What You See May Not Be What You Get

The term heuristic, which Wikipedia says comes from the Greek word for ‘find’ or ‘discover,’ “refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Where an exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution.” We call heuristic approaches “intuition” and “guessing” as well. We all use this part of the brain – imagine how hard it would be to have to think about every choice we make, to reason through every decision. Our brains would be overloaded. So nature allows us to use heuristics for many common tasks.