Summer series: A neuroscientist on unlocking your brain’s potential to build intuition

Published Dec 11, 2024, 2:00 PM

To celebrate summer, we’re dropping the top episodes of 2024. Professor Joel Pearson’s lab was the first to develop a test to study intuition. The neuroscientist and psychologist discusses the science behind gut feelings and a toolkit for making better intuitive decisions. 

 

WANT MORE FROM JOEL?

For more on Joel’s book The Intuition Toolkit (Simon & Schuster, $29.99) see here. You can find him @ProfJoelPearson or via his site here

 

WANT MORE BODY + SOUL? 

Online: Head to bodyandsoul.com.au for your daily digital dose of health and wellness.

On social: Via Instagram at @bodyandsoul_au or Facebook or TikTok here, or DM host Felicity Harley @felicityharley

Welcome to Extra Healthy Ish. Yes, this is the podcast from Body and Soul, the big sister one Too Healthy Ish. I am your host of Felicity Haley and to celebrate summer, we are dropping our top episodes of twenty twenty four. This one was a goodie. It was with a psychologist, neuroscientists and co founder of Future Mind's Lab at UNSW, Professor Joel Pearson. Now you see his lab in Well in Sydney was the first to scientifically test intuition. Yes it's legit. So he joined us to discuss well the involving science around intuition and also his new book called The Intuition Toolkit, And you guessed it. We're going to learn more about how to not only trust your body, but your gut feeling. Thank you for coming on Extra Healthy Ish.

My pleasure.

Nice to have you here today, and well done on your new book. No easy feat writing a book, but academic papers, so you probably used to it to some degree.

But writing a book for everyone where I want it to be entertaining, exciting and you know, you know, keep people getting through the message is a different prospect. It's different to writing academically. So yeah, it was a fun challenge and I learned a lot.

Yeah we're well done. Now before we start and talk about intuition, How do you stay extra healthy ish in your life?

I try and exercise, so I'll do you know, I'll go for a run once twice a week. I'll go do some resistance training twice a week. I went to the gym this morning, and then I'll try and do hit sauna at the end of the gym session again twice a week. I used to intermittent fast. I do less of that now just because I didn't get enough protein in. I try and go to bed at a regular time, so I have a ten.

O'clock proof curfew.

Yeah, pretty much. I try and go to bed then that happens since I had kids, so I try and keep that regularity, get sunshine, do all the things stay hydrated. But they're the main thing.

What about the sauna, let's just talk about that. Why do you love it?

I like it for two reasons. One is that the data on the longevity side of it and the heat shock proteins what it does to the physiology seems to be linked to longevity to not dying in a dose dependent manner, which means if you go once a week versus twice versus four times a week, the probability of dying from basically anything goes down the number of times us a sauna per week. So I find that really interesting. But most of all, I just I find I get a mood boost from it. Something. The difficulty there the challenge. I watch my heart rate. Once it gets up to the one forty zones, I've been in the sauna for long enough and it feels uncomfortable, and I come out, I just feel much better.

How long do you spend in there?

I base it on discomfort and heart rate. I don't worry too much about the time. So in other words, if I've been running or sprinting, or I've been to gym first, I'm already my internal body temperature is high, so when you go to the sauna, you don't have to be there as long. So I try and use my heart rate as a sort of way to gauge how long I need to be there for. Rather than always go for half an hour for coming cold, then I under stay in longer to get the same sort of internal body.

To do colds as well. Or are you just use the cold therapy.

Or little bit I used to do. Yeah, so sometimes alternating between the two. Yes, So some gyms will have a cold plunge set of fancier gym, so sometimes I will do that. I have done the cryotherapy thing before when I've had injuries and things like that. But yeah, I enjoy a get more of a benefit of the heat.

I think, Yeah, might just suit your body more. I could talk all day about it. Let's talk about Well. I just feel like everything you do is probably backed by science, so you know exactly what works and what doesn't.

I love experimenting with things and it annoys my wife.

But such as life now, intuition, Yeah, what is it?

Yeah? So it is the productive use of unconscious information for better decisions and actions. So the actions include sports, football, tennis, you name it. So we could also add in the word learnt. So we need to learn association. So we learn that different things in the environment predict positive or negative things. So a brain makes that association. Learning goes on there. Then when you go into any environment or you meet someone, that learning is triggering red flags positive or negative, and you're feeling that in your body. Right, So our bodies can access the unconscious and really interesting ways, even for a decision. So you feel it in your gut, this so called gut response, because your body's responding. Your heart rate might go up, you're sweating a little bit more, and your sort of skin in your hands, and you don't know why because it's based on unconscious information. So that's sort of a jury general framework for how we think about how I think about intuition. It's not the same as everyone's definition, right, Some people will define it as more of a spiritual thing, as a blueprint of the universe, energies feeling. I'm not against that. I'm not against it. I don't want to you know, poo poop people. But I think having a scientific explanation is good. For one, it will create more science. We'll understand more, and it's we can we can, we can use it, we can build a practical guide like I've done in the book based on that. If you just say it's tapping into the universe and the energy, how it's much harder to educate people about that, to teach them how to use it in safe ways because it's not clear what it is, how it's linked to brain function.

Things like that, and this is happening all in a split second. You know, if you walk into a room, you know when we met, like your red flags are popping up or whatever, when everywhere you know, it's just phenomenal what our brains can do and how bodies can so quickly respond.

Yeah, so in the moment when you feel it, Yeah, exactly, it's based you know, it happens all unconsciously in a second or two. But importantly, as we'll get to the five rules, it is based on learning and prior experience. So one of the rules of intuition is that you can't if you've never played chess before, you can't just sit down and be an intuitive chess player. You need training, you need experience, whether it be tennis, chess, football, whatever.

I mean, well, your lab was the first to develop a scientific test to measure intuition, and that was only ten years ago. It feels like, why is research only happening now into this.

I mean, that's the question I've been fascinated with for ten years. When we started studying it in the lab, I was like, well, there's all these books. Gladwell's book would just come out at the time, and people were fascinated by it, but no one was really researching it. And that happens in science, right. The majority of people in science are fairly conservative. They if there's not a good way to measure something, they kind of don't want to study it. And so developing new ways to measure things is one of the things my lab does really well and I'm passionate about. We've done it with mental imagery, a fantasia hallucinations, and it's like you building a telescope to look at the sky or a microscope, right, but we're talking about the mind. So if you can't measure these things, you can't really study them. You can't understand the way they work in the brain. Simp Building a tool to measure these things, building new technology around them opens opens the door to a whole new area of science.

So how did you measure it back then?

Yeah, So we do something I call emotional inception, which is a way of so we need to get unconscious information into people's brains, and it need to be emotional information. So we have this way in the lab of presenting emotional images to one eye and then flashing bright colors to the other eye, and those flashing colors suppress the picture, and so you never see it. Wow, but your eye still processing it, your brain still processing it right. The emotional the olympic system, the amignant of the emotional parts of the brain are still reacting right, So your heart rate will still go up, you will sweat a little bit more.

So your body's still.

So your body's still, but you will never see the picture. So that was the first ingredient we needed to create this scenario where we could get things into the unconscious and see what happened. And then at the exact same time, we have people make very simple decisions. And it's a cloud of noise, a little bit like a static like in the old school analog TV sets noise clouds of noisy dots moving left or right, and all people have to do is say, oh, the dots are moving left, Oh they're moving right. Super easy, super simple. But there's lots of little dots and they're flickering. So it's and what we're measuring is how people can use the unconscious emotion from these images that we're suppressing to make better decisions with the dots. And it turns out that if you give people positive or negative images very quickly, they learn and We set it up so that when it's positive, the answers say going to the right. When the image is negative, the answers going to the left in the moving dots, and so again. People never see the images, but what we see is very quickly they learn to use the unconscious information to tap into their body, to their gut sensation, and they start getting better and more accurate at these decisions. They start responding more quickly, and they're more confident in their decisions. So that's kind of how.

I want, isn't it getting more confident in how you attack different things? Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, And not everyone does it to the same degree. We found out that some people, the people that actually report making very intuitive everyday decisions, will get much more of a boost from these unconscious images. People that report no, no, no, I make very rational decisions every day when we get them into lab, they don't seem to get much benefit from the unconscious images. So it does seem to be related to how people feel like they make their decisions every day.

And is that a genetic thing?

Great question. We don't know yet. We don't know. Yeah, I think it has something to do with interror perception. So the internal perception of our bodies. Am I too hot? Am I too cold? On my thirst? You need to go to the bathroom. We have a whole internal perceptual system. And some people can sit there and feel their heart beating, right, they can just you can can tap their heart beat with their finger one hundred percent accurate. Other people have no idea. So there's a big difference in that internal perceptual system. I think that's a large piece of the puzzle.

We'll be back after this short break with more from Professor Joel Pearson. Let's talk about your tool kit because I think you know, most of our listeners want to know how they can better tap into their decisions, how not to be so perhaps emotional. Dare I say, and make decisions in the emotional state. Yeah, you've got a lovely acronym smile.

Yeah, so smile before you use your intuition, Smile before you into it. And that's really that's the main purpose behind the book is to help people make better decisions and guide them. So the message is really the intuition is not always good or always bad. It's not black and white for some things, and sometimes it's really good. But there are things you should absolutely not use your intuition for and times when you're over emotional when you should not use intuition. So smile as a way to remember that. So s is self awareness, and that's really checking your self awareness in terms of emotion. If you are emotional positive or negative, don't practice intuition. Do something to bring emotional state back down again, maybe some breathing, some relaxation. Then it's a can you give.

It a situation, perhaps a real life example of you know how you can actually do that in the moment, Yes, because you're like up here and you can't bring yourself down Andy, oh my god, I can't, like I'm in the middle of an argument or whatever.

Yeah, So it depends. So there's also data. If you are suffering from anxiety or depression, you shouldn't use intuition. But that's hard. You can't just switch that off by doing some breathing or something that's a different thing in the moment. If you are highly stressed or highly emotional, and this can happen with large decisions more, you need to sort of tap into physiology. Notice that, take a moment, go and do something, Do some exercise, do some box breathing, do some physiological size, So the rapid breathing in and the slow breathing out different things to try and bring that physiology back down. And most people who have done this before a little bit or practice this will be familiar with they'll know when their physiologists come back down. Now, if you just won the lottery, you've just fallen in love, right, I said positive or negative? So you don't want to know if you're on top of the moon, Well, that emotion will also flood out intuition, so it's not just being stressed or negative emotions as positive as well.

What about mastery? I mean I found this. I'm a big Gladwell fan, but I found it very interesting about you when you wrote about that. You debut, you don't agree with you. He's ten thousand, We've got it.

Made this ten thousand hour rule very famous, right, And that's not really based on any science. It's just it's just a very sticky concept. It was originally based on the average age which people become very good at things, right, and if you work backwards from that, it seems like they probably have around ten thousand hours.

But his book out lies, by the way listeners, it's.

Not really based, it's not a real thing, so learning is not like that. So the question is so the m in smiles for mastery, So you need to be a master to some degree. It's something you need experience with something. Like I said before, if you haven't played chess, be an intuitive chess player. And the big question is how much experience how much mastery do you need? And it's different for different things and for different people. So there's not a simple easy answer I can give there. So, and that's how learning is. Right. If something's very emotional, very strong, so PTSD right is you can have very strong learning, so strong that it's disruptive and unpleasant from a single instant, from a car accident for example. So a single thing can have lifelong learning which is too strong, whereas other things where you know this coffee doesn't taste that good, it's not that the learning will be much weaker there. So you need many instances of coffee shop visits, for example, compared to a car accident or something. So it depends on how strong the emotion is. As one way to think about how much experience you need.

Yeah, before you rely on your intuition, what are the impulses? Yeah, you talk about instincts versus intuition in the role of decision making. Now this is quite interesting listens, because we're talking off air around the whole intuitive eating let's do it idea, are going to let's ruin everyone's day by you know, from a scientific academic standpoint, say this doesn't work.

Yeah, So the thing to look out for we don't want to confuse the feelings of intuition with the feelings or the pool towards addictive things your drugs, your alcohol, your social media, you're gambling and food. Right, So food can be addictive, and there's a whole movement, there's books on intuitive eating, and I know people love this. But if we're looking and thinking about modern foods, highly processed foods are highly engineered that you know, millions or probably billions of dollars have gone into to make them highly addictive, and so you can basically eat them all day, then we don't want to be intuitive about that. They're basically shifting towards a category of drugs. Then they are addictive, and so we just want to stay clear of using intuition for any of these things that have this addictive pool. Right, So that pool you know I want to check my email now, right, and I can convince myself, Oh, it's my intuition. I'm probably got an important email I'm tapping into, like, and it's it's not. It's just the addictive pool, right, It's not intuition. So we don't want to use that as an excuse. So with anything it's addictive, it's not intuition. Don't confuse it to don't use intuition for.

That, well said, thank you.

L Low probability, yeah, so it's it's L for low probability, but it's really all probabilities. We're just really bad at understanding numbers and probabilities. So you can nickname this the shark attack rule or the winning lotto rules. Just depict some examples in Australia that were big in the last few weeks. So we tend to think emotionally when it comes to sharks. Right, I'm old enough to remember the Jaws that Steven Spielberg Jaws films, and I'm swimming.

My kids are watching it now.

It's retro, right, and when I'm swimming. As soon as I'm thinking about a shark, I start imagining it. I hear the music and as soon as I'm imagining it. It's like when you imagine something, it tricks to your brain and thinking it's real, so emotional the Olympic system again, the emotional parts of your brain bond like there's actually a shark there. It doesn't matter what the probabilities are, You'll just start thinking emotionally. So we don't want to feel our way with emotions or intuition around anything with numbers probabilities, particularly low probabilities, trying to feel away. You know, what's the probability of smoking and getting lung cancer or climate change? These things or viruses are really hard to feel your way through with intuition, and we just should not use it for anything on probabilities.

Last one environment a This is about only using intuition infamiliar and predictable.

Yeah, environments environments both external and internal. So the type of learning that intuition is based on, this associative learning is context specific. So the classic thing, you know, you go home, maybe your kids are cramming for an exam, and when they study in their bedroom, what they're actually they're taking in the information they need to learn for the exam, let's say, but they're also stamping their bedroom into that lone. In other words, your brain learns the context the bedroom with the information, and people will do things like chew gum, put fragrance on their arms and then do that when they go to the exam because it brings back that same context. And it's not only the room, it's also the internal context. So the old jokes of getting drunk the next day to remember where you left your keys when you were drunk the night before are actually true. If you're highly caffeinated, drunk, whatever internal state, the learning is specific to that as well. So this is important when it comes to intuition. During COVID, we all shifted from the office to working at home, and a lot of the intuition was specific to the office. Right when we're at home, it's not going to translate that well. An example often give is Steve Jobs, who had amazing at Apple, had amazing intuition with the product design, the simplicity of beautiful products he would help design at Apple. When it came to Lenuy's life, his health decisions and home decisions, he still tried to follow his intuition and made some very poor decisions and end up a lot of people have said end up dying because he put off surgery for his cancer. So that sort of is a pointant example of when you change from one environment to another, just be careful, try not to trust your intuition.

So just before we go, just maybe give us one or two examples of how we can actually apply this smile Yeah, your smile, not this smile theory. Sorry, that was your wonderful smile theory.

So I'd like to think about it like you would going to the gym, right the first time, you know, I'll give you these five rules, and that they they seem. Oh, I don't want to learn these five rules, It's what a hassle. But for the first week, write them down, put them on your phones, put them up on the wall, remember them and they'll be annoying to try and remember each time you need to make a decision. The next week much easier. A week after that, they'll be automatic. So think about it like going to the gym. Which machines you might want to use at the gym? How many reps that kind of thing after a few weeks completely automatic. So try and embrace that, take it on and learn it. Start with small decisions. So often when we get to really big decisions, you know, get married, get divorced, by the house, move country. We start thinking emotionally and then we start being intuitive, right, but we want to practice that with smaller get used to it. I recommend keeping track of your decisions, whether you're on the phone or just keeping it at a table. How did you feel where did you feel it? Did you make a good decision where you're happy with that decision, and keep track of that and you want to over time increase the odds. So to be clear, smile is the best way we know how with science at the moment, to optimize to make your intuition the best it can possibly be. It won't be right one hundred percent of the time.

We're human.

We're human, but it is the best way we know how to optimize it and make it the most.

Reliable and ultimately, Yeah, as you say, make better decisions and live a well healthy life. I suppose I think so?

Would you like that wrap up?

Thank you?

Fits perfectly with the podcast. Yeah, that's my goal to improve people's lives through better decision making and bring the emotion and the rational together.

Yeah, Joel, lovely to chat to you. Thank you for coming on extra.

Healthy, Oh, pleasure, thank you. Oh.

I find all of this, all these gut feels, intuition, what the brain's doing fascinating. Anyway. If you do want more from Joel, his book is called The Intuition Toolkit and it is out now. If you did enjoy this chat, make sure you rate and review it, share it with a friend someone who is also interested in this kind of gut feeling thing that sounded very scientific, didn't it. Anyway, And make sure you subscribe to Healthy so you know exactly when we drop a new EP. Anything else, Head to Body and soul dot com. Do you follow us on socials? Grab our print edition which is out in your local Sunday paper and until tomorrow it's extra healthy ish