Let’s say you’re going down a road at 100km/h. Someone overtakes you at 130km/h. Right at the moment your cars are next to each other, a sudden obstacle appears in front of you! You both start braking immediately. You manage to stop your car with millimeters to spare. Now, since the other car was going faster than you, you know it’s going to crash. But at what speed? Crashing into something at 5km/h is, after all, quite a different experience compared to crashing at 50km/h.

Take a moment to think about what speed you believe the other car will crash at. You may assume that you both have the same make and model of car, and both your reaction times are exactly the same, and both of you break as hard as possible (ie, you both decelerate at the same rate). The only difference is in the initial speed when you both started braking.

Think you got the answer?

If you thought other red car would crash into the obstacle with 30km/h, you’re probably not alone. But in reality, while you barely managed to stop your car, the other car will crash at about 83km/h. The reason is that increasing your speed means your kinetic energy increases with the square, meaning that if you’re going twice as fast, you now have 4 times as much kinetic energy to deal with.

The point of this is that our intuition is a valuable tool, but in our modern world, it doesn’t always work as we expect it, especially when it comes to things that (historically speaking) are new. Humans were walking, running, and throwing for thousands of years, so your brain needs very little training to be good at dealing with stuff going at these speeds. But going down the road at 100km/h is not something you can experience anywhere else but a car, and those have only existed for a bit over a hundred years. Not nearly enough for our brains to develop a proper intuition to such speeds.

Pretty much anything that is outside our evolutionary experience is hard for our brains to deal with. How far away a different continent really is (which isn’t helped by the fact that maps project a sphere onto a plane). How many burgers McDonald’s sells each second.

The thing is, it’s not that our brains can’t think and subsequently correctly intuit about these things. But this intuition literally does not come naturally to us; we have to work and train it. Professional race car drivers, for example, don’t have to perform conscious calculations and actively think about driving their cars at high speeds. They could develop their intuition thanks to many hours of training and a lot of practical experience. You, too, can learn and internalize new intuition, but only if you’re willing to put in the time and the work to train your brain for it.

The flip side of this is that it’s also easy to exploit our built-in evolutionary responses. Behavior that was once useful to avoid getting eaten by a tiger is nowadays used to keep you distracted and “engaged” to social networks.

This, too, can be unlearned. But it also takes work and conscious effort to do so.

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