A non-"woo woo", neuroscience-based perspective on intuition

One of the most deeply useful things that happened to me during my twenties was that I turned up the volume to my intuition.  

I’m sure I had some connection to my intuition before — that sense of “inner rightness” or “gut knowing.” But it was working with a coach that helped me hear it more clearly (and, eventually, follow it more directly) — which paid huge dividends in my life.

And yet, I’ve struggled to discuss intuition in a way that doesn’t sound at least slightly sketchy. Most of the people I work with are smart professionals — they’re skeptical. Sometimes words like “intuition” sound a little too much like “let’s go sit in a yurt sauna and connect to our spirit ancestors.”

Recently, I found the most compelling description of intuition I’ve ever read, in Dr. Paul Napper and Dr. Anthony Rao’s The Power of Agency.

Napper and Rao point out that just because intuition isn’t a conscious brain process (like, say, making a pro-con list), doesn’t mean that it’s not using your brain. Far from it:

“Intuition makes rapid, beneath-the-surface mental connections. Intuition is when your mind weaves perceptions together from the millions of stored bits of your memories and experiences. It is capable of creating a new, holistic understanding of a situation, almost always well before you arrive at a decision through conscious, logical thought.”

This gives intuition a remarkable usefulness. If we had to wait for our logical, reasoning brain to understand a situation, it would take far longer — from minutes to, well…years (Have you ever taken that long to understand, on a logical level, what you knew in your gut far earlier?)

And yet, we’ve all also had experiences when our initial reaction led us astray.

This could be for many reasons, but one key problem, Napper and Rao argue, is that we’re confusing intuition and emotion.

Both intuition and emotion often manifest themselves in our bodies (e.g., we have a physical sensation associated with them – a throbbing in our belly, a tightening in our heart). Both seem to come to us in a direct, immediate way — not through the conscious reasoning centers of our brain. And of course, each one can affect the other: you might have an emotion based on an intuitive insight, or vice versa.

Napper and Rao point out some useful ways to tell the two apart:

• “Volume” of the message. For most of us, emotions are “louder and more insistent,” versus intuitions, which “can be quieter, subtler.”

• When they occur. Emotions often occur “as a direct response to something that just happened,” while we might feel an intuition when we are resting and quiet, without a lot of external stimulation. (Though, sometimes you do get an intuitive insight in response to something immediate, too.)

• Clarity about the cause. It’s often easier to know what caused an emotion: “She said I was acting selfishly, and it infuriated me.” It can be harder to articulate exactly what causes an intuition: “I am pretty sure that guy is trying to swindle me, but I can’t exactly explain why.”

• Where in the body we experience them. Some people may feel emotions vs. intuitions in different parts of their bodies. Napper and Rao say that many people feel intuitions in the stomach or lower heart area; that’s why they’re often called a “gut feeling.” By contrast, emotions are often experienced higher in the body, in the upper chest, throat, or even face — we say that we feel “choked up by sadness” or “flushed with embarrassment,” for example.   
  

And yet, my favorite insight from Napper and Rao is this:

“Keep in mind, not everyone is highly intuitive by nature. For some, it will take practice.”

I couldn’t agree more. Our intuition (and for many of us, also our emotions, despite Napper and Rao’s points above!) can be hard to hear, and it can take some practice to build our capacities.

The good news is that just like driving a car or kicking a soccer ball, you can get more skillful. And the more you use these skills, the better you will be — the easier it will be to connect to your inner knowing, and the clearer you will be about what you hear.

And this feels like a moment to mention: Coaching can be very helpful for skillfulness with both emotions and intuition. Here’s a link to learn more about individual coaching, if it’s of interest.

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I’m in your corner rooting for you.

Katie