The Live Enterprise: Create a Continuously Evolving and Learning Organization

5

INTUITIVE DECISIONS

From Knowledge to Intuition

Plastic Brains and Neuron Forests

It takes 302 neurons to keep a worm’s nervous system ticking, while the capuchin monkey has around 3.7 billion neurons.^1,2 For us humans, the magic number is 100 billion neurons—about the same number of stars in the Milky Way. Those 100 billion neurons spark more than 100 trillion connections, called a “neuron forest” by the experts, where information runs at up to 250 miles an hour inside our skulls. Literally, we are a mass of neural networks that guide our cognition and reasoning, as well as more subtle qualities such as hunches, gut feelings, intuition, and love.

Based on measurements across over a hundred populations,³ all this happens within an average ...