Albert Einstein certainly did: “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am” (1929).
Neuroscience supports Einstein’s conclusion. Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis suggests that emotions are crucial in decision-making. Damasio suggests that the brain learns to associate our experiences with specific emotional states, creating a “somatic marker.” These markers guide our future choices.
This demolishes two wildly held — but false — ideas. First, many people still believe that reason and emotion are incompatible. Wrong. Emotion and feeling are “indispensable” to the reasoning process (Damasio, 2003). Second, our culture is still suffering from the pernicious notion that the mind and body are separate. Descartes infamously promoted this nonsense; he may be the stupidest genius that ever lived!
When Descartes first claimed that the mind and body are distinct, the philosopher Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia challenged him. She highlighted the importance of the body in thinking. Sadly, she didn’t convince him, and we’ve been suffering from the consequences of Descartes’ influence ever since.
Somatic markers are sometimes outside our conscious awareness but can be sensed as gut feelings. When we pay more attention to our gut feelings, we can learn to listen to them and even dialogue with them. The philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin describes “a body-sense of meaning” that he calls a “felt sense” (1981). Felt senses give us access to embodied knowing that may be fresh because “your body knows much that you don’t know” (Gendlin, 1981). I use my felt sense all the time, especially in my therapy work, by applying Gendlin’s Focusing technique.
Gut feelings are most reliable when we have experience to draw on, and there’s a lot of subtle information to consider. Intuition can spot patterns, while analytical thinking tends to get confused by all the data. Lie detection is a good example. We’re pretty good at using our intuition to assess if someone is telling the truth, but if we’re asked to think it through and explain our reasoning, we tend to get it wrong.
Financial trading is a perfect example of a situation with masses of subtle information, and the experts have much experience. Unsurprisingly, traders often rely on gut feelings instead of market analysis. Research revealed that “the gut feeling of financial lore” brought market success (Kandasamy et al. 2016). One trader describes this gut feeling as “like having whiskers, like being a deer … something somewhere just gave you a slight shiver, but you’re not quite sure what, but it’s something to be careful about, something’s around” (Vohra and Fenton-O’Creevy, 2014).
Gut feelings are subtle, but as Gendlin showed, we can learn to be more attuned to our intuition. Recent research suggests that enhancing our emotional intelligence can improve our intuitive decision-making.
So, should you trust your gut? The answer is an empathetic ‘yes’ if there’s a lot of subtle information to consider and you have experience of similar situations. Improving your emotional intelligence and learning Focusing will help you listen to your gut instincts and get better at knowing when to trust them.
