○On a rainy night in London, a young woman walks toward the entrance of a side street, smiling to herself as she recalls the night she spent with a friend she had just broken up with at the station. She was about to walk down a dimly lit shortcut back to her lodgings when she stopped.
Something in her body tells her not to go down that road. She stopped and turned back toward the busy, well-lit but long journey home.
“Where are you going?” She didn't hear the footsteps of the man who was walking behind her. He seemed to be thrown off by her change of direction. Her instincts screamed at her, but she didn't answer and hurried away along the main road.
Everyone has a story like this. It's about the streets you haven't walked, the cafes you haven't entered, the times when your body reacts and saves you just a split second before something bad happens. There are many terms for it. A sixth sense, intuition, something in the air.
According to Joel Pearson, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of New South Wales, the following happens in your brain at that moment:[It’s] Process everything in your environment. The time of day, the brightness, the brightness, the speed at which people walk, for example shadows, colors, and many other things.
“You're making predictions based on prior learning, situations you've been in, movies you've watched, everything you've experienced in life.”
It's called intuition. It's a vague concept that Pearson has been studying for his 25 years. The author of a new book called The Intuition Toolkit has settled on a clear definition of something that many people can't quite put their finger on. ”
Mr Pearson works on the science of consciousness at UNSW's Future Minds Lab. In particular, how information from the unconscious influences our decisions, actions, and emotions, and how emotions influence that process. “This is a very fascinating subject, but science has been really bad at this,” he says.
It is the science of “psychophysics.” Pearson describes the subfield of psychology as the development of blood testing and microscopy for the mind. “But when you look at it under a microscope, it's not cells or neurons or chemicals, it's behaviors, experiences, and expressions, like depression and anxiety, mental imagery and intuition.”
The goal of Pearson's research is to understand not only what intuition is, but also how it arises, how it is used, and how we can use it better.
The first challenge was to come up with an accurate and useful definition of intuition. Many things are lumped together under intuition, including paranoia, emotional thinking, cognitive biases, the human tendency to see patterns and connections that don't exist, and human fallibility in judging probabilities. This is important. Pearson calls this a “misconception” and says that if we rely on it too much, we can put ourselves at greater risk.
According to him, intuition includes three important elements. It is learned, it is productive, and it is based on unconscious information.
Learning informs how our brains process the unconscious information it receives. For example, consider a scenario where you are trying to choose a new cafe to have coffee or lunch.
“You've been to hundreds of cafes before, and your brain processes everything from the temperature, the music, the hairstyle, the coffee machine, this and that, the cleanliness of the floors, the cleanliness of the windows. “You learned that some of these things are predictive of better eating and better coffee,” says Pearson.
So when you're standing at the entrance to a cafe, your intuition applies those learnings to the wealth of unconscious information you're processing, and your intuition tells you whether you want to eat there or not. I'll give it.
According to Pearson's definition, intuition must be productive. This is his way of clarifying the ongoing debate about whether intuition is good or bad and whether the term can cover any kind of automatic or emotion-driven decision-making. He wants to focus on situations where intuition works for the better.
And finally, what's really interesting in Pearson's lab is unconscious information. The sound of a co-worker's phone, the smell of coffee as you walk past a cafe, or the feeling of the hot sun on your skin are just the tip of the iceberg.
“The brain is good at limiting the spotlight, so it can focus all its resources on one narrow thing, like a spotlight on a stage,” says Pearson. But all the sensory information on the rest of the iceberg is still being processed.
This is exemplified by what Pearson calls “blind actions,” how we pick up information that we are not even conscious of, such as throwing our foot out to deflect a soccer ball or snatching an overturned object. This is an example of how this can be incorporated into behavior. Pulling a child off the kitchen counter or pulling a child back from the road just before an invisible car speeds past.
Defining intuition is one thing. The next question Pearson seeks to answer is how we can use this information to explore and leverage our own intuition. To that end, he came up with “Smile,” a handy abbreviation for his five rules for understanding intuition and using it safely.
S stands for self-awareness, especially one's emotional state. When we feel stressed or emotional, our emotions impair our intuition. In this state, we shouldn't trust what feels like intuition because what we're actually doing relies on emotional thinking, fear, and paranoia.
M stands for mastery. Because it takes practice and learning to be able to use your intuition. The intuitive cues you rely on when choosing a cafe in Melbourne are less helpful when choosing a cafe in Tokyo. This is because they have not learned enough to support their intuition. Pearson writes: “When you're doing something for the first time, you can't rely on your intuition.”
“I” stands for impulse and addiction, but is sometimes mistaken for intuition. The urge is an “innate reflex,” similar to what causes salmon to swim upstream to spawn or birds to migrate north for the winter. And anyone who has ever given in to an uncontrollable desire knows how convincing the addictive siren cry of that forbidden call can be. But that's not intuition.
L stands for low probability. “Our brains are very bad at understanding probability,” Pearson says, as evidenced by the $7 billion Australians spent on lottery tickets in 2023. Fear of sharks or fear of being struck by lightning is not a gut feeling (unless you happen to be in a shark cage or standing on a barren hill in a storm). They also attribute random events to intuition, such as dreaming of a plane crashing the night before it actually crashes somewhere in the world.
And the last E stands for environment, which is tied to the learning aspect. Intuition should only be trusted in familiar and predictable situations, whether trusting intuition about future business partners in a completely different cultural context or intuition about the environment. Safety on the streets of different cities.
As that young woman who made a different choice about which road to walk on that rainy London night decades ago, I didn't feel in that moment that my intuition had saved me from danger. I can't go in. And for that I am very grateful.