A perceptive individual stands out for his intuition.
From the Latin perspicax , the adjective perspicacious refers to a resourceful, sharp, lucid, cunning, penetrating or sagacious person. Insight is linked to the ability to discover things that are hidden or to understand situations that, at first, seem very confusing.
For example: "I need to hire someone insightful to find out who the informant is" , "Thanks to his insight he was able to change his decision just in time " , "You don't have to be very insightful to know that Mario does not agree with his position" .
The insightful subject and intuition
Insight is related to intuition and spontaneous ability. A subject can know a lot about a topic until becoming a true specialist thanks to study and reading , but there are a series of skills and virtues that cannot be acquired. To this last group belongs the quality of insight, which can lead a person to act appropriately in a situation without having the apparently necessary formal knowledge.
It is evident that insight alone cannot make anyone an expert or professional. However, everyday life and certain tasks do not require formal studies to achieve objectives, but rather intuitive knowledge, which comes from the depths of our mind and leads us to look for the right path, sometimes without knowing why. .
Just as musicians with innate talents fear learning theory because they believe technicalities could threaten their creativity and spontaneity , people with a natural intuition for solving problems tend not to have much affinity for formal studies. The structures of academia can, in many cases, become obstacles that block vision and prevent free decision-making.
Animals can be insightful too.
The quality in animals
In recent years, various studies have shown that animals have the ability to understand certain mathematical problems better than people, which has sparked very varied reactions. To explain this discovery, the researchers have taken as an example the well-known North American television program called "Let's make a deal" , which has been exported to various parts of the world, and whose name in Spanish is "Deal made" .
The objective of this contest is to choose one of three doors to try to find the prize, hidden behind one of them. Once the contestant has expressed his decision , the driver opens one of the incorrect doors and offers to change his mind. The question is how convenient it is for players to accept the offer to modify their choice .
Apparently, most people stick with their initial decision, which results in having a 1/3 chance of being right, instead of the 2/3 chance they would get if they changed their choice. The explanation is as simple as it is confusing: the first door chosen is only the correct one out of every three times ; The alternative adds a third to said probability, making it more convenient.
A study carried out based on this contest shows that human beings tend to stick with our first choice even after verifying that changing the decision increases the chances of success ; Pigeons , on the other hand, after a few attempts, give up on the undeniable and always choose the second option.
The problem with human participants is that they hesitate too much and get confused, instead of letting themselves be guided by their intuition and the evidence. But, far from a television program, animals demonstrate their insight in countless situations; Bees , for example, are capable of finding the shortest path between two flowers, something that we can only achieve through complex calculations , accessible to very few people.