perhaps it would be better to say that they are less likely to overrate themselves. The book cites one study from Columbia University which found that men overstated their maths ability by 30 per cent and women by 15 per cent. 

It is also the case, he writes, that women are penalised for appearing confident: “Their mistakes are judged more harshly and remembered longer. Their behaviour is scrutinised more carefully and their colleagues are less likely to share vital information with them. When women speak, they’re more likely to be interrupted or ignored.” 

“The fundamental role of self-confidence is not to be as high as possible,” he adds, “but to be in sync with ability.” 

Prof Chamorro-Premuzic’s interest in leadership was nurtured while growing up in Argentina, a country that he describes as having had one terrible leader after another. He came from a pocket of Buenos Aires known as Villa Freud for its high concentration of psychotherapists (even his family dog had a therapist), so it was a natural step to enter the field of psychology. 

There are many observations in the book that posit women as the superior sex, for example, citing their higher emotional intelligence. Such biological essentialism has been contested, for example by Cordelia Fine in her book Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds. 

Prof Chamorro-Premuzic says describing such differences as “hard-wired” would be an “overstatement”. Nonetheless, he argues that men score higher for impulsivity, risk-taking, narcissism, aggression and overconfidence; while women do better on emotional intelligence, empathy, altruism, self-awareness and humility. 

The book’s central message, though, is not to make a case for preferential treatment for women, but rather to “elevate the standards of leadership”. We should be making it harder for terrible men to get to the top, rather than focusing solely on removing the hurdles for women. 

He makes the argument against setting quotas for women in senior positions, which, Prof Chamorro-Premuzic says, can look like special pleading. Rather, he says: “We should minimise biases when it comes to evaluating leaders, rely less and less on human valuations and use performance data.” 

Raising the leadership game will boost the number of women in such positions, but it will also highlight talented but modest men who are typically overlooked. “There are many competent men who are being disregarded for leadership roles,” he says. “They don’t float hypermasculine leadership roles.”

I can make one confident prediction: my forecasts will fail

Tim Harford in The Financial Times 

I am not one of those clever people who claims to have seen the 2008 financial crisis coming, but by this time 10 years ago I could see that the fallout was going to be bad. Banking crises are always damaging, and this was a big one. The depth of the recession and the long-lasting hit to productivity came as no surprise to me. I knew it would happen. 

Or did I? This is the story I tell myself, but if I am honest I do not really know. I did not keep a diary, and so must rely on my memory — which, it turns out, is not a reliable servant. 

In 1972, the psychologists Baruch Fischhoff and Ruth Beyth conducted a survey in which they asked for predictions about Richard Nixon’s imminent presidential visit to China and Russia. How likely was it that Nixon and Mao Zedong would meet? What were the chances that the US would grant diplomatic recognition to China? Professors Fischhoff and Beyth wanted to know how people would later remember their forecasts. Since their subjects had taken the unusual step of writing down a specific probability for each of 15 outcomes, one might have hoped for accuracy. But no — the subjects flattered themselves hopelessly. The Fischhoff-Beyth paper was titled, “I knew it would happen”. 

This is a reminder of what a difficult task we face when we try to make big-picture macroeconomic and geopolitical forecasts. To start with, the world is a complicated place, which makes predictions challenging. For many of the subjects that interest us, there is a substantial delay between the forecast and the outcome, and this delayed feedback makes it harder to learn from our successes and failures. Even worse, as Profs Fischhoff and Beyth discovered, we systematically misremember what we once believed. 

Small wonder that forecasters turn to computers for help. We have also known for a long time — since work in the 1950s by the late psychologist Paul Meehl — that simple statistical rules often outperform expert intuition. Meehl’s initial work focused on clinical cases — for example, faced with a patient suffering chest pains, could a two or three-point checklist beat the judgment of an expert doctor? The experts did not fare well. However, Meehl’s rules, like more modern machine learning systems, require data to work. It is all very well for Amazon to forecast what impact a price drop may have on the demand for a book — and some of the most successful hedge funds use algorithmically-driven strategies — but trying to forecast the chance of Italy leaving the eurozone, or Donald Trump’s impeachment, is not as simple. Faced with an unprecedented situation, machines are no better than we are. And they may be worse. 

Much of what we know about forecasting in a complex world, we know from the research of the psychologist Philip Tetlock. In the 1980s, Prof Tetlock began to build on the Fischhoff-Beyth research by soliciting specific and often long-term forecasts from a wide variety of forecasters — initially hundreds. The early results, described in Prof Tetlock’s book Expert Political Judgement, were not encouraging. Yet his idea of evaluating large numbers of forecasters over an extended period of time has blossomed, and some successful forecasters have emerged. 

The latest step in this research is a “Hybrid Forecasting Tournament”, sponsored by the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, designed to explore ways in which humans and machine learning systems can co-operate to produce better forecasts. We await the results. If the computers do produce some insight, it may be because they can tap into data that we could hardly have imagined using before. Satellite imaging can now track the growth of crops or the stockpiling of commodities such as oil. Computers can guess at human sentiment by analysing web searches for terms such as “job seekers allowance”, mentions of “recession” in news stories, and positive emotions in tweets. 

And there are stranger correlations, too. A study by economists Kasey Buckles, Daniel Hungerman and Steven Lugauer showed that a few quarters before an economic downturn in the US, the rate of conceptions also falls. Conceptions themselves may be deducible by computers tracking sales of pregnancy tests and folic acid. 

Back in 1991, a psychologist named Harold Zullow published research suggesting that the emotional content of songs in the Billboard Hot 100 chart could predict recessions. Hits containing “pessimistic rumination” (“I heard it through the grapevine / Not much longer would you be mine”) tended to predict an economic downturn. 

His successor is a young economist named Hisam Sabouni, who reckons that a computer-aided analysis of Spotify streaming gives him an edge in forecasting stock market movements and consumer sentiment. Will any of this prove useful for forecasting significant economic and political events? Perhaps. But for now, here is an easy way to use a computer to help you forecast: open up a spreadsheet, note down what you believe today, and regularly revisit and reflect. The simplest forecasting tip of all is to keep score.

Expecting Sehwag to do the unexpected

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan in Cricinfo

Opposition captains always feared: what if Sehwag gets going? Everyone else just learned to accept that he would forever surprise


Going up: Sehwag constantly turned traditional batting concepts on their head © AFP



The heart wishes Virender Sehwag had retired after a rousing Test, his team-mates chairing him off the ground, the crowd bidding him adieu with a standing ovation. The mind understands that this was never going to come to pass, that Sehwag's days as an international cricketer were long past, and that he would tweet the news of his exit (as he had promised late last year) and be off without a fuss.

The end was as abrupt as it was apt. Not for him a press conference bathed in emotion, or a speech that tugged at heartstrings. There was no grand felicitation, there were no teary goodbyes. Instead he went his own way, wrapping up with a tweet that started "I hereby… " and a statement that began, "To paraphrase Mark Twain…"

None of this should come as a surprise; to have experienced Sehwag's career is to have come to expect the unexpected. During times when conventional wisdom advised circumspection, he would blast off. Where other batsmen shut shop a few overs before stumps, he saw it as an opportunity to pick off boundaries. When opposition captains pushed mid-off and mid-on back, he didn't look at it as a chance for singles; instead he was determined to launch the ball over the fielders' heads. Where team-mates used the services of a nightwatchman, he deemed it an insult ("If I can't play for 25 minutes, I'm not much of a batsman.")

Stories of Sehwag's counter-intuition are legion. He once charged a medium-pace bowler in a Ranji Trophy game, swished wildly, and missed by more than a foot. That in itself should come as no surprise, except, as his former team-mate Aakash Chopra wrote on this website, it was little but an act. On "one of the worst pitches", Sehwag was actually trying to mess with the bowler's length. Sure enough, the trick rattled the opponent. The next two balls pitched short. And Sehwag smashed two fours.



Paul Harris ended up the loser in his contest with Sehwag in 2008 © Getty Images


The common refrain while talking about Sehwag's batting is how his approach was so simple, how the see-ball-hit-ball approach served him so well. This, of course, is partly true - he has himself acknowledged the value of clearing all clutter from the mind - but it is also somewhat reductionist. Sehwag might not have analysed ground conditions and wagon wheels with a high level of granularity (and, back in 2006, he might not have known about Pankaj Roy and Vinoo Mankad's record partnership) but he was far from unschooled. He analysed his innings and dismissals, and spoke to those he respected about technical glitches, taking on advice from openers as varied in approach as Sunil Gavaskar and Kris Srikkanth. He enjoyed chatting with psychologist Rudi Webster (he was especially curious to hear about the early struggles of Viv Richards, whom Webster likened Sehwag to) and sometimes surprised team-mates by reeling off names of bowlers he had faced in stray innings.

Most significantly he was astute enough to constantly upend traditional approaches to batting. Where Sachin Tendulkar was bogged down, padding away Ashley Giles bowling over the wicket, Sehwag backed away and slashed; charged diagonally and slashed; and, in what was little short of a tight slap across the bowler's face, reverse-swept without a care in the world. None of this was blind slogging; it was a planned assault to disrupt a bowler's rhythm, nullifying his negative tactics. Six years on, when another left-arm spinner targeted his pads, Sehwag challenged him: "Come round the wicket and first ball I'll hit you for a six." Paul Harris - with a long-off, long-on, deep midwicket and a deep point - accepted the dare. And sure enough, the first ball soared over the sightscreen.

Such provocation wasn't merely an instinctive flash of bravado. Like the smartest of bowlers, Sehwag understood when to needle the opposition and when to send out a message by shutting up. Against Australia in Chennai in 2004, he made friendly small-talk with some fielders as he walked off after the first day's play. But come the end of the fourth day, with India chasing a tricky target, he pounded a drive past Glenn McGrath and strode off, chin up, with a raging sense of purpose. "You have to show the other team that you're here to win," he would later say of that unforgettable walk-off.



Fury Road: Sehwag set up India's record chase against England in Chennai in 2008 © AFP


It has often been pointed out that Sehwag averaged slightly over 30 in the third and fourth innings of Tests with just one hundred, a stat used to demonstrate his frailty under "scoreboard pressure". What is not highlighted as much is that he averaged a mighty 65.91 in the second innings of Tests, with 12 hundreds - many of which came after the opposition had piled on massive scores. When New Zealand amassed 630 in Mohali in 2003, Sehwag responded with 130; when South Africa piled on 510 in Kanpur in 2004, he answered with 164; when Pakistan erected 679 in Lahore in 2006, he blitzed 254; and when South Africa put on 540 in Chennai in 2008, he smoked the fastest Test triple-hundred. As important as it is to celebrate Sehwag the match-winner, it's vital to hail Sehwag the match-saver: the opening batsman who drew games not by playing out time but by rollicking along at berserker pace, eliminating threats of India following on.

What this meant was that, despite his poor fourth-innings record, teams were often hesitant to declare in the third innings, the fear of "what if Sehwag gets going?" never far from their calculations. There is no stat to quantify the psychological effect that Sehwag had on fielding teams but an Ian Chappell quote from 2005 sums up the sentiment: "Sehwag can change the course of a match with the ease of Moses parting the Red Sea".

Over the years there were a number of innings when Sehwag parted the metaphorical Red Sea, but the apex of match-changeability arrived on that December afternoon in 2008 - a month after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai - when England set India 387 for victory in Chennai. The odds were grim. No team had chased more than 155 at the ground and no team had achieved a fourth-innings target of more than 276 at any Indian venue.

None of this mattered to Sehwag. He had begun the fourth day by telling Ravi Shastri, "We could easily chase 300-plus against England," and then gone on to burn the batting manual, juddering a 68-ball 83 to fire-start the chase. There were rasping upper cuts and swirling sixes; the short balls ending up in the V between point and third man, the full ones in the V between square leg and midwicket. It was a kind of innings that galvanises the team to dare to dream; an innings that sends shock waves through the fielding side; and an innings that makes ten-year-olds want to reach for their bats, getting them hooked to the game for good.

Once the win was achieved, Tendulkar was asked about Sehwag's mighty eruption. "We are quite used to that," he said with a smile. "You kind of expect something which is not expected."

He may as well have been summing up a once-in-a-lifetime career.

Love, intuition and women. Science would wither without them

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent

As it sometimes does, last October the Nobel Committee for the prize in physiology or medicine split its award. Half the pot (of eight million Swedish kronor in all) went to the British-American neuroscientist John O’Keefe, the other to the Norwegian couple who have charted the grid cells in the brain that enable our pathfinding and positioning skills via a sort of “internal GPS”.

May-Britt Moser and Edvard I Moser first met at high school and have worked together over 30 years. Professor Moser (May-Britt) said after the Nobel nod: “It’s easy for us because we can have breakfast meetings almost every day.” Professor Moser (Edvard) stated: “We have a common project and a common goal … And we depend on each other for succeeding.”

“There were a lot of things that made me decide to marry Edvard,” the other Professor Moser has recalled. Not all had to do with neurological breakthroughs. Once, Edvard gave her a huge umbrella. Open it, he said. “So I opened it above my head, and it rained down small beautiful pieces of paper with little poems on about me.”

This week, another Nobel laureate in the same discipline – Sir Tim Hunt, 2001 – found himself in need of a titanium umbrella in order to fend off the media flak. The 72-year-old biochemist told a conference in South Korea that “girls” caused mayhem in the lab. “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.” Cue the avalanche of outrage that has now driven Sir Tim – married, by the way, to the distinguished immunologist Professor Mary Collins – out of his honorary post at University College, London. In Britain, where only 13 per cent of scientific and engineering professionals are female, his off-the-cuff “banter” has gone down like a tungsten (denser than lead) balloon.

So it should. Yet the champions of equality in science who have justly hooted at Sir Tim’s antique ditty might spare a thought for the Mosers’ partnership. The Norwegian pair are not alone in fusing personal commitment with top-grade scientific collaboration. Last year, in a fascinating study for Nature, Kerri Smith reported that, according to the US National Science Foundation, “just over one-quarter of married people with doctorates had a spouse working in science or engineering”. A 2008 survey found that the proportion of research posts that went to couples had risen from 3 per cent in the 1970s to 13 per cent.

Smith consulted a range of high-flying scientific double acts. They included the Taiwanese cell biologists Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan, who have collaborated since 1967. Lily Jan praised the joint progress made possible by a “very consistent long-term camaraderie”. After years of long-distance romance and research, physicists Claudia Felser and Stuart Parkin now live together in Germany with plum posts at the Max Planck Institutes in (respectively) Dresden and Halle. “Lufthansa and United Airlines will be very unhappy,” said Parkin.

These partnerships in life and lab follow a different, far more equal, pattern to the liaison of master and muse, once common in the arts. Scientists tend not to bother much with history. But the rising number of collaborating duos will know that they can hail as their forerunners the most intellectually fertile pairing of all: between Marie Sklodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie.

Marie had plentiful Hunts of her own to vanquish. In 1903, only a late objection by a Swedish mathematician with feminist sympathies prevented her first Nobel Prize, in physics, from going to Pierre and Henri Becquerel alone. Not that the Nobel selectors learned their lesson. Lise Meitner, who first explained the significance of nuclear fission, never got the call. When Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel for their work on DNA in 1962, no mention was made of Rosalind Franklin (who had died in 1958). Her research into the double‑helix structure had made their triumph possible.

As any woman scientist will tell you, such neglect and condescension die hard and slow. Yet the atavistic Hunt and his denouncers share a common position. Both would banish Eros from the bench. Cases such as the Mosers suggest that, in some conditions, intimate bonds may even seed creativity. Expel love from the lab, and who knows what angels of deliverance might flee as well?

Besides, in science or any other pursuit, the same seeker can benefit at different stages both from solitary striving and intimate collaboration. You will find moving proof of this in the “autobiographical notes” that Marie Curie appended to her 1923 memoir of her husband. As a lonely Polish student in 1890s Paris, she relished her independence, even at the cost of cold, hunger and isolation in a freezing garret. She wrote: “I shall always consider one of the best memories of my life that period of solitary years exclusively devoted to the studies, finally within my reach, for which I had waited so long.”

Later, as she and Pierre experimented to isolate radium and investigate its properties in a tumbledown hut on the Paris School of Physics site, another kind of bliss took hold: “It was in this miserable old shed that we passed the best and happiest years of our life, devoting our entire days to our work.” Marie and Pierre’s shared quest embraced rapture as well as reason: “One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.”

Note the poetry. Sir Tim, in contrast, reveals himself as a strict dualist. Love and tears will ruin your results. On the one hand lies intellect, on the other emotion. As always, the female serves as proxy for the latter. Yet the binary mind in which Hunt believes no more exists in physics than in painting. Investigate the history of scientific discovery and you plunge into a wild labyrinth of Curie-style ecstasies, hunches, chances, blunders, windfalls, visions, guesses, serendipities and unsought “Eureka!” moments.

However, at the entrance to this theme park of happy accidents one statement should stand. Louis Pasteur said: “Chance favours only the prepared mind.” The intuitive breakthrough that rewrites all the rules happens to people who have toiled and failed, toiled again and failed better. Vision blesses the hardest workers. “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination,” Einstein said in 1929. “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” But he could get away with such New Agey bromides only because he was Albert Einstein.

Still, the scientific evidence in favour of intuitions, dreams and visions is strikingly widespread. In 1865, August Kekulé slumps in front of the fire and, in a reverie, sees the atoms of the benzene molecule “twisting and moving around in a snake-like manner”. Then, “one of the snakes got hold of its own tail, and tauntingly the whole structure whirled before my eyes”.

In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev grasps the structure of the periodic table in another dream. In a Budapest park in 1882, Nikola Tesla recites Goethe’s Faust and then imagines the electrical induction motor. “The idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed… The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear.”

More recently, the Nobel-winning biochemist Kary Mullis has written a Thomas Pynchon-like account of the day in 1983 when during a nocturnal drive in California he “saw” the pattern of the DNA polymerase chain reaction that kick-started genetic medicine. With his girlfriend (a chemist in the same lab), he had left for a weekend in the woods. “My little silver Honda’s front tyres pulled us through the mountains… My mind drifted back into the laboratory. DNA chains coiled and floated. Lurid blue and pink images of electric molecules injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes…”

A self-mythologising tinge colours many such memoirs of inspiration. They uncannily tend to resemble one another. All the same, these “Eureka!” narratives have a consistent theme, of a break or rest after thwarted labour. The pioneer of quantum mechanics Paul Dirac wrote that “I found the best ideas usually came, not when one was actively striving for them, but when one was in a more relaxed state”; in his case, via “long solitary walks on Sundays”. In science, the unconscious can work hardest when the intellect has downed tools.

In which case, the flight from emotion – from Tim Hunt’s dreaded tears and love – may sterilise more than fertilise. Shun “girls”, by which he seems to mean all subjectivity, and the seeker risks falling into an antiseptic void.

But enough: it feels unscientific, to say the least, to pillory a bloke for a gaffe that shows up a culture and an epoch more than an individual man. Perhaps Sir Tim, and the Royal Society that clumsily rushed to distance itself from him despite its own distinctly patriarchal history, could lay the matter to rest with a suitable donation. It ought to go to the Marie Curie charity for terminal care, which since 1948 has enlisted science and research to strengthen love – and to dry tears.

Cricket Coaching: Follow in the bare footsteps of the Kalenjin

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

What can the story of running shoes among Kenyan athletes teach us about cricket? More than I thought possible.

Nearly all top marathon runners are Kenyan. In fact, they are drawn from a particular Kenyan tribe, the Kalenjin, an ethnic group of around 5 million people living mostly at altitude in the Rift Valley.

Here is the really interesting thing. The majority of top marathon runners grow up running without shoes. The debate about whether other athletes should try to mimic barefoot-running technique remains contested and unresolved. However, it is overwhelmingly likely that the unshod childhoods of the Kalenjin does contribute to their pre-eminence as distance runners.*

And yet it is also true that as soon as Kalenjin athletes can afford running shoes, they do buy them. They know that the protection offered by modern shoes helps them to rack up the epic number of hours of training required to become a serious distance runner.

So there is a paradox about long-term potential and running shoes. If an athlete wears shoes too often and too early, when his natural technique and running style are still evolving, he significantly reduces his chances of becoming a champion distance runner. But if he doesn't wear them at all in the later stages of his athletic education he jeopardises his ability to train and perform optimally when it matters.

Put simply, the advantages of modernity and technology need to be first withheld and then embraced. Most Kenyan runners begin wearing trainers in their mid-teens. Some sports scientists argue that if they could hold off for another two or three years, they'd be even better as adult athletes. But no one knows for sure exactly when is the "right" time to start running in shoes. We glimpse the ideal athletic childhood, but its contours remain extremely hazy. 

Logically, there is a further complexity. Imagine two equally talented developing athletes, one with shoes, the other barefoot, neither yet at their athletic peak. Wearing shoes, by assisting training and recovery, would yield an advantage at the time. But that short-term advantage would leave behind a long-term disadvantage, by depriving the athlete of the legacy that barefoot runners enjoy when they begin wearing shoes at a later stage. In other words, building the right foundations during adolescence is more important than doing whatever it takes to win at the time.

Where is the cricket here? When I read about the strange influence of first learning barefoot then using the latest technology - in the admirable and thought-provoking book Two Hours by Ed Caesar, published this July - I wrote in the margin: just like cricket coaching.

A modern player seeking an edge over his opponents would be mad not to have access to the latest kit, technology, data, fitness coaching and rehab techniques. But if he comes to rely on the interventions and apparatus of coaches and trainers too early, when his game and character are still in flux, then he misses out of the biggest advantage of the lot: self-reliance and learning from trial and error. In other words, there is no conflict between homespun training methods and sports science. It is a question of the right amount at the right time. Indeed, the art of training always relies on subtly mixing technique and science alongside folk wisdom and feeling.

Consider the greatest of all cricketing educations. As a child, Don Bradman learnt to bat on his own - repeatedly hitting a golf ball against the curved brick base of his family water tank. The empirical method led him to a technique that no one had dared to try. His bat swing started way out to the side, rather than a straight pendulum line from behind him. He had escaped the greatest risk that can befall any genius: an early overdose of prescriptive formal education.

Kevin Pietersen, in his pomp the most exciting England batsman of his era, was also self-taught to an unusual degree. It was ironic, in his recent autobiography, that Pietersen was so keen to describe in words that he knew better than "the system". In his earlier days, he made the point more eloquently with his bat. Having arrived from South Africa as an offspinning allrounder, he became one of the most thrilling batsmen in the world. Think of all the money and effort - the "pyramids of excellence" and "talent conveyor belts" - expended on manufacturing great English players. And one of the best of them was untouched - some would say undamaged - by the whole apparatus. He figured things out for himself.

Connected to the question of impairing natural development is the problem of over-training and specialising too early. The now debunked "10,000 hours theory" - which holds that genius is created by selecting a discipline as early as possible and then loading on mountains of practice - is being replaced by a far more subtle understanding of nurturing talent.

A study of professional baseball players showed that keeping up football and basketball in teenage years increased the likelihood of making it as a top baseball pro. In his fine book The Sports Gene, David Epstein assembles persuasive evidence that Roger Federer's sporting education (a mixture of badminton, basketball, football as well as tennis) is far more typical of great athletes than the Tiger Woods-style mono-focus that is so often held up as the model.

When the psychologists John Sloboda and Michael Howe studied gifted children at a musical academy, they found that extra lessons for younger musicians proved counterproductive: the kids just burned out. The best players, it turned out, had practised the least as children. Diversity was just as important. The exceptional players practised much less at their first instrument, but much more than the average players on their third instrument.

So if you want an Under-13s champion, yes, buy the latest kit, bully him to practise all hours, pick one sport and make him eliminate all the others. But you are merely reducing the likelihood of producing an adult champion.

Even professionals can aspire to retain the receptivity of children who are learning by playful sampling rather than through directed orthodoxy. I once organised the first phase of pre-season training for a cricket team. I tried to change the culture from one of compliance - if I don't do what I'm told, I'll get in trouble - towards self-regulation, the ability to feel and respond to your game as you push yourself and find out what works and what doesn't. The Kalenjin have mastered that, too. Even at the very top, the athletes continue to lead the training sessions. They take what they need to from science but they trust their intuition.

*A barefoot childhood is by no means the only factor. A recent study showed that the Kalenjin elite runners had 5% longer legs and 12% lighter legs than a sample of top Swedish runners. The Kalenjin also have an unusual mixture of sea-level ancestry (they moved from the low-lying Nile Valley to the elevated Rift Valley only a few centuries ago) and altitude living. Physiologically, they are valley people who live up the mountain. There are also, inevitably, a host of environmental factors.

Dhoni's feel for cricket

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

  

MS Dhoni possesses a rare and charming combination of intuition, judgement and experience  © Getty Images

Enlarge

As the rain came down at Edgbaston, many blurry TV hours were filled with punditry, most of it lost on the airwaves to heaven. Somewhere along the way though, someone, and I don't recall who, said something like this: "At heart, MS Dhoni is a gambler… "

If that's so, he's the man you want to be standing next to at the roulette wheel; the chips are piling up, and there's nothing his India have not won. 

But is he? As anyone closely affiliated with actual professional gambling (not spot-fixing or bookmaking, but making a living from betting legally) will tell you, done properly, it is for the most part a boring and pragmatic assessment of odds and value. There are very few coups de theatre to be had.

What Dhoni did in offering Ishant Sharma the 18th over of England's innings with Eoin Morgan and Ravi Bopara at the crease and 28 runs required from 18 deliveries, was something altogether more instinctive, a rare and charming combination of intuition, judgement and experience that carried with it inherent risk. Here was the match, in the hands of the team's most profligate bowler.

Ishant, still coltish at 24 and with a career that often seems to be gripped by slow but inevitable entropy, was nervous - which he had the grace to admit afterwards. Morgan and Bopara had timed their charge, and both had begun to clear the boundary. Ishant began with a slow, short ball, a dot. Having got a look at him, Morgan dispatched the next over backward square leg.

Spooked now, not quite in rhythm around the wicket, Ishant bowled consecutive wides. He galloped in again, this time cutting his fingers across the ball for more control and slowing it down enough for Morgan to spoon him up wristily to Ashwin on the edge of the circle, a shot miscued to the degree that the batsmen had time to cross as it fell. Then a faster, shorter one on the line of the stumps that Bopara flat-batted straight to Ashwin, who had materialised as if by magic in the right place once more.

There was an element of Napoleon's dictum on luck about Dhoni's decision, and there is no doubt that had things gone the other way, he would have come under heavy fire

The game that was England's mid-way through the over was India's by the end, and hearteningly for all of us who love a trier, it was Ishant Sharma's, too. Dhoni applied his coup de grace, the mugging of England completed by the estimable partnership of Jadeja and Ashwin.

There was an element of Napoleon's dictum on luck about Dhoni's decision, and there is no doubt that had things gone the other way, he would have come under heavy fire. But one of his great qualities is a calm fearlessness that he has shown so often. The underlying logic behind using Ishant was sound; Dhoni knew that England would take the batting Powerplay in the last two overs, and he wanted his spinners for them. But his decision was proactively to bowl Ishant rather than Umesh Yadav or Bhuvneshwar Kumar, and that was at the heart of India's win.

It would be fascinating to hear Dhoni talk about it in depth, to know exactly where it came from. He has played so much cricket now, and so much of it under tremendous pressure, he has a deep feeling for the rhythm of the game; he hears its heartbeat acutely. It informs his subconscious, it leads what we might call intuition or instinct, but in reality it is something more weighty and useful. Let's call it intellect.

England have a great sense of order to their cricket, but they, and Alastair Cook, don't quite have what Dhoni has. It makes an eloquent argument for harmonising the calendar and allowing the players to go to the IPL and suchlike, to get game time in front of huge crowds when there is something on the line and they can absorb the kind of rhythm that Dhoni runs to. At heart he is a gambler, but beyond that, at heart he is a cricketer, in every sense of the word.