Gut Feelings (Intuition)

Gut AlmightyPsychology TodayIntuition really does come from the gut. It's also a kind of matchinggame based on experience. There are times when trusting your gut isthe smartest move—and times you'd better think twice.By: Carlin FloraYou "know" things. You don't even know how you know them. Yet you havea sense of certainty when driving down a strange street that youreally must make a left turn. Or comfort a co-worker who insists she'sfine. Or quit your job and move to Paris.Intuitions, or gut feelings, are sudden, strong judgments whose originwe can't immediately explain. Although they seem to emerge from anobscure inner force, they actually begin with a perception ofsomething outside—a facial expression, a tone of voice, a visualinconsistency so fleeting you're not even aware you noticed.Think of them as rapid cognition or condensed reasoning that takesadvantage of the brain's built-in shortcuts. Or think of intuition asan unconscious associative process. Long dismissed as magical orbeneath the dignity of science, intuition turns out to muster somefancy and fast mental operations. The best explanation psychologistsnow offer is that intuition is a mental matching game. The brain takesin a situation, does a very quick search of its files, and then findsits best analogue among the stored sprawl of memories and knowledge.Based on that analogy, you ascribe meaning to the situation in frontof you. A doctor might simply glance at a pallid young womancomplaining of fatigue and shortness of breath and immediately intuitshe suffers from anemia.The gut itself literally feeds gut feelings; think of butterflies inthe stomach when a decision is pending. The gut has millions of nervecells and, through them, a "mind of its own," says Michael Gershon,author of The Second Brain and a professor at Columbia University.Still, gut feelings do not originate there, but in signals from thebrain.That visceral punch in the paunch is testament that emotions are anintrinsic part of all gut feelings. "I don't think that emotion andintuition can be separated," says cognitive scientist AlexandreLinhares at the Brazilian School of Business and PublicAdministration. Emotion guides how we learn from experience; if youwitness something while your adrenaline is pumping, for instance, itwill be remembered very vividly.Experience is encoded in our brains as a web of fact and feeling. Whena new experience calls up a similar pattern, it doesn't unleash juststored knowledge but also an emotional state of mind and apredisposition to respond in a certain way. Imagine meeting a date whoreminds you of loved ones and also of the emotions you've felt towardthose people. Suddenly you begin to fall for him or her. "Intuition,"says Linhares, "can be described as 'almost immediate situationunderstanding' as opposed to 'immediate knowledge.' Understanding isfilled with emotion. We don't obtain knowledge of love, danger, orjoy; we feel them in a meaningful way."Encased in certainty, intuitions compel us to act in specific ways,and those who lack intuition are essentially cognitively paralyzed.Psychologist Antoine Bechara at the University of Southern Californiastudied brain-damaged patients who could not form emotional intuitionswhen making a decision. They were left to decide purely via deliberatereasoning. "They ended up doing such a complicated analysis, factoringeverything in, that it could take them hours to decide between twokinds of cereal," he says.While endless reasoning in the absence of guiding intuitions isunproductive, some people, including President Bush, champion theother extreme—"going with the gut" at all times. Intuition, however,is best used as the first step in solving a problem or deciding whatto do. The more experience you have in a particular domain, the morereliable your intuitions, because they arise out of the richest arrayof collected patterns of experience. But even in your area ofexpertise, it's wisest to test out your hunches—you could easily havelatched on to the wrong detail and pulled up the wrong web ofassociations in your brain.When researcher Douglas Hofstadter is starting a knotty math problem,for instance, he begins with a hunch. Then he hunkers down andcalculates. After two weeks, perhaps he'll see a roadblock and giveup. Another hunch pushes him to a new tack, and perhaps it is theright one.It's time to declare an end to the battle between gut and mind—and tothe belief that intuitions are parapsychological fluff. Better toexplore how the internalized experiences from which gut feelings arisebest interact with the deliberate calculations of the conscious mind.




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