© Blaublut Edition
September 7, 2023
Margit Hiebl
What is intuition really? Neurologist Prof. Dr. Volker Busch explains how our gut feeling develops and why intuitive decisions are often better than their reputation.
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Whether in work, relationships, or spontaneous decisions in everyday life: intuition is always with us. But what exactly is behind the famous gut feeling? Neurologist and psychiatrist Prof. Dr. Volker Busch explains how intuitive decisions are made, when we can trust them, and why our inner voice is often wiser than we think.
Is intuition actually the proverbial gut feeling?
In common usage, we usually treat them as equivalent. Academically, gut feeling is more of a superficial, quick instinct. Intuition, on the other hand, is true experiential knowledge. An inner perspective that allows us to decide whether something is good or bad for us. It's more developed and much deeper.
How does intuition arise?
The essential tasks of the human brain are: perceiving the environment with the senses, storing the impressions gained, making predictions, and deriving meaningful actions from all of this. In this way, it builds up a vast wealth of experience over the course of life. Like a huge library.
The archivist is the hippocampus, which creates the filing system. As far as we know, an intuitive process then works like this: In the given life situation, it is checked whether there was something similar in the past. The results are then passed, among other things, to the prefrontal cortex – this is where decisions are made.
If something is identified as known, the probability is high that the new situation will be compared to it, the experience reactivated, and an action derived from it. However, this has not been researched down to the last detail.
Does every person have this?
There is no person who does not have intuition, as we all make experiences around the clock, and our brain is programmed to store and evaluate them. But of course, there are differences between people.
And in old age or with dementia it can get a little lost – then the experiences are still there, but the card index system has broken down, and you can't find anything right away.
It is said that intuition is typically female, is that true?
Presumably, this is because we allow intuition differently in various areas of life: When it comes to business, it is often denied. In matters of love or in private, we are more willing to admit that we have not relied on facts.
I believe intuition is more often attributed to women because even today business decisions are frequently associated with masculinity, decisions involving love and emotion are assigned to women. This is neither fair nor correct, because men can also make very intuitive decisions. And it has never been proven otherwise. What is true, however, is that women are more likely to admit that they made an intuitive decision.
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Shouldn't intuition be used more often in business?
Yes and no. Yes, when the situation becomes too complex. Because at a certain critical mass of arguments, we seem to step out of our minds. Then it is better to reduce the complexity and say: Get rid of all the numbers and facts! Let's listen to ourselves. What do we know from the past, what is good for us?
And what speaks against it?
Intuition is always good when we come into situations that resemble past experiences. In a world as it currently is, constantly confronting us with new problems we haven't had before—keyword supply shortages, Corona, climate change—a gut feeling from a situation in the 1990s might not help us much.
Old experiences do not always lead to good decisions for new developments. New problems require new solutions, which are better obtained through facts.
When should you distrust your intuition?
When too many Emotions are involved. Anger, sadness, but also sky-high euphoria can cloud your judgment. It’s better to sleep on it until the emotions have cooled down. If you still stand by the decision, the inner voice becomes more audible again.
Are there also physical signals?
The Heartbeat, the butterflies in the stomach, the hairs on the neck standing up – it's called somatic marking. This brings a feeling so strongly into awareness that it cannot be ignored. That is probably the idea behind it: so that we do not overlook intuition, it is occasionally marked physically, making it more impressive.
Yes, if there is a corresponding note in the library of experience. Famous example: in 1950 at the Monaco Grand Prix, Formula 1 driver Juan Manuel Fangio entered the tunnel. But instead of accelerating as usual, he slowed down. Only hundreds of meters further did he see an accident involving several cars.
So why did he brake so early? The situation was different from usual – his brain had reported this to him. In his library of experience, it was noted that spectators always look at the drivers coming out of the tunnel – this time, however, the heads were turned in the other direction. If he had driven through the tunnel for the first time, there probably wouldn't have been a corresponding note in his library.
Is intuition learnable?
Yes, but only to some extent. Someone who has been socialized in their life to gain security through arguments and facts will not become a gut person. But they can learn to free themselves a bit from information and give more attention to the inner voice. And practice listening to it. Then you quickly realize that it can also be a reliable source and that you don't always have to make it difficult for yourself.
Can this inner voice be trained?
There is no specific technique, but there must be a willingness to allow intuition. To do this, I must open the fine channel between myself and my experiences.
How do you do that?
First, turn down the volume of life. Today, whether at the bus stop or during lunch break, there is an external voice that clutters us with something. Even while walking in the forest, many listen to an audiobook. How is an inner voice supposed to emerge there?
So, repeatedly create short idle phases where you are also offline. And feel within yourself. You may then hear other voices that nag, worry, or drive you. But they come from the head. Admittedly, distinguishing them requires some practice — but the true, intuitive voice is always benevolent, never critical.
What else helps?
Have many new experiences. And real ones, not virtual: Only the things we experience ourselves and actively immerse in leave deep memory traces. Then the hippocampus puts new books on the shelf and thus archives the raw material from which intuition arises.
What if we are intuitively wrong??
Learn from your mistakes! Take a few minutes at the end of the day and calmly review the relevant decisions. What was my expectation? Did everything go as planned? If not, what could be the reason?
This comparison leads to the books in your library being rewritten in some places and kept up-to-date – an update. Mistakes are therefore unavoidable on the way to expertise. They are useful because they improve our intuition – but only if we deal with them.
An example: The remarkable navigation talent of the Inuit through the eternal ice was described as early as the 19th century. They passed it down from generation to generation – but for about 20 years they have been using GPS systems on the phones. Since then, accidents among young Inuit have increased because the network is not always stable and experience was hardly built up.
Researchers estimate that the orientation knowledge of the Inuit will be lost in two generations. This applies to all of us. Experience-based intuition is primordial and still important for our species today.
