by On a rainy night in London, a young woman walks towards the entrance of a side street, smiling to herself as she remembers the evening she spent with the friend she managed to say goodbye to at the train station. She is about to walk down the poorly lit shortcut that will take her back to her accommodation, when she stops.
Something in her body tells her not to go down that street. She pauses, then turns back towards the busy, well-lit but further route home.
“Where are you going?” She did not hear the footsteps of the man who was walking behind her. He seems to be spending his change of direction. Instincts scream, she does not respond and rushes away on the main road.
Everyone has a story like this – the road they didn’t walk down, the cafe they didn’t go into, the time their body reacted to save a second before something bad happened. It has many terms; 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 is happening in the brain in that moment: “[It’s] processing of all objects in the environment; the time of day, how well it is lit, how well it is not lit, the speed at which the person is walking, for example, the shadows, the tone and a hundred other things.
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“It will make predictions based on prior learning, situations you’ve been in, 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 of what many people can’t quite put their finger on: “It’s the learned, positive use of unconscious information for decisions or better actions. “
In his Future Minds Lab at UNSW, Pearson is engaged in the science of consciousness; in particular how information from our inquiry affects our decision-making, behavior and emotions, and how emotions influence that process. “It’s this fascinating subject,” he says, “but the science was really bad.”
It is 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 just 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 for intuition. That’s important because a lot of things come in under intuition – paranoia, emotional thinking, cognitive bias, the human tendency to see patterns or associations when they don’t exist, and human fallibility when it comes to estimating probability. Pearson calls this ‘delusion’, and says that if we put too much trust in it, we could be putting ourselves at greater risk.
Intuition, he says, consists of three main parts: it is learned, it is productive, and it is based on unconscious information.
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Learning is what informs what we do with the unconscious information our brain receives. For example, consider the situation of trying to choose a new cafe to have coffee or lunch.
“You’ve been to hundreds of cafes before and your brain has processed all those things – the temperature, the music, the hairstyles, the coffee machine, is this, that, how clean is the t -floor, how clean the windows are – and you learned that some of those things predict better food and better coffee,” says Pearson.
So when you’re standing at the entrance to a cafe, your intuition is applying that learning to the wealth of unconscious information you’re processing, and it tells you whether you want to eat there or not. you don’t want
Intuition must also be productive, according to Pearson’s definition. His way is to clarify the ongoing debate about whether intuition is good or bad, whether the term can cover any kind of automatic decision-making or emotions. He wants to focus on the situation where intuition works for the better.
And finally, the unconscious knowledge is that things get very interesting in Pearson’s lab. The information we are receiving at any given moment – the sound of a colleague on the telephone, the smell of coffee as we walk past a cafe, the feeling of the warm sun on our skin – is only the tip of the iceberg.
“The brain is very 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 that sensory information in the rest of the iceberg is still being processed.
This is illustrated by what Pearson calls ‘blind action’, and is an example of how we can incorporate information we’re not even aware of into our actions, whether that’s kicking a foot to deflect a soccer ball, kicking an object that’s falling out off a kitchen counter, or pulling a child back from the road moments before an unseen car drives by.
It is one thing to define intuition. The next question Pearson is working to answer is how can we use this information to explore and cultivate our own intelligence? To that end, he’s come up with a handy acronym for the five rules for understanding and using your intelligence safely: Smile.
The S stands for self-awareness, especially of your emotional state. When we are stressed or emotional, those emotions affect our intellect. In that state, we should not trust intuition because what we are actually doing is dependent on emotional thinking, fear or paranoia.
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The M stands for mastery, because using your intellect requires practice and learning. Those intuitive tips you rely on to choose a cafe in Melbourne won’t be of much use when you’re choosing a cafe in Tokyo, because you don’t have the learning to back up your intuition. As Pearson wrote, “You can’t rely on intuition if it’s the first time you’re doing something.”
The I stands for impulses and addiction, which can also be mistaken for intuition. Impulses are “innate reflexes”, like what drives salmon upstream to spawn or birds to migrate north in winter. And anyone who has ever succumbed to an irresistible piety will know how compelling that addictive, forbidden call can be. But it is not also intuition.
The L is for low probability. “Our brains are very bad at understanding probability,” says Pearson, as the $7bn Australians will spend on lottery tickets in 2023 can attest. Fearing or being afraid of sharks (unless you happen to be in a shark cage or standing on a hilltop during a storm) is not an intuition. Furthermore, we attribute random events to intuition, such as dreaming of a plane crash the night before a plane crash somewhere in the world.
And finally, the E is for environment, which links to the learning aspect: predictability should only be trusted in familiar and predictable contexts, be it trusting our intuition about a potential business partner in a cultural context that is completely different, or our intelligence about street safety in another city.
As that young woman who made another choice, decades ago, to walk down the street on that wet night in London, I can’t help but feel that my intelligence saved me from danger in that moment. And for that I am very grateful.
