Don't even think about it

The February 17 issue of Science magazine contained a most interesting paper by Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues from the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Long story short: when you're making an important decision you're probably better off not weighing the possiblities but instead going with your gut.

It's called the "deliberation–without–attention" hypothesis and is gaining increasing traction in the decision theory mind space.

You can read more about this seemingly contrarian advice here, here and here.

Dijksterhuis said, "Your brain is capable of juggling lots of facts and possibilities at the same time when you let it work without specifically thinking about the decision."

Sounds an awful lot like a quantum computer to me.

Loran Nordgren, a co–author, said, "Conscious thought should not be relied upon in big or complex decisions. In this sense, conscious thought is like a flashlight. It can clearly illuminate a particular piece of information. But, as the information becomes more complex, conscious thought can focus only on a subset of the information, and this can lead to bad decisions."

Perhaps emotions are the the most powerful decision making tools we own — we only need to learn to trust them and, in effect, ourselves.

Easier said than done.