On a rainy night in London, a young woman walks towards the entrance of an alley and smiles to herself, remembering the evening she spent with the friend she had just said goodbye to at the train station. He was about to walk down the poorly lit shortcut that would take him back to where he was staying when he stopped.
Something in his body tells him not to go to that street. He pauses, then turns toward the busy, well-lit but longer route home.
“Where are you going?” He didn’t hear the footsteps of the man walking behind him. He seems surprised by her change of direction. His instincts scream, he doesn’t answer and hurries away along the main road.
Everyone has a story like this; The path they didn’t walk, the cafe they didn’t enter, the reaction their bodies gave to save them a second before something bad happened. There are many terms for this; sixth sense, a gut feeling, something in the air.
According to neuroscientist and psychologist Joel Pearson from the University of New South Wales, what is happening in the brain at that moment is as follows: “[It’s] processing of everything in the environment; time of day, how well it is lit, how poorly it is lit, the person’s walking speed, e.g. shadows, tone of voice, and hundreds of other things.
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“You will make a prediction based on your previous learning, the situations you have been in, the movies you have watched, and everything you have experienced in your life.”
Call it intuition; It’s a vague concept that Pearson has been working on for 25 years. As the author of a new book called The Intuition Toolkit, he has settled on a solid definition for this thing that many people don’t fully understand: “It is the learned, positive use of unconscious information for better decisions or actions. ”
Pearson is interested in the science of consciousness at the Future Minds Lab at UNSW; In particular, how the information coming from our unconscious affects our decision-making, behavior and emotions, and what effect emotion has on this process. “It’s a fascinating subject,” he says, “but the science has been really bad on it.”
This is the science of ‘psychophysics’; A subfield of psychology that Pearson defined as developing blood tests or microscopes for the mind. “But when viewed under the microscope, it is not the cells, neurons, or chemicals that matter, but the behaviors, experiences, and representations, whether it be depression, anxiety, mental imagery, or intuition.”
The goal of Pearson’s work is to understand not only what intuition is, but how it happens, how we use it, and how we can use it better.
The first challenge was to find an accurate and useful definition of intuition. This is important because so many things fall under intuition – paranoia, emotional thinking, cognitive bias, the human tendency to see patterns or relationships where none exist, and human fallibility when it comes to judging probability. Pearson calls this ‘false intuition’ and says we may be putting ourselves at greater risk if we rely on it too much.
He says intuition involves three basic components: it is learned, it is productive, and it is based on unconscious knowledge.
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Learning is what informs our brains what to do with the unconscious information it receives. For example, consider the scenario where you are trying to choose a new cafe to grab coffee or lunch.
“You’ve been to hundreds of cafes before, and your brain has processed all of those things – the temperature, the music, the hairstyles, the coffee machine, this, that, how clean the floor is, how clean the windows are – and Pearson says some of those things are better food and better food.” “You just learned that he predicted coffee,” he says.
So when you stand at the entrance of a cafe, your intuition applies what you’ve learned to the wealth of unconscious information you’ve processed and gives you a gut feeling about whether you want to eat there or not.
According to Pearson’s definition, intuition must also be productive. This is his way of clarifying the ongoing debate about whether intuition is good or bad, whether the term can encompass any kind of automatic or emotion-based decision making. He wants to focus on the situation where intuition works better.
And finally, unconscious knowledge is where things get really interesting in Pearson’s lab. The information we are aware of receiving at any given moment (a colleague’s voice on the phone, the smell of coffee we hear when passing a cafe, the feeling of the hot sun on our skin) is just the tip of the iceberg.
“The brain is really good at restricting the spotlight, so it can focus all the resources on something narrow, like a spotlight on a stage,” Pearson says. But all this sensory information on the rest of the iceberg is still being processed.
This is illustrated by what Pearson calls “blindness” and is an example of how we can incorporate information into our actions that we are not even aware of; whether it’s throwing our foot to deflect a football or grabbing a falling object. knocking it off the kitchen counter or pushing a child out of the way moments before an unseen car speeds past.
Defining intuition is one thing. The next question Pearson tries to answer is how can we use this knowledge to discover and leverage our own intuitions? To that end, he’s come up with a handy acronym for five rules for understanding and safely using your intuition: Smile.
S represents your self-awareness, especially your emotional state. When we are stressed or emotional, these emotions compromise our intuition. In this case, we should not trust what feels like intuition because what we are actually doing is relying on emotional thinking, fear, or paranoia.
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M represents mastery because learning to use your intuition requires practice and learning. These intuitive tips you rely on for choosing a cafe in Melbourne won’t be of much use when choosing a cafe in Tokyo because you don’t have the information to back up your intuition. As Pearson writes, “When you’re doing something for the first time, you can’t trust your intuition.”
The ego represents impulses and addiction, which can also be confused with intuition. The urges are “innate reflexes,” like what drives salmon to spawn upstream or birds to migrate north in winter. And anyone who has succumbed to an irresistible desire knows how convincing the addictive siren call of the forbidden call can be. But it’s also not intuition.
L is for low probability. “Our brains are really bad at understanding probability,” says Pearson, as evidenced by the $7 billion Australians will spend on lottery tickets in 2023. Fear of sharks or lightning strikes is not intuition (unless you’re in a shark cage or standing on a barren hill during a storm). We also attribute random events to intuition, such as dreaming about a plane crashing somewhere in the world the night before.
And finally, E is for environment, which ties into the learning aspect: intuition should only be trusted in familiar and predictable contexts; whether that’s trusting our intuition about a potential business partner in a completely different cultural context or trusting our intuition about the business partner. The safety of a street in a different city.
As that young woman who made a different choice about which street to walk on that rainy London night decades ago, I can’t help but feel like my intuition saved me from danger in that moment. And I’m so grateful for that.