How your body predicts the future

In that split second before Ying kicked, Scurry says, “time slowed down. Everything she did was slow motion and very clear. She opened her hips up, she approached short from the same side, I saw the inside of her foot she was using, so I knew exactly where she was going before she kicked the ball.”

Scurry took advantage of relaxed rules on coming off her line to keep out Ying’s effort

The way Scurry describes the experience, it sounds like magic.

And perhaps it was. But Scurry was also relying on something else: her expertise. This is the intuition of blood, sweat and tears, of 10,000 hours of experience, of what the Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell calls “rapid cognition” in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. To mere mortals, Scurry’s save looks like the work of the gods. But to the neuroscientists who study intuition, it was pattern recognition at the highest, fastest, most optimised level.

The ‘reptilian brain’ and a higher power

Our brain’s main job is to keep us alive, and recognising patterns rapidly is an evolutionary asset. “Intuition” is the subconscious, and extremely fast, recall of patterns. It often results in biofeedback — sweaty palms, a lump forming in your throat, a wave of nausea.

Our brains process the data and spit it out in sweat and feelings. Our minds make meaning from it. Our bodies are inextricably linked to it all.

Attempting to locate an Intuition Central in the brain is kind of a fool’s errand because of the complex and dynamic interplay of the human beast. Today, neuroscientists divide the brain into three broad regions.

The first is the so-called reptilian brain, our oldest ancestral inheritance, which is at the base of the cortex and is responsible for our most primitive processes and responses. The second is the more sophisticated limbic system, which deals with social and emotional processing. And above the limbic system is the neocortex, where higher-order brain function takes place — like sensory perception, cognition, motor commands, spatial reasoning and language.

How is intuition different from instinct? I ask John Allman, a California Institute of Technology neuroscientist and the recipient of an international Golden Brain Award.

Instinct, he tells me, is “genetically programmed behaviour necessary for survival”. Humans have fight-or-flight responses deeply encoded in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for memory, decision-making and emotional responses.

The difference for humans, with our instinctual behaviours, is that fighting or fleeing is not always precisely applied. Intuition, on the other hand, also “does not require conscious intervention” but “has a strong learnt component to it”, Allman says.

His research has pinpointed a group of neurons located in the anterior cingulate cortex and the frontal insular cortex. These are the von Economo neurons (VENs), also known as intuition neurons. They are four times the size of other brain cells and are present in great apes but not smaller monkeys. These neurons essentially allow large mammals to read social situations and cues, and inform their owner what to do, intuitively.

“The von Economo neurons may relay a fast intuitive assessment of complex social situations to facilitate the rapid adjustment of behaviour in quickly changing social situations,” Allman says.

Human babies have few VENs and go on to develop them within the first four years of life, acquiring far more than other large mammals. “It is as if the infant is in no need of intuition until they become more socially independent, and only need to learn behaviours that are adaptive in socially complex settings,” he says.

Trust your experience

What laypeople might call intuition, some scientists call expertise. Maria Konnikova, a bestselling author, Columbia psychology PhD and late-in-life professional poker player, explains: “Intuition is basically another term for incredible domain expertise.

“Let’s apply this to poker. I have found myself in situations where I have a gut feeling my opponent is bluffing. I can never trust that gut feeling, because I’ve been playing poker for all of a few years. I do not have the domain expertise. But my coach, Erik Seidel, has been playing poker since the 1980s. So if he has a gut feeling, he should actually trust that.”

Because that gut feeling, she tells me, is actually something else entirely: “That’s hundreds of thousands of hours of practice he has put in, hundreds of thousands of hands. If he thinks a guy is bluffing, that’s not intuition. That’s pattern recognition.”

But how to know if and when we should act on what feels like an intuitive impulse?

“I would try to figure out why am I making this decision, whether it’s calling or folding or raising,” she says. “How reliable is the information? What is my degree of confidence? Sometimes I really don’t like the guy and I just want a reason to call, so I decide he’s bluffing.

“But that’s not a good reason. You have to constantly learn to go back and be attentive to your own thought process and the factors you’re using to make a decision.”

If intuition is equivalent to expertise, then we must become experts in ourselves. And if intuition is, according to science, pattern recognition, then we must begin to recognise our own patterns. This is the first step in untangling anxiety from intuition.

The imagined apocalypse

Where do you go when things become uncertain? I mean mentally.

It can be really complicated. Think about your bespoke patterns of mind.

Cognitive behavioural therapy is a mode of identifying thought distortion. These include all-or-nothing thinking (seeing things in black and white), jumping to conclusions and personalisation.

For me, it’s catastrophising. I can imagine the worst possible outcome to any benign, or even positive, scenario. The hotel won’t have my reservation. The flight will be cancelled. My kid won’t be able to go to preschool because he will not figure out the mechanics of his bladder and the potty in time, thus initiating him into a life of crime.

And I then of course apply this apocalyptic filter to myself and my shortcomings. This is just what my brain does. In its misguided way, I think it’s trying to inoculate me against any of these eventualities. If I can imagine the doomsday scenario, then I can prep for it mentally. This, of course, never works.

Since I know this is my habit, I have to be sceptical of any “intuition” suggesting the worst. If a thought comes to me like “My husband will leave me”, or “Everyone hates me”, that thought is very unlikely to possess any useful truth, other than to alert me to my sense of unease in that moment.

Becoming experts in ourselves means knowing what our patterns are, and also when to deploy our tools. In recovery circles, there’s a useful acronym: Halt, meaning “hungry, angry, lonely, tired”. The thinking is that if you are experiencing any one of these conditions, you are not to make any big decisions, have any important conversations or make any proclamations about what things mean. You should eat a banana, take a deep breath, lie down.

Here, in these instances, we can use our intuition to bring us back to peace, not to solve big problems.

Why we love Google Maps

To sort out the difference between anxiety and intuition, we first need to better appreciate the relationship between anxiety and uncertainty. A central tension in our human predicament is that humans really don’t care for uncertainty, and yet we live in an uncertain world.

We like patterns and knowing what comes next. This is simply not always possible. Where information is incomplete, we tend to fill in the blanks. And so we feel anxious. Our amygdalas compensate by trying to soothe us into a sense of comfort by grasping when and where they can.

“I think that’s why we love Google Maps,” says Margaret Sheridan, a neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “You know where you’re going, but you can also just plug the address into your app and be sure. It’s also why we love texting to tell your friend you’re almost there. No one needs to know that, but we love it. We’ve created these tools to decrease our uncertainty.”

Honouring our response to uncertainty is the first step toward developing better intuition. And I don’t mean the big, brooding questions about the kind of uncertainty where you wonder whether you will ever meet your match or if you’re in the right career or if you will one day have kids.

What I’m talking about is the urge and instinct to find solid ground in the form of checking, checking, checking.

Checking your email. Googling the average duration of the common cold. Texting your friend to see if they made it home safely. Confirming the time of the fitness class you take every week at the same time. Looking up the weather instead of looking outside. Making sure the kids are breathing at night. The list is truly endless.

When this checking goes into overdrive, you get conditions like obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which people find uncertainty intolerable and go to great lengths to soothe themselves in the constant quake of life.

Anxiety or genius insight?

Uncertainty feels like the problem. But really it is our activity, our shortsighted self-soothing, that creates the bulk of anxiety. To improve our intuition, we need to get better at living in and being with uncertainty. What if we didn’t pathologise our discomfort with uncertainty as “anxiety”, but came to see it as an organic, ancient response? What if we could cultivate some level of comfort around knowing that this is our great human inheritance, as well as our great human challenge?

To train our intuition, let’s first quell our anxiety to get attuned to our birthright of uncertainty. We will never feel fully comfortable with uncertainty; we are not built for that. But we can recognise discomfort with uncertainty when it is happening. When I start to spiral, even just saying the word “uncertainty” brings me back.

We must first become experts in ourselves to discern what anxiety feels like, in contrast to intuition. And that, in itself, can be a life’s work.

But it’s worth it. Because it’s during our most receptive and engaged states that we are more prone to “aha!” moments. It’s the reason why you are more likely to come up with a good idea for a presentation when out on a walk than toiling in front of your computer. The psychologist Robin Hogarth defined an intuitive burst as one that is “reached with little apparent effort and typically without conscious awareness. They involve little or no conscious deliberation.”

It’s no mistake that Scurry was already in a heightened flow state when she heard the call, out of nowhere, to break with her typical practice and look at her opponent walking up to the ball. Being in the zone allowed her to receive that intuition, effortlessly, and make a career-defining save.

Excerpt adapted from Everyday Intuition (Headline), available now