If you have ever just “gone with a hunch” or “trusted your instincts”, you know that sometimes those gut feelings can be absolutely right. Two recent books, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Gut Fellings by Gerd Gigerenzer, give more insight into this phenomenon.
The fact is, often we know something without knowing that we know it, or how we know it. For instance, imagine that you are in the medicine aisle of your local discount store, and you remember, suddenly, that you need some anti-nausea or “motion sickness” medication. You went down that aisle looking for aspirin, but you grab the motion sickness tabs anyway, because “you never know when you will need them”.
Four hours later you are grabbing for those same motion sickness tabs to fight a nasty stomach bug. But when you were in the store, you felt absolutely fine. So why did you think of the pills?
Perhaps your brain knew you were unwell before you became consciously aware of it. You knew without knowing but some part of you obviously knew.
Let’s take another example. You are interviewing for a job. You feel that job is a good fit, but for some reason you are not too sure about the person who interviews you. You can’t put your finger on why you are not comfortable with him, but you know there is something that is just not quite right.
You get the job offer, but you turn down the job. Six months later you hear that the executive who interviewed you has been fired for cooking the books.
These things happen, and they happen all the time. We know things without knowing, but too often we are afraid to really trust our hunches, our gut instincts.
Our feeling is that unless we can know why we know, we do not really know. We are worried that we are not making our decisions “consciously” enough.
The truth is, our brains are very complex machines, and we can make very complex decisions much more rapidly than we would expect.
We have no problem believing that our computers, which have much less capability than our human brains, could make a decision in a split second, but we have a great difficulty accepting decisions from our brains unless we have a clear view of what is behind the decision.
This need to understand is very human but we make decisions all the time that we can’t always explain.
When a paramedic team arrives at the scene of an accident, they do not have time to think much about what they are going to do, they just do what their training and, yes, instincts, tells them needs to be done.
On a more mundane level, a professional journalist can write a very good column in half an hour or less while someone who does not write on a regular basis, or considers herself not a writer, may struggle with the same project for hours.
Our brains know things, and they especially know things in areas where we have training or experience. We can very definitely trust our brains to make a lot of decisions without our conscious interference. They may be wrong on occasion, but more often they are right.
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