🍄 Got a Hunch?

The feeling of intuition—from emotional inception to qualia. Neurological studies bring legitimacy to the idea of ‘gut feeling’ as a sixth sense.

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Intuition speaks when not spoken to. 
Intuition is the biological language of the body. 
It acts unconsciously. It works steady and quietly.

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Intuition speaks when not spoken to. It’s the biological language of the body that acts unconsciously and historically lays wrapped in an air of mystery. Now, as neuroscientists manage to measure it and psychologists pick it apart, the intricacies of intuition start to reveal themselves. From interoception as an internal alarm bell system to the knowing sense of qualia, research shows interesting inter-body chatter at play between the brain and gut.

“Intuition is that part of our mind that presents us with the gist of a situation,” explains Elaine Fox in Switch Craft: How Agile Thinking Can Help You Adapt and Thrive [HarperCollins, 2022]. “These intuitive hints are almost imperceptible, occur rapidly, and allow us to pick up information about the world without intention…it is knowledge that guides our behavior without necessarily being available to our conscious awareness.” Fox founded and directed the Oxford Centre for Emotions & Affective Neuroscience (OCEAN) at the University of Oxford and is now Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide.

Intuition is visceral

 “The only real valuable thing is intuition.”— Albert Einstein

Intuition is synonymous in many languages and cultures with visceral signals often referred to as gut feelings. Visceral is one of the senses that has been defined by our neural pathways. Neurological research has identified an awareness that operates below our level of consciousness and which may serve like a physical “alarm bell.” The neurologist Antonio Damasio and his colleagues have argued that unconscious processing accompanied by physiological somatic markers force our attention on positive or negative outcomes, which manifest in our conscious awareness as a “gut feeling” (they called this the somatic marker hypothesis).

Other neurological research using neuroimaging techniques has identified brain regions that are implicated in those insights (the “aha” or eureka moments) where we experience the pieces of a problem that has been perplexing us falling into place often after a period of unconscious incubation. Alongside this, the methods of neuroscience are also beginning to shed light upon the brain regions and processes that are involved in intuitive judgment. For example, the role of working memory in feelings, emotion, unconscious processing and human consciousness itself.

Emotional inception

Intuition happens under the hood. “My lab had been studying consciousness for quite a while before this and so we had the tools to render things unconscious, and we can do that visually,” says Joel Pearson, a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), in The Guardian podcast. Pearson, who penned two books this year: Intuition: Unlock Your Brain's Potential to Build Real Intuition and Make Better Decisions [Welbeck, 2024] and The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why [Simon & Schuster, 2024], explains “We can put a picture in front of one eye and then show bright flashing lights to the other eye and because those flashing lights are so bright it suppresses whatever we show to the other eye, so that becomes unconscious but the eye is still processing it, your brain is still processing it. I call this emotional inception—and it’s exactly that, it’s incepting emotional information into the brain.”

The name is a nod to the 2010 sci-fi film, Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets. “We’re not doing that by hacking dreams or anything, but we can show people a scary picture like a spider or a snake, or a happy picture like a flower or a puppy and we know their brain is still processing it even though they’ll never be consciously aware of it, never see it. So that’s step one, getting information into the brain, and step two is tying that with a real world decision task. So by doing that we can monitor and track how well people can combine this unconscious information with a conscious decision. And then how they can learn to do that better and better over time. We saw really nice data showing that when we’re giving people the unconscious emotional information, their brain’s responding to it, they’re sweating more,” says Pearson. In some conditions they asked people how confident they were. Then the researchers gave them emotional unconscious information, and their confidence went up—even though they didn’t see the images.

For Professor Elaine Fox, psychologist and author, intuition is ‘just knowing’…it is knowledge that has an unarticulated feel. ”It’s the ‘gut feeling’ that’s easily missed. Most of us will have had that gut feeling that something is just not quite right, even if we cannot pinpoint why. These intuitions can also be very helpful in tuning us in to the cultural norms of a new situation. Because our brain analyzes patterns and probabilities before our conscious mind has time to catch up, these intuitive hints can be very useful to orient us when we are in new and unfamiliar surroundings.”

Intuition in action

Intuition is also lifesaving. Pearson mentions Australian mountaineer Jon Muir. The adventurer says a ‘gut feeling’ saved his life in many situations, not least while on a team expedition up Mount Everest in the 1980s. “He felt a sinking heavy feeling of dis-ease, a lack of ease in his stomach and it started getting stronger and stronger and at first he thought it was a rumbling stomach, or something to do with hunger but it wasn’t,” Pearson tells The Guardian. “This heaviness was pulling him down and he started having doubts about pushing to the summit—that it was perhaps too windy, or he was too tired. As they got closer the feelings of ‘this is not right’ got stronger and he decided to turn around and make his way back to camp. People were shocked as they had trained for years and raised all the money, but two went back with him.” The other two went ahead, fell and lost their lives.

Studies in psychology suggest that intuition is a very real process where the brain makes use of past experiences, along with internal signals and cues from the environment, to help us make a decision—often without registering in our conscious mind.

Pearson says everybody has intuition but use it to different degrees. “I think it comes down the internal bodily sensation, called interoception, which is just internal perception, whether we’re hot, cold, hungry, need to go the bathroom. We have a whole system inside our bodies for perceiving this state,” he says. “When it comes to unconscious signals it’s really interesting because our body responds to unconscious information in our brains, whereby definition it’s unconscious, we’re not aware of it but our body can tap into that, and that’s really what that gut feeling is.” Not everyone gets it in the gut—some people get that feeling of knowing in the chest, in the fingertips or sweaty palms. But it is some physiological, bodily response to something our brain is processing that we’re not consciously aware of.

Whether we notice or not, our body is sending these signals to the brain, particularly when we’re making risky decisions. What you think of as a ‘gut feeling’ is actually you responding to those subtle cues.

Qualia and pre-reflective consciousness

The act of reflecting on one’s experiences suggests that subjective feelings and sensations are a necessary element of human life. As simply described by Federico Faggin, physicist, inventor, founder of the Faggin Foundation for the study of consciousness, qualia is “being the way we know by feeling, by sensations and feelings.” In his interview with ALICE, Faggin explained that “consciousness is the fact that we can understand, that we can comprehend, we can perceive through qualia. And the physical representation of qualia is a pure quantum state. A pure quantum state has all the characteristics of qualia as our sense of knowing and experiencing, which we feel is qualia. So if you think about it, that kind of knowing, we know for example the love that I feel has dimensions that I cannot fathom either. In other words, there are dimensions that I know that I could know but I don't know yet.” (More on qualia and consciousness in ALICE’s A More Human Human. Now., featuring Faggin).

A comprehensive explanation for qualia has its origins in evolutionary biology as information passing through the nervous system that serve to guide the behavior of individuals to ultimately facilitate survival. In her thesis “Rescuing Qualia,” Mary Graham, philosophy doctoral researcher at University of Guleph, states that as “humans and as sensing beings, qualia are what adds richness and dimension to experience, even when one encounters unpleasant stimuli. From food preferences to music preferences, the mere fact that we care one way or another suggests something necessarily resides beyond the opinion, otherwise it would refer to nothing or assured indifference.” Citing the plausible explanations for the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” (the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than non-conscious), she explains that qualia are information messages which are currently inaccessible to all except the owner of the body processing them. “Just as we are unable to see what information is stored in a computer hard drive without a way to access it, information about one’s experiences is stored in the body and recalled when cued.” She concludes that qualia are simply a bodily form of representation which emerges from “pre-reflective awareness.” According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (and similar to the seminal thought-ware of French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), pre-reflective self-consciousness is present whenever you are living through or undergoing an experience, e.g., whenever you are consciously perceiving the world, remembering a past event, imagining a future event, thinking an occurrent thought, or feeling sad or happy.

This pre-reflective dimension of consciousness is directly linked to the theory of intuition according to María Isabel Sanhueza and Pablo Fossa of Universidad del Desarrollo, co-authors of the research paper “Why Theory of Mind Is Not Enough to Understand Others?” Phenomenological philosophy teaches that the knowledge of oneself and of the world is produced via intuition and not through reason (reflection) The researchers write that “Intuition is the direct and immediate perception of the objects of the world, which is experienced in a pre-reflective way, and it is only possible to reflect at a later time. Pre-reflective consciousness receives intuitively perceived objects through direct experience of essences. In the pre-reflective consciousness, the objects of immediate perception are grasped directly, abruptly and intuitively, and constitute the purest phenomenological essence of the objects in the world.”

Thinking from the gut

“There is a great deal of incoming information and interpersonal processing taking place outside of conscious awareness in the neural networks that organize emotion and sensory and somatic information,” writes Dr. Lou Cozolino, Professor of Psychology at Pepperdine University, for Psychology Today. “This is how we come to know things without knowing we know them.” He explains that often in retrospect, after something has gone wrong, we tend to become aware of the indications that were drowned out or ignored within the stream of conscious processing. Clues that were vaguely recognized at the time often gain meaning and clarity in the rearview mirror.

In the words of Jonas Salk, “Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next,” writes Cozolino. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio theorized that we evolved to use bodily cues such as muscle tone, heart rate, and endocrine activity in order to make rapid decisions about how to navigate the physical and social worlds. These “somatic markers” translate unconscious emotions and sensations into felt instinct. It's an evolutionary strategy that allows us to make quick decisions that require minimal thought to enhance survival.

Split decisions

Is intuition a north star? Always right and never wrong? Pearson believes that intuition as unconscious learning systems can be very similar to how we think about AI systems now. Pearson tells The Guardian, “We’ve seen how AI can be really biased in a number of ways, but with any of these unconscious learning systems, with the training data, if junk goes in, junk is going to come out. It’s the same with AI and it’s the same with intuition, so if you train your intuition on bad data, then your intuition is going to have biases in it.”

Gut feelings are the result of many channels of information processing and provide a road map that integrates our emotions and physical sensations with a given environment. “At this moment in history, it is essential for all of us to foster our own centeredness, self-awareness, and intuition”, writes Cozolino. He believes that learning to read all of the input from the world translates to balancing reason with emotion held within the stillness at our core. As we struggle to make decisions about our lives in these confusing and difficult times, it is more important than ever to listen to and nurture these vital instincts—the visceral, and the real.

What else we are wandering…

👀 Seeing from behind
Many people have had the experience of turning around with the feeling that someone is looking at them from behind, to find that this is in fact the case. Conversely, many people have found that they can sometimes make people turn around just by looking at them. Surveys show that between 70 and 97% of the population in Europe and North America have had personal experience of this phenomenon. Rupert Sheldrake, biologist and author of “The Sense of Being Stared At” (Park Street Press, 2013) has studied the astonishing power of human intuition. In one experiment, children were asked if they could sense when someone was staring at them. With their backs turned, they raised their hands with a remarkable 90-100% accuracy rate. However, when their parents attempted the same task, the results plummeted, introducing doubt into the children’s minds.

🧠 Driving with Intuition
Despite consistent findings in past intuition research studies, translating these effects into real-world applications has proven challenging due to the limitations of traditional research environments. A new study conducted at Institute for Noetic Science’s (IONS) cutting-edge laboratory called “Driving with Intuition” uses innovative technology to measure brain, heart, and eye activity in a virtual driving environment. The study aims to develop a sensitive and reliable measure of intuition with practical implications—and is looking for participants. Learn more here.

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