What you can't unsee
Cognitive neuroscientist. Twenty years studying how experts recognise patterns before they can explain them. Author of two books on perception and skill.
The judgment precedes the reason
Recognition fires before the brain can produce an explanation for it. What an expert tells you about their reasoning is assembled afterwards, from whatever material is available.
Expertise is not optional vision
Once the pattern is trained, it arrives whether or not you want it. Speed was bought with the loss of the ability to look at the thing fresh.
Confidence does not track novelty
Experts underperform their own certainty on unfamiliar cases, because the machinery that produced the wrong answer also produced the feeling of being right.
The clumsy step is the discipline
The strongest performers keep a short written list of what would mean they are wrong, and check it before committing. It interrupts a fluent process on purpose.
“Most people think expertise is knowing more. It's mostly the inability to stop noticing things.”
You study people at the exact moment they recognise something. Before they can say why. What does that look like from the inside of a scanner?
It looks like a decision that has already been made. The signal we associate with recognition fires a few hundred milliseconds before the part of the brain that would produce an explanation. By the time you can defend a judgment, you made it.
So the explanation is a reconstruction.
Usually. It is not dishonest. It is what the brain does when you ask it a question it does not have direct access to. It builds something plausible out of what it can reach.
That should worry anyone who hires experts on the strength of their reasoning.
It should make you interested in their track record instead. The reasoning is a story about the judgment. The record is the judgment.
Three questions this conversation did not answer.
If the judgment comes before the reason, what exactly is being taught when we teach expertise?
How much of a reputation is pattern recognition, and how much is the market rewarding fluent explanation?
Can you keep the speed of an expert and recover the eyes of a beginner, or do you have to choose?