Is truth stranger than fiction? I'm not convinced. Mind you, I'm halfway through a very weird thriller, Jed Rubenfeld's The Interpretation of Murder, which manages to get Freud and Jung involved with a kinky serial killer in 1900s New York. So this isn't the best time to ask me. But if there's one repository of truth that is stranger than fiction, it's the Times letters page. Case in point? A reader wrote on Saturday to say that, on the night before her Warwickshire village was flooded, her neighbours counted more than 200 snails on their lawn. And what's more, these little chaps were - apparently “without exception” - scurrying uphill as fast as their flabby torsos would carry them.

What a fascinating insight into animal life in the Midlands! The animal in question, of course, being homo sapiens. What other species would spend a night counting snails? (Incidentally, how do you ensure that you haven't counted the same one twice?) Or observing this mighty mass of gastropods for long enough to ascertain their direction of travel? After all, it takes 25 seconds for the average snail to shuffle an inch.

I long to know more. Once the snails had reached higher ground, did they huddle together for warmth? Was the higher ground high enough to save them from the flood? Did all 200 descend safe and sound, their stalky eyes blazing with joy, when the river receded? Or was this the molluscan equivalent of Custer's Last Stand: a heroic but doomed battle against hopeless odds?

And the most important question of all: as the neighbours watched this bizarre procession of slithering shells, did it occur to them to do something about moving their furniture and carpets on to higher ground, too? Or did they ruefully make the connection between the snails' tactics and the imminent flood only after the event?

These are vital questions, because they touch on the vexed issue of what makes humans different from, and higher than, animals. If, indeed, we are different or higher. We regard ourselves as the smartest kids on the evolutionary block: the species best equipped to survive whatever this crazy old planet can throw at us. We have invented remarkably complex systems to predict everything from tidal waves to whether it will rain at Lord's. We have telescopes capable of seeing stars erupt a trillion miles away, and triple-brained boffins interpreting how such galactic traumas will affect grain harvests in Indiana. We have all that. Yet when it comes to the crunch - warning a village to be ready for a soaking by an overexuberant river - a bunch of snails seem to have better advance information than we have.

And snails aren't the only creatures to show us up. A few weeks ago The Times's estimable weather expert, Paul Simons, drew attention to a fascinating blog written by a farmer in eastern China. He noticed his animals becoming increasingly agitated in the weeks before the recent earthquake. True, that may have been a case of hindsight ascribing significance to behaviour that wasn't actually so unusual. Yet it fits a well-documented pattern - of household pets going missing in a city before an earth tremor, for instance, or cattle losing their appetite before a hurricane. And it's not just in freak weather that so-called dumb animals make astonishingly accurate intuitive judgments that we still cannot fathom. Just consider, for instance, how salmon navigate their way across thousands of miles of ocean to find their home river. It has taken humans 50,000 years to develop homing devices as good as that. And your sat-nav will still point you the wrong way round the M25, if you give it half a chance.

Is there a lesson to be learnt here? We humans take pride in our ability to reason, to invent amazing gadgets to keep us out of harm's way. And, most of the time, they do. But has all this emphasis on cognitive thinking led to a withering of our instincts, our powers of intuition? Those snails on the lawn didn't think their way to high ground. They just knew it was the right move. And for thousands of years, before the dawn of modern science, humans must have done much the same thing. They relied on accumulated layers of ancestral intuition and acute use of their senses to guide them through the dangers of the natural world.

But we've blunted those powers of intuition. That's not surprising. We live in an insulated urban society. We spend less and less time in contact with nature, more and more filtering the outside world through protective machines such as the computer or the TV. But it's a pity. Diminished intuition adversely affects every aspect of life - from relationships and creativity to the workplace. Just think about the task of recruiting staff. In the old days you gave a bloke a job if you liked the look of him. Today some companies wouldn't dream of hiring anyone without subjecting his handwriting to graphological analysis, his body language to a psychologist's report and maybe his voice to a lie-detector test as well.

The American journalist Malcolm Gladwell tried to counter this retreat from intuition in his book Blink, where he argued that our senses tell us far more, subconsciously, about any situation or person than we think we know. Though he overstates his case, the book is a breath of fresh air. In all walks of life now you see evidence of this paralysing reluctance to rely on instinct. We have become shackled by the very machines and systems we invented to liberate us.

It's time we relearnt the virtues of intuition from animals. I wouldn't go quite as far as Yehudi Menuhin, who once delightfully suggested that “every parliament should have members who represent the fowls of the air and the fishes of the sea”. But I do think that if you live near a river, you would be well advised to spend less time watching the weather forecast and more observing those clever-clog snails in your garden.

Mind you, if they're such a smart species, why don't they have proper feet?

The grand total for Elton's joanna? Maybe £45,000
What price genius? As it happens we can calculate exactly. Next month one of Sir Elton John's pianos will be auctioned at Bonhams. A custom-made Steinway concert grand in top condition, it would normally be expected to sell for about £35,000. Reduce that figure by a couple of thousand for the piano's ghastly mottled yellow colour (I did say it was custom-made for Sir Elton) and another couple because you need a mansion as big as Sir Elton's to get the 9ft monster in your living room. Which means that if the piano belonged to just anybody, it would fetch around £30,000. In fact Bonhams anticipates a winning bid of up to £45,000. So the “added value” of its association with genius is just £15,000.

A ridiculously small price to pay, surely, for procuring an old joanna once tickled by Sir Elton. Or even to buy his piano. After all, an old upright once owned by John Lennon went for £1.45 million a few years ago. Mind you, its buyer was George Michael, who may have been rather desperate to acquire some link with musical genius, however tenuous.

Testing times
Ten cheers for the Institute for Public Policy Research. It has just proposed that the school year comprise five eight-week terms, with breaks of two or three weeks between each, instead of the current unproductive slog through 13-week terms with a long summer holiday during which the kids forget everything. But if we decide to shake up the school year so radically, could I make one other plea - that the exam period be moved from the traditional May/June period to February and March? It would make so much more psychological sense for pupils to be revising and sitting their beastly GCSEs and A levels while the wind is howling outside, rain lashing the windows, temperatures plummeting and ... Actually, forget all I've just written. The weather is perfect for exams right now.

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