Angus Fletcher is a professor of story science at Ohio State’s Project Narrative. His research has been endorsed by renowned psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors, as well as having received support from major institutions such as the National Science Foundation. In 2023, he was awarded the Commendation Medal by the U.S. Army for his work.

Examining the minds of visionary thinkers and U.S. Army Special Operators has solved many puzzles about how our brains work and how we can help our brains work better. From compiling these case studies, it is clear that there is a path for training your mind to act smart with limited information and outperform computer AI in terms of volatility and uncertainty.

Below, Angus shares five key insights from his new book, Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know. Listen to the audio version—read by Angus himself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.

For decades, Nobel-prize-winning cognitive scientists and psychologists such as Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman have told us that intuition is simply pattern matching. But young children score lower at pattern matching than they do at intuition. How is that possible?

To answer this puzzle, I looked into the minds of Special Operators who possessed unusually high levels of intuition, allowing them to anticipate the future faster than other soldiers on the battlefield.

These Operators had trained their brains to spot what the Army calls exceptional information. Exceptional information is an exception to a previously established rule. It’s a warm-blooded reptile or a rainbow at night. It’s the first person to split from the pack and do the unprecedented. Exceptional information is the opposite of a pattern. It’s the breaking of a pattern.

This is why children score high on intuition. Their brains are focused more on unusual details than on familiar patterns. A four-year-old child can spot up to ten times more exceptional information than the average adult. If you happen to be one of those average adults, don’t worry. You can train your brain to get better at spotting exceptions.

One way to improve your intuition is to travel. Travel immerses your brain in places that break the pattern of your regular life, activating your brain’s power to spot exceptions by putting you in situations where everything is exceptional.

If you don’t have the time or the budget to take a trip, you can get a quick dose of mind-travel from authors like Shakespeare. Shakespeare fills his plays with characters who are exceptions to conventional narrative formulas: Hamlet is an action hero who thinks deeply; Cleopatra is a cold-blooded schemer with a loving heart; Falstaff is an old man who behaves like an adolescent. By giving us characters who break archetypal patterns, Shakespeare opens our minds to the exceptional. In the words of Hamlet: “As a stranger, give it welcome.” Embrace things because they are different.

Because characters like Hamlet activate intuition, Shakespeare’s readers have a history of anticipating the future. Shakespeare reader Nikola Tesla spotted the exception known as the AC motor and used it to usher in modern technology. Shakespeare reader Marie Curie spotted the exception known as radioactivity and used it to usher in modern........

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