ohOn a rainy night in London, a young woman walks to the entrance of a side street and smiles to herself as she thinks back to the evening she spent with the friend she had just greeted at the train station. She is about to walk down the dimly lit shortcut that will take her back to her accommodation, when she stops.
Something in her body told her not to go down that street. She pauses and then turns back onto the busy, well-lit but longer road home.
“Where are you going?” She did not hear the footsteps of the man walking behind her. He seemed thrown by her change of direction. Instincts screamed, she didn’t answer and hurried off down the main road.
Everyone has a story like this – the road they didn’t walk on, the cafe they didn’t go into, the time their body reacted to save them a split second before something bad happened. There are many terms for it; a sixth sense, a gut feeling, something in the air.
According to University of New South Wales neuroscientist and psychologist Joel Pearson, this is what happens in the brain at that moment: “[It’s] processing of all the things in the environment; the time of day, how well it is lit, how well it is not lit, the pace the person is walking, for example the shadows, the tone and a hundred other things.
“It’s going to be a prediction based on previous learning, situations you’ve been in, also movies you’ve watched and all the things you’ve been through in your life.”
Call it intuition – a nebulous concept that Pearson has been studying for 25 years. As the author of a new book called The Intuition Toolkit, he’s settled on a solid definition for that thing that many people can’t quite put their finger on: “It’s the learned, positive use of unconscious information for better decisions or actions. “
In his Future Minds Lab at UNSW, Pearson is engaged in the science of consciousness; especially how information from our unconscious affects our decision-making, behavior and feelings, and what effect emotion has on that process. “It’s this fascinating subject,” he says, “but the science has just been really bad at it.”
It’s the science of ‘psychophysics’; a subfield of psychology that Pearson describes as developing blood tests or microscopes for the mind. “But it’s not cells or neurons or chemicals when you look under the microscope, it’s behavior and experiences and representations, whether it’s depression or anxiety or 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 come up with an accurate and useful definition for intuition. This is important because many things are subsumed under intuition – paranoia, emotional thinking, cognitive bias, the human tendency to see patterns or associations where none exist, and human fallibility when it comes to judging probability. Pearson calls this ‘misintuition’ and says that if we put too much faith in it, we can put ourselves at greater risk.
Intuition, he says, includes three key components: it is learned, it is productive, and it is based on unconscious information.
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The learning is what informs what we do with the unconscious information our brain receives. For example, consider the scenario of choosing a new cafe to get a coffee or lunch.
“You’ve been to hundreds of cafes and your brain has processed all those things – the temperature, the music, the hairstyles, the coffee machine, the this, the that, how clean the floor is, how clean the windows are – and you’ve just learned that some of those things predict better food and better coffee,” says Pearson.
So when you stand at the entrance to a cafe, your intuition applies those teachings to the wealth of unconscious information you’re processing, and gives you a sense of whether or not you want to eat there.
Intuition must also be productive, according to Pearson’s definition. This is his way of clarifying the ongoing debate over whether intuition is good or bad, or whether the term can cover any kind of automatic or emotion-driven decision-making. He wants to focus on the situation in which intuition works for the better.
And finally, the unconscious information is where things get really interesting in Pearson’s lab. The information we are aware of receiving at any given moment – the sound of a colleague on the phone, the smell of coffee when we walk past a cafe, the feeling of warm sun on our skin – is just the point. of an iceberg.
“The brain is really good at limiting the spotlight, so it can focus all the resources on one narrow thing, like a spotlight on stage,” says Pearson. But all that sensory information in the rest of the iceberg is still being processed.
This is exemplified by what Pearson calls ‘blind action’, and is an example of how we can incorporate information we are not even aware of into our actions, whether it’s swinging a foot out to kick a soccer ball bending down, yanking a falling, tipping object off a kitchen counter, or pulling a child back from the road moments before an unseen car speeds by.
Defining intuition is one thing. The next question that Pearson tries to answer is how can we use this information to explore and tap into our own intuition? To that end, he came up with a handy acronym for the five rules for understanding and safely using your intuition: Smile.
The S stands for self-awareness, especially of your emotional state. When we are stressed or emotional, our intuition is compromised by those emotions. In that state, we shouldn’t trust what feels like intuition, because what we’re really doing is relying on emotional thinking, fear, or paranoia.
The M represents mastery, because learning to use your intuition takes practice and learning. Those intuitive cues you rely on to choose a cafe in Melbourne aren’t going to be very helpful in choosing a cafe in Tokyo because you don’t have the learning to back up your intuition. As Pearson writes, “You can’t rely on intuition when it’s the first time you’ve done something.”
The I stands for impulses and addiction, which can also be confused with intuition. Impulses are “innate reflexes,” such as what drives salmon upstream to spawn or birds to migrate north in winter. And anyone who has ever succumbed to an irresistible urge will know how compelling that addictive siren call of the forbidden call can be. But it’s not intuition either.
The L is for low probability. “Our brains are really bad at understanding probability,” says Pearson, as the $7 billion Australians will spend on lottery tickets in 2023 can attest. A fear of sharks or being struck by lightning is not intuition (unless you happen to be in a shark cage or standing on top of a barren hill during a storm). We also attribute random events to intuition, such as dreaming of a plane crash the night before a plane actually crashes somewhere in the world.
And finally, the E is for environment, which ties in with the learning aspect: intuition should only be trusted in familiar and predictable contexts, whether it’s trusting our intuition about a prospective business partner in a completely different cultural context, or our intuition about the safety of a street in another city.
As that young woman who decades ago made a different choice about which street to walk on that wet London night, I can’t help but feel that my intuition saved me from danger in that moment. And for that I am very grateful.
