June 3, 2024 • 39 mins
Why do you sometimes feel that you trust this person but not that one -- for reasons you can't quite put your finger on? What signals does the brain vacuum up in your daily life, and what fraction of those does your conscious mind have access to? When does intuition steer us wrong? And what is the future of intuition, as we build new technologies to take the myriad signals racing around in the dark of our brains and bodies and bring them to light? Join Eagleman and his guest, cognitive neuroscientist Joel Pearson, to unpack when to trust and when to ignore the signals of intuition.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Today we're going to talk about intuition. Why do you
experience a feeling when you walk into a place that
you don't like this restaurant and you want to go
to this other restaurant, Or you trust this person but
you don't quite trust that person. Or you might have
a sense that something is wrong with your pet or
your child, even if you can't articulate what the issue is.
(00:27):
So in all these cases, what are the signals that
the brain is picking up on and what fraction of
those signals does your consciousness have access to? And importantly,
does intuition sometimes steer us wrong? What we call intuition
is not something to be trusted automatically. It quite often
(00:49):
steers us the wrong way. So what are the features
of the situation to look for where you might feel like, Okay,
my intuition is more likely to be useful here than
in this other situation, where my intuition is more likely
to steer me wrong. And what is the future of
intuition as we build new technologies that might take the
(01:11):
myriad signals racing around in the darkness of our brains
and bodies and bring them to light. Welcome to inner
Cosmos with me. David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
author at Stanford, and I've spent my career at the
intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life.
(01:46):
Today's episode is about that gut feeling that we call intuition. Now,
if you've been listening to this podcast for a while
or reading my books, you've definitely heard me talk about
all the stuff that transpires unconsciously in the unconscious mind.
This is all the computations we have no access to
(02:06):
and really no acquaintance with. So think about how you walk,
all the sophisticated coordination of muscles and balance that's required there.
Until very recently, that was an impossibly difficult task to
get robots to do this. But ever since you were
two years old or so, you've been doing it just fine. Now,
(02:27):
you can't articulate how you walk and how you keep
your balance. It's much like riding a bicycle in that way.
And presumably you can do several things while you're walking
or riding a bike. You can have a conversation or
maybe punch out a text on your phone while you're
doing it. But if I ask you to describe to
me what you are doing with all that beautiful sophisticated musculature,
(02:49):
it's simply not possible. You put the years of work
into learning how to walk and how to ride a bicycle,
and it resulted in expertise, but and inability to articulate
what was going on there under the hood. And it's
like this with most of the actions that you take,
whether that's deciding what you want to eat, or who
(03:12):
you're going to marry, or how you're identifying a smell
from some mixture of molecules or whatever. You just find
that your brain can magically do it because all these
operations are happening in silence, in the darkness of this
vast computational vault. So your conscious mind is like the
(03:33):
broom closet in the mansion of your brain, and all
of the rest involves work that's happening that you can't see.
And why is that the case. It's because the data
being pulled in from all your senses is way too
detailed to be useful. Your retina at the back of
your eye that transmits visual input at about ten million
(03:56):
bits per second, which is similar to an ethernet connection.
But if you had conscious access to all that data,
you wouldn't be able to operate at your level of
space and time. At your level, what you care about
is where the heck did I put my toothbrush? Or
what can I read on this menu? Or where is
(04:17):
my friend's face in this crowd of people? You just
want simple, high level answers to important questions. You want
the abstractions, not the details. So your brain takes in
enormous amounts of data, but what you want is the headline.
In Silicon Valley where I live, for example, all my
(04:39):
venture capitalist friends talk about this as pattern matching. They
have thousands of new companies coming in to give them pitches,
and in each of those pitches there are a million
details that they can't know, but they think, you know.
In my career, I've seen all these pitches and patterns emerge.
(05:00):
I don't even know why. I sometimes feel like, wow,
this team of founders is really great, or this team
of founders is never going to make it, even though
the idea seems strong. So those assessments rely on their intuition,
and what they're trying to do is make their intuition
good and refine it and refine it with practice. So
(05:21):
in many situations. In all of our lives, we have
lots of practice at something and we see a new
situation and we make an assessment like yes or no,
or good or bad, or take it or leave it.
And the extraordinary thing about brains is that they can
summarize a complex situation and say, look, although there are
(05:42):
a million details here, the big picture is that you
should approach that or avoid that. And you rarely have
access to the details about why. Sometimes you might think
you have access, but that is often just a retrospective story. Now,
in neuroscience jargon call this unconscious inference, meaning you are
(06:03):
inferring something about the situation and you're not doing it consciously,
presumably because of the amount of data that is involved.
And in popular parlance we call this intuition. But intuition
sometimes gets a bad name because it's often hijacked by
spiritual guru types who say you should always trust your intuition.
(06:25):
Now here's the truth. You should not always trust your intuition.
After all, your intuition is not a perfect predictor. In
Silicon Valley, for example, four out of ten companies that
are backed by those venture capitalists, they lose money or
they go bankrupt, and many times the intuitive decisions that
we make, let's say about relationships, turn out to be
(06:47):
bad decisions. Just because the computations are happening under the
hood and they're vast and complex, it doesn't mean they're
guaranteed to be correct. Intuition is quite often wrong or
makes a decision based on things that you wouldn't feel
proud of doing if you had access to it. For example,
what if your intuition tells you not to sell your
(07:11):
house to this guy, but it's because of some deep down,
unconscious racism that you weren't even aware of. What if
your intuition tells you that there's something creepy about that
guy over there, and you don't want to do business
with him, and you say, look, I'm just trusting my
gut on this one. But it turns out the poor
guy has early Parkinson's disease, and so as a result,
(07:33):
he's unable to make expressive facial expressions and instead his
face is mostly blank, and that creeps you out because
you don't get what's happening. Because let's say you're not
a clinician. Or what if you're sitting on a jury
and you think there's something about this guy that makes
me feel like he should be put away for a
long time. But it turns out it's because he's not
(07:57):
handsome but ugly. There's an extensive litery sure on this
that ugly people get longer sentences than good looking people.
So the idea that we should always trust our intuition
turns out to be mistaken. But the good news is
it turns out that we can be a little bit
smarter about when to look to our intuition or ignore it.
(08:21):
Researchers have been working to figure out the circumstances under
which your intuition might be more trustworthy or less trustworthy.
So for this I decided to have a conversation with
my friend and colleague Joel Pearson. Joel's a professor of
cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
He's recently written a book about this called The Intuition Toolkit.
(08:44):
So Joel and I sat down together to dig into
this topic. Joel tell us about intuition, Yeah, so a
topic I love.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
We've been studying it for over a decade now, and
I've recently just published a book the Intuition Toolkit. So
a decade ago we started looking at the landscape of intuition,
and people define it as a spiritual thing. Other people
in psychology and neuroscience defind it very very differently. You
have all these different definitions. So I wanted to come
up with a clear definition, the most practical and what
(09:26):
I think is the most useful definition, and that is
the productive learnt use of unconscious information for better decisions
and actions.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
By the way, does intuition always give better this is me?
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Okay, yeah, that's how I'm so. So this was part
of the problem.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
So I'm going to introduce a couple of words. So
this is what I did.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
At the beginning.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
I came up with another word called misintuition. Right, I know,
it sounds like a miss universe contest, but it's not.
I wanted a word that so I wanted to sort
of split apart the misfiring of intuition when it goes wrong,
because there are times when you should absolutely not use
it and other times where it is useful. So I
wanted to split that apart and came up with this
other word misintuition and intuition. So that's why I define
(10:06):
intuition as a productive use right of unconscious information and
it's learnt, right, So we can't we'll get to in
a second, I'm sure, but you can only use intuition
really for something you have experience with and that turns
out to be important.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
So give us, give us more of a sense of
this then. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
So the example I like to give is you walk
into a cafe, right, and you at the second you
walk through the door, your brain's processing a thousand different things, right,
the music, what the staff are wearing, if there's tablecloths,
no tablecloths, the temperature, how clean the floor is, smells, this,
the hundreds of things, and you're not consciously aware of them,
all right, and as you walk in, you're going to go, yeah,
(10:46):
let's get coffee here, or let's go across the road
to the other place, right, And that people are going
to sometimes will report as they don't know why, but
this is something off that they felt sometimes in the gut, right,
the gut response.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
That's kind of the way I tend to introduce intuition.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
And what's happening in that those few seconds the second
as you walk in the door, is that things in
the environment are triggering positive or negative associations, and that
is based on past learning, right, the classic Pavlovs dogs,
classical conditioning.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
So you go to enough cafes where it's really hot
in there and there's bad music and this coffee is terrible,
your brain will learn that. Whether you consciously remember that
or not, your brain will start to learn these associations.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
If you get food poisoning and sick, it's going to
learn it really quickly. And so you go to enough cafes,
you go to one hundreds of thousands, your brain will
learn which cues the environment predicts good or bad food
or coffee. And that's what's happening. So all the things
in the environment are triggering red flag, green flag, right,
and you feel it and you don't know why, right,
(11:50):
and you either get the coffee or you go somewhere else. Yes,
So that's I think the best way to think about it.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Cool. And this is why I think about intuition as
long as it's just having a wide angle lens on
the There's a lot of interest in neuroscience obviously about
cognition where you're deciding, okay, what's the next chest move
here and so on? And that's what all lots of
AI is about, is how do I make a really
smart decision here? But but in a sense with intuition,
it's I'm going to take in the whole cafe, and
(12:17):
you know something's going to bubble up saying go or stay.
So I'm really interested in this issue of misintuition though, because,
as you phrase it, because there are lots of times
that people have intuitions that are totally incorrect, like, oh,
this coffee shop, there's something that creeps me out about that.
Like the guy in the corner there, I feel like
(12:38):
he's a mass murderer, even though maybe the guy has
you know, something like Parkinson's disease, where people have you know,
blank facial expressions. I've seen this a bunch of times
where someone has Parkinson's and other people think, oh my gosh,
that guy's creepy. There's something wrong with that guy because
they don't know about it. Right, Okay, So so give
us a sense of misintuition and how when you feel
(12:59):
like his intuition mostly right, mostly wrong, totally random.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
So I'm glad you are.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
So the second half of the book, he unpacks based
on these five rules and I use the word the
acronym smile so people can try to remember this right.
So the first half of the book is really about
the science we've done, the lab, how you measure it,
how you create the lab. And it's not always good.
Sometimes you should use it, sometimes you shouldn't. And that's
what the rules unpack. So let's sort of tell people
when it's safe to trust their intuition. And an example
(13:26):
of this I give often is Steve Jobs, who talked
about using his intuition at Apple, both for product design
and running the company in all different you know, and
he was a master at it. He went to India
and studied it. He was really into it when it
came to his health decisions later in life, and some
of his other decisions not so much right. And that's
interesting because.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Wait, can you impack that for people who don't know
about his health.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
So he died from cancer in the end, he actually
or his doctors and his family wanted him to get treatment,
to get an operation, and he said no, he didn't
want to get have that sort of be invaded surgically
like that, and he put off the treatment, put it off,
and put it off, until it's basically too late. And
this idea that intuition is specific to a particular environment
(14:09):
or context, and it makes sense because the learning that
I'm saying that it seems to be based on is
context specific. And this is one of those rules is
actually the E at the end of smile for environment.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
So if you learn.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
It at you know, you craft your intuition expertly at work.
When you go home, when you're on holiday in a
different context, different environment, that learning is not going to
apply so well. So we need to be careful and
we change the environment because when you learn something in
the environment gets sort of attached to that. Right when
you're studying for the exam in your bedroom, not only
are you learning all information, you're learning the information imprinted
(14:43):
to your bedroom. So we have to be careful with that.
So that's an example of where you can be led astray.
Now s the beginning smile is self awareness, and that
really is a trigger for emotions. So we shouldn't trust
our intuition when we're emotional and we're stressed, anxious, or
depressed for a number of reasons for something called arousalor misattribution,
which is something so humans are not very good at
(15:05):
understanding where particular feelings or stress or emotion come from,
and we can go we can deep dive into this.
This classic experiments in psychology that are now a lot
of data to support this. Right, But basically, you know,
if there was a snake right here on the floor,
we both get adrenaline, we'd both be sweating and scared
of the snake, and then later on we confuse that
and say, man, that podcast was amazing, Right, we'd confuse
(15:27):
the emotion for the situation with the emotion from the snake.
We're just bad to understanding the source of these things.
So that's a number one rule. If you're emotional stressed, don't.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Follow your intuition. Just just put it aside, follow the
logic as best you can. Right. So that's s.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Then M is for mastery, and that we mentioned learning before,
So that's really that you need to build these associations
in your brain between the environment, the triggers, and good
or bad outcomes. So you've never played chess before, you
can't sit down and just be a grand master intuitive
chess player, right. Your brain needs to learn the associate
between patterns outcomes, what's good what's bad. Likewise, for anything
(16:03):
so you need to sort of put the time in
and build that experience. How much experience ten thousand hours,
not so much, We don't know, right, depends how emotional
things are.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
We know that something like PTSD, you can learn something
very strong, you know, in a moment it was just
good or bad coffee. It's going to take a lot
of learning, a lot of iterations. But if something is
highly emotional, then you'll learn it very very quickly. So yeah,
so you need to have experience with that. And now
it's a really interesting one. I is really for impulses,
but also addiction. So I heard started hearing from people
(16:36):
that things that have addictive nature, so you alcohol, drugs,
but also social media, checking your email. So behavioral addictions.
People have this urge is strong pull towards them, and
they can confuse that or call it intuition. But I
didn't want that to be part of intuition. I think
that's something a little bit different. So one of the
rules is just to stay clear of anything that's addictive
(16:58):
and don't confuse that with intuition, right, including food. And
that's a controversial one because there's a whole movement of
intuitive eating, which is a hot topic which we can
deep dive into it.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
What is that movement? So there's a whole idea.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
There's all these books on intuitive eating, and this is
this idea that you just follow how you feel about
the food, right, you and you eat as much as
you want, whenever you want, and your body will naturally
come to an equilibrium more or less, right, I'm summarizing it.
The problem is modern food's highly engineered, right, billions of
dollars going into making food basically like a drug addictive,
and that's a very dangerous thing. I'm against that idea
(17:31):
unless you're out in the country and you're eating a
whole food diet and maybe that that can work. And
then L is for low probability, but it really it's
for anything around probabilities and numbers.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
So psychology textbooks are full of examples where people just
get these probability tests and it's completely wrong, right, And
our brains just don't process numbers very well, or probabilities particularly,
And so again, anything around probabilities and numbers, stay away
from intuition, right.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Just don't don't use your intuition for anything around numbers.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Right, as in, I don't want to drive over the
bridge because I've seen lots of stories of bridges collapsing.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
In fact, it's terribly low probability. People get scared to
get the gut feeling of not wanting to do that.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Is so I live in Sydney.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Sometimes I'll call it the shark attack rule right where
the sharks, you know, I think you're more likely to
be get this For an AUSSI stat more likely to
be injured by a kangaroo than a shark, right, and
certainly more likely to be hurt in a car crash
than a shark. But people don't think twice about getting
in the car or patting a kangaroo, but they'll be
you know, once you start imagining a sharks, you know,
in the water, then you get reoody scared of it.
(18:40):
So for a range offer reasons, we're just not good
at following the numbers and probabilities. Emotions other things creep in.
So anything around that don't follow the feelings, don't follow intuition.
Stick with the numbers and the probabilities, you know.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
One example that here in Silicon Valley is with self
driving cars. The probabilities and self driving cars are terrific,
as in you're much less likely to get an accident
with those. But there's something about control and the other
emotions involved there that make it so people just can't
do it. They'd rather have a much higher risk drive
than do something safe.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
Yeah it's a funny, Yeah, yeah, it's an odd thing.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
So the l is what does the advice to people though,
that if it's a low probability event, don't try.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Anything abound probabilities, smoking, climate change, or anything around numbers
and probabilities. Don't feel it, don't like follow the numbers,
do the math, just follow whatever the numbers say, don't
try and feel your way through it.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
And then E was the environment.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
So I mentioned before with Steve Jobs that the learning
is context and environment specific.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
So when you're on.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Holiday, right, I'm in a different country now, you know,
I look to the wrong side, and I feel like
I should look to the to the to the right
and right the cars coming from the left here in America,
and they're all you know, when there's there's all kinds
of very subtle things like that when you're traveling that
I have to really pay attention to, not just do
my usual intuitive thing and sort of think, go back
(20:05):
to sort of first principles and think logically about what
I'm doing.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
So that's smile.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
There's these five rules that fall out of the science
around intuition.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
It's just so curiosity. Why did you call it smile
instead of miles or slime?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
My wife helped me with that. Essentially came up with that.
I wanted something positive because a lot of.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
The rules that don't do this don't use your intuition,
Like I like the idea of smile before you intuit,
smile before you use your intuition, and the idea that
of people to have a daily practice and you know,
getting really used to those rules, like you know, going
to the gym or something in practicing right, I suggest
people have a sort of an intuition practice diary or
a table where they'll keep track of things and learn
(20:45):
to use it. So one of the things that people,
you know, small decisions. They may not use intuition when
they're going to get married or get divorced, or change
live somewhere else, move overseas or a new job or
leave a job. All of a sudden, they start talking about, oh,
my gut says this, I'm feeling it this way or
that way. And they're not well practiced at following these
kind of rules. Might they might be finding highly anxious, right,
(21:06):
and their intuition.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Is not going to work when they're anxious.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So I like the idea of starting with small decisions
and working up to the larger ones.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
That's excellent. That's so good because people write about intuition,
and I feel like they often give way too much
credit to intuition. So what you're doing is so important
to say, look, here are the times, listen do it
here at the times not to listen to it, because
you might drift into the realm of misintuition there, which
people do all the time. And obviously, people with anxieties
(21:34):
about things or misapprehensions about things, including you know, whatever
it is, maybe they're divorced from reality or they just
overrepresent something. People will often follow their gut but incorrectly.
So this is a really important thing that you're doing here.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
If you're anxious about flying and getting on the plane,
it's probably not your intuition telling you something is going
to happen, unless you know you're a mechanic and line
mechanic and you're an expert, right, It's not that it's something.
It's just your anxiety, so don't confuse the two.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
How do you measure this in the lab?
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Yes, we started off on this quest almost a decade
ago now, well actually no a decade, so we had
this sort of rough definition of intuition and we've been
studying consciousness. So we do a lot of consciousness research
in my lab, and we have ways of rendering things unconscious.
What do I mean by that? So we have a
way to show people a picture in one eye and
then flash bright colors in the other eye, and that
(22:29):
can render that picture completely unconscious. So it's kind of
like just me doing this, right, I see you and
this eye and my hand there.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
For the audio audience, he's covering his one of his eyes.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yes, so if you're on YouTube there, yes, So that
puts the visual system into this binoch the rival with
this this state of competition. Right, And if the thing
and in the other eyes is bright enough and you
make it flicker, you'll never see the picture in the
other eye.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
So let me just unpack this, which is that you've
got two eyes. They normally fuse their picture so you
see the world, but in fact, you can in the
laboratory give a stimulus to one eye and different stimulus
to the other eye, and you can have them compete.
And by doing this cleverally, you can make it so
that the input going into one eye you're not conscious of,
even though your visual system still sees it, just FAPs exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
So I call this inception, and we're doing it with
emotional images. I call it emotional inception, like the Christopher
Nolan film. Right, So we don't we're not hacking dreams
or anything, but we're getting and this is what we need.
It's like the ingredients you need if you want to
study intuition. How can you get something into the brain
and you know it's unconscious And this is a way
of doing that. So what we do is we show
people sort of nasty images snakes, spiders, sharks, guns, these
(23:39):
kind of things in one eye and we have a bright,
flickering stimulus to the other eye and so they never
see the scary image, but we know their brain is
processing it. We can put a little thing around their
finger and we can see that they start sweating a
little bit more in those conditions when there's an emotional
thing there, so we know what is being processed. So
that's the first ingredient. The second ingredient that needs to
be a decision right to see making. So at the
(24:01):
same time, we have this noisy cloud of dots just
moving all over the place on the screen, a bit
like the old school analog TVs right, but there's that
fuzzy snow so a bit like that, but it's slightly
drifting left or right a little bit more, but it's
kind of hard to pick if it's going left or right.
So super simple, all people have to do is say, oh,
it's going left.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
That's it. That's the end of a trial.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Then we do it again and again, and so they
don't know we're doing this, but at the same time
they're deciding whether it's moving or left or right, we're
showing them a positive or a negative image. And then
what we see over time is their brain starts to
associate the positive or negative with the direction, and their
performance starts to go up.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
They get better and better at it.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Right, their reaction times get faster and faster, so their
accuracy goes up, their responsors are faster, and if you
ask them how confident they are, their confidence goes up
as well. Right, And then if you give them a
questionnaire and say, how do you make decisions in everyday life?
Speaker 3 (24:56):
You know, outside the lab, the.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
People that are report making more intuitor decisions are much
better or they get it more of a boost from
these unconscious images. So so I know to a lot
of people they're like, wow, this is kind of a
strange way to measure intuition. And it is, but I
think it's an interesting sort of technology in a way
to measure and dissect something in the lab so we
can understand it, right, but it is different to how a.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Lot of people may think about intuition.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
And tell us about intuition and AI.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, So at the end of the book and the
very last the last chapter, I started talking about this
and it's something that came up early and journalists would
ask this question. And I realized that the way I'm
defining it right, unconscious learning. Things in the world become
associated with positive negative outcomes in your brain. Unconscious learning.
That's kind of how these new versions of AI operate.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
We don't think they're conscious and they're learning, so unconscious
learning and they're learning this thing predicts this thing positive
negative outcome. So there's something interesting between those two that
it's just a nice parallel there, and that's interesting itself.
The second is the question of will we be able
to outsource our intuition to an AI assistant?
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Right?
Speaker 3 (26:09):
And could we you.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Know, if we have all these wearables and we're going
to get a lot more of them soon, could the
AI use all these wearables to basically tell us what
our intuition is saying?
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Right?
Speaker 2 (26:19):
So can we outsource it? And this, you know, would
be interesting to everyone, but i'd be interesting to certain
populations who don't have people with mental disorders or addiction
is one interesting area where we know decision making doesn't
work that well in people that have an addiction, and
intuition cerainly doesn't work. So could you outsource intuition to
(26:39):
an AI, your personal AI assistant?
Speaker 3 (26:42):
I think it's a really fascinating question.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
So we're actually doing something at my company in your sensory,
which is an interesting version of this. So, just as
one example, there were some students at us SEE who
took the risk band and for people with autism who
have a hard time reading the emotional of the person
they're talking to, the wristband listens in real time and
makes a machine learning decision, Oh the person is happy, sad, angry,
(27:07):
things like that, and then just buzzes to tell you ways,
oh that person. So if you're a kid with autism
who can't read that, you're just being told the answer
to that.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
And do you see learning? Do they get better as
I learned?
Speaker 1 (27:18):
I don't know yet, but presumably because you're just telling
them like, hey, this guy's angry, so to adjust your
behavior appropriately. So it's just a memorization thing. But I'll
give you another example. Something we did is we got
these smart watches that measure horr ate and herd variability
and galvinx can response and so on, and we use
the API to take that data out and feed it
(27:39):
into this wristband that vibrates in different ways so that
these invisible states of your body can become visible to you.
So you can actually feel, oh, it's not this thing
that is making you know. It's not the cafe's fault,
but it's that I drank too much coffee earlier, or
whatever the issue is. You can start actually reading these
(28:00):
signals from your bodies in ways that are typically invisible
to us. I'll tell you the really interesting spread we did,
which is we fed that data through the Internet to
the risk band. And the reason we did that is
so that, for example, your spouse could wear the watch
and you're wearing the vibrating wristband, so you're feeling your
spouse's physiology, so you know she's feeling nervous or stressed,
(28:22):
even if you're on the other side of the world.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
I love it, she'll cut the argument.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
But no, this is this must have an application for
you know, emotional intelligence and emotional awareness. So people have
some people don't have good emotional awareness. They're not aware
when they're angry or stressed, right, So this is part
of that s that first rule for using intuition. People
just don't realize when they're stressed or anxious. But this
could be a really interesting way of sort of training
people up in this self awareness of their own physiology.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
I like them, you know. I think about the time.
I just heard a statistic this morning. I don't know
if it's true, but it's true. Truth to you though,
But which is that eighty five percent of the jobs
that will exist when our kids are adults don't even
exists yet, And so who knows if the number is
exactly right, But it strikes me as Wow, what a
world we're entering into. But in this context, the world
(29:08):
of maybe everyone's just going to have the opportunity be
much more emotionally intelligent because we'll all tap into this
stuff and get these signals and no because my you know,
Apple Vision proglasses or something. We'll say, hey, eaglman, your
heart rates going up. You're gotving skin response to spiking.
And I'll say, oh, okay, I wouldn't have known that,
but now, thank goodness, I'm being told that piece of cake.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
I hope so, because I mean this data showing that
emotional intelligence has actually gone down of the last decade.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
And it's been linked to tech use.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
So it's hard to pull out the causation here, but
there's some that it suggested the more young people use tech,
they're lower their emotional intelligences.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Anyway, Well good, so we'll rescue it with tech things.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Cool. Yeah. I think I
think this as you and I study our whole careers.
The brain is this entire cosmos happening in there. There's
so much information that you're picking up from the world
you have no access to. We are so low bandwidth
(30:05):
in terms of our conscious understanding of any of this stuff.
But because the data is in there, it should be extractable.
And what that means is that what intuition becomes in
fifteen years is maybe you know, you'll write a sequel
to the book with this new world.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
But yeah, I mean interception, right, That's kind of what
it is. It's you can think of it as as
our bodies, our physiology tapping in, so our bodies have
this access to the unconscious information in our brains, which
sounds like a funny way to put it. Our bodies
get access to something we don't if we use our consciousness,
but it kind of does so by tapping into your
gut response, your heart rate, your sweating or not, you're
(30:44):
getting this extra source of information, the unconscious.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
And it's kind of like that.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
It's just sort of using interception, this internal perceptual stet
of the body to get access to extra information. And
who wouldn't want that if we can trust.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
It exactly, because maybe you can think of an example,
thinking off the top of my head, where we confuse
our emotional state or intuition about what's you know, we
misinterpret what's happening you gave the example before and if
there's a snake on the floor and then and everything. Wow,
that was a really exciting podcast. But we're we're mixing,
we're confleting some things. I mean, it is a very
(31:18):
exciting podcast.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
But a great story, a great story from the book
is I went on a date many before I got married,
and it was a first date and we went rock
climbing one of those indoor rock climbing gyms, right, and
we're climbing and falling and blaying and then we swap
and it's exciting. It's like wow, and we were like,
the chemistry is amazing. And next time we meet up,
it's like, huh, not so much. Turns out we were
(31:39):
not suited for each other at all. And I was like,
but it felt so amazing that first date, and it
struck It puzzled me for years, and I was like, ah,
arousal misattribution, that's exactly what's going on. All the adrenaline
from the falling and the climbing. We thought it was
coming from each other and it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
So yeah, right, aren't There are these studies where you
have people crossing a rope bridge over a cliff and
you have the female assistant with the clipboard who asks
the person questions while they're on the rope bridge, and
then later the question is something about like, hey, would
you would you like to get her number and go
on a date something like that, versus the exact same
assistant with the same clipboard asks the same questions but
(32:16):
in a boring situation on campus.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Yes, it's the same thing. Yeah, the rickety bridge experience.
It's very family rickety bridge experiment. And yeah that people
just confuse these feelings with drenaline from the height with
a person in front of them.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
It's yeah, yes, So we're entering a very exciting future
as we get better sensors and better AI being able
to essentially summarize things and tell them to our low
band with conscious mind and just say, hey, pal, here's
how you're feeling. You know, don't confuse this. So maybe
you'll have to add another letter to your smile.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah, I think absolutely, David.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
I think the things we can imagine now this is
like a passion of mine in my labs is measuring
things in the mind that we thought were too hard
to measure, right, And I call it like a blood
test for the mind. We want objective, reliable measurements of
mental things like a blood test that we can rely on.
When you interview someone, give them a questionnaire. It's good,
but it's not that reliable. We need this objective test.
(33:12):
It's a different way of thinking about tech and technology,
but it can be done now.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
We can do this now.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
The book is The Intuition Toolkit. And thank you so
much for me to Joel.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
I'll pleasure David.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
And before we go, I want to say thank you
for inspiring me with expanding what academia can be and
writing books and TV shows and companies and all the
cool things you do. I think it's groundbreaking in that
you're breaking open the classic academic model.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
So thank you, Thank you, Joel.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
So that was Joel Pearson talking about his new book,
The Intuition Toolkit, and now I want to bring it
back to the big picture. I'm always struck by how
(34:00):
much we do at the unconscious level that we don't
have access to. And a couple of episodes ago, I
was talking with Ed Katmull who's the founder of Pixar Films,
and one of the topics we touched on in our conversation,
which I didn't include in that episode was this topic
of intuition, the kind of intuition that an animator might have.
(34:21):
So here's a short clip from that conversation with Ed's
thoughts about that.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
The ability to animate means you you understand motion and emotion,
and you are observing things, and you're you're conveying things
at a subconscious level, and that's not really a visualization
element I know in the in the case of our
our brains is that we take a lot of subtle clues,
(34:55):
but we're taking them unconsciously. So the way we move
our face.
Speaker 5 (35:00):
Or our lips or our body motion, we're kind of
aware that we convey information to our body, but we
don't know exactly what that is or how we do it.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
If you actually.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Understand how important that is, and then a good animator
will sort of get that and see it and then
convey it if they can, if they put it in
the animation, then people will see it and they'll get
information at this level, not knowing that they're getting it.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
I mean.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
One of my favorite examples in Twist Story two, where
Jesse that the doll was very upset because her owner
had actually discarded her. But while she was talking.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
She was taking your pigtail and she was twisting it.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
Almost nobody would notice that she would was twisting her pigtail.
They wouldn't notice at a conscious level, but an unconscious level,
that would mean that she's really torn up inside, along
with the other things that are there. So we've got
different levels of getting information from the world. There's the
(36:11):
direct words we're saying, and sometimes the direct words we're
saying are the opposite of what we really mean, and
so you've got like that's one level, and the other
is the body motion conveying something. That whole process means
that the animator is observing these different levels and putting
(36:31):
them into the character, and of course the actor also
provides layers to that. And when you get all of
that right, you have something which is complex and is interested,
it's observing multiple levels and isn't just about the pictures, it's.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
About all of this coming together. That was Ed Catmull,
founder of Pixar Films, talking about the intuition that's for
an animator. Sometimes they can consciously articulate what they're up to,
and sometimes they can't. But for a good animator, they
pick up on those cues and they transmit those cues,
(37:10):
sometimes all under the radar of consciousness. And of course
these animators are working on areas where their intuition makes
good sense because they have mastered their data and they're
working in familiar and predictable contexts. So let's wrap up
for today. Intuition is about putting together vast information that
(37:31):
your brain has picked up on to give you a
final nudge in one direction or another, and it's massively
important for our functioning in the world. But we shouldn't
romanticize it to believe that it's always correct and always
to be listened to. Instead, we need to be clever
about when to trust it and under what circumstances. As
(37:53):
Joel suggests, we need to take into account whether we're
feeling too emotional, in which case, don't trust you tuition.
You need to master data before trusting your intuition on something.
Don't mistake impulses an addiction for intuition, don't use your
intuition for very low probability judgments, and you should really
(38:16):
only trust your intuition in familiar and predictable contexts. In
the end, each of us carries vast computational resources comparable
to Google or Meta or Apple. But instead of it
weighing eight ounces and us carrying in our back pocket,
we have three pounds of this computational material and we
(38:38):
lug it around on our shoulders the way that we
carry other things that are heavy and important. This is
all you have to make your decisions in the world,
and think about it this way, in the same way
that you might tell a student how to leverage the
computational might of the Internet while retaining appropriate skeptic about
(39:00):
some of the results. So it goes with the massive
networked biological landscape of our own brains. It is up
to us to learn how to become good users. Go
to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and
(39:21):
to find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts
at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check
out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos
of each episode and to leave comments until next time.
I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
Today we're going to talk about intuition. Why do you
experience a feeling when you walk into a place that
you don't like this restaurant and you want to go
to this other restaurant, Or you trust this person but
you don't quite trust that person. Or you might have
a sense that something is wrong with your pet or
your child, even if you can't articulate what the issue is.
(00:27):
So in all these cases, what are the signals that
the brain is picking up on and what fraction of
those signals does your consciousness have access to? And importantly,
does intuition sometimes steer us wrong? What we call intuition
is not something to be trusted automatically. It quite often
(00:49):
steers us the wrong way. So what are the features
of the situation to look for where you might feel like, Okay,
my intuition is more likely to be useful here than
in this other situation, where my intuition is more likely
to steer me wrong. And what is the future of
intuition as we build new technologies that might take the
(01:11):
myriad signals racing around in the darkness of our brains
and bodies and bring them to light. Welcome to inner
Cosmos with me. David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
author at Stanford, and I've spent my career at the
intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life.
(01:46):
Today's episode is about that gut feeling that we call intuition. Now,
if you've been listening to this podcast for a while
or reading my books, you've definitely heard me talk about
all the stuff that transpires unconsciously in the unconscious mind.
This is all the computations we have no access to
(02:06):
and really no acquaintance with. So think about how you walk,
all the sophisticated coordination of muscles and balance that's required there.
Until very recently, that was an impossibly difficult task to
get robots to do this. But ever since you were
two years old or so, you've been doing it just fine. Now,
(02:27):
you can't articulate how you walk and how you keep
your balance. It's much like riding a bicycle in that way.
And presumably you can do several things while you're walking
or riding a bike. You can have a conversation or
maybe punch out a text on your phone while you're
doing it. But if I ask you to describe to
me what you are doing with all that beautiful sophisticated musculature,
(02:49):
it's simply not possible. You put the years of work
into learning how to walk and how to ride a bicycle,
and it resulted in expertise, but and inability to articulate
what was going on there under the hood. And it's
like this with most of the actions that you take,
whether that's deciding what you want to eat, or who
(03:12):
you're going to marry, or how you're identifying a smell
from some mixture of molecules or whatever. You just find
that your brain can magically do it because all these
operations are happening in silence, in the darkness of this
vast computational vault. So your conscious mind is like the
(03:33):
broom closet in the mansion of your brain, and all
of the rest involves work that's happening that you can't see.
And why is that the case. It's because the data
being pulled in from all your senses is way too
detailed to be useful. Your retina at the back of
your eye that transmits visual input at about ten million
(03:56):
bits per second, which is similar to an ethernet connection.
But if you had conscious access to all that data,
you wouldn't be able to operate at your level of
space and time. At your level, what you care about
is where the heck did I put my toothbrush? Or
what can I read on this menu? Or where is
(04:17):
my friend's face in this crowd of people? You just
want simple, high level answers to important questions. You want
the abstractions, not the details. So your brain takes in
enormous amounts of data, but what you want is the headline.
In Silicon Valley where I live, for example, all my
(04:39):
venture capitalist friends talk about this as pattern matching. They
have thousands of new companies coming in to give them pitches,
and in each of those pitches there are a million
details that they can't know, but they think, you know.
In my career, I've seen all these pitches and patterns emerge.
(05:00):
I don't even know why. I sometimes feel like, wow,
this team of founders is really great, or this team
of founders is never going to make it, even though
the idea seems strong. So those assessments rely on their intuition,
and what they're trying to do is make their intuition
good and refine it and refine it with practice. So
(05:21):
in many situations. In all of our lives, we have
lots of practice at something and we see a new
situation and we make an assessment like yes or no,
or good or bad, or take it or leave it.
And the extraordinary thing about brains is that they can
summarize a complex situation and say, look, although there are
(05:42):
a million details here, the big picture is that you
should approach that or avoid that. And you rarely have
access to the details about why. Sometimes you might think
you have access, but that is often just a retrospective story. Now,
in neuroscience jargon call this unconscious inference, meaning you are
(06:03):
inferring something about the situation and you're not doing it consciously,
presumably because of the amount of data that is involved.
And in popular parlance we call this intuition. But intuition
sometimes gets a bad name because it's often hijacked by
spiritual guru types who say you should always trust your intuition.
(06:25):
Now here's the truth. You should not always trust your intuition.
After all, your intuition is not a perfect predictor. In
Silicon Valley, for example, four out of ten companies that
are backed by those venture capitalists, they lose money or
they go bankrupt, and many times the intuitive decisions that
we make, let's say about relationships, turn out to be
(06:47):
bad decisions. Just because the computations are happening under the
hood and they're vast and complex, it doesn't mean they're
guaranteed to be correct. Intuition is quite often wrong or
makes a decision based on things that you wouldn't feel
proud of doing if you had access to it. For example,
what if your intuition tells you not to sell your
(07:11):
house to this guy, but it's because of some deep down,
unconscious racism that you weren't even aware of. What if
your intuition tells you that there's something creepy about that
guy over there, and you don't want to do business
with him, and you say, look, I'm just trusting my
gut on this one. But it turns out the poor
guy has early Parkinson's disease, and so as a result,
(07:33):
he's unable to make expressive facial expressions and instead his
face is mostly blank, and that creeps you out because
you don't get what's happening. Because let's say you're not
a clinician. Or what if you're sitting on a jury
and you think there's something about this guy that makes
me feel like he should be put away for a
long time. But it turns out it's because he's not
(07:57):
handsome but ugly. There's an extensive litery sure on this
that ugly people get longer sentences than good looking people.
So the idea that we should always trust our intuition
turns out to be mistaken. But the good news is
it turns out that we can be a little bit
smarter about when to look to our intuition or ignore it.
(08:21):
Researchers have been working to figure out the circumstances under
which your intuition might be more trustworthy or less trustworthy.
So for this I decided to have a conversation with
my friend and colleague Joel Pearson. Joel's a professor of
cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
He's recently written a book about this called The Intuition Toolkit.
(08:44):
So Joel and I sat down together to dig into
this topic. Joel tell us about intuition, Yeah, so a
topic I love.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
We've been studying it for over a decade now, and
I've recently just published a book the Intuition Toolkit. So
a decade ago we started looking at the landscape of intuition,
and people define it as a spiritual thing. Other people
in psychology and neuroscience defind it very very differently. You
have all these different definitions. So I wanted to come
up with a clear definition, the most practical and what
(09:26):
I think is the most useful definition, and that is
the productive learnt use of unconscious information for better decisions
and actions.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
By the way, does intuition always give better this is me?
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Okay, yeah, that's how I'm so. So this was part
of the problem.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
So I'm going to introduce a couple of words. So
this is what I did.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
At the beginning.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
I came up with another word called misintuition. Right, I know,
it sounds like a miss universe contest, but it's not.
I wanted a word that so I wanted to sort
of split apart the misfiring of intuition when it goes wrong,
because there are times when you should absolutely not use
it and other times where it is useful. So I
wanted to split that apart and came up with this
other word misintuition and intuition. So that's why I define
(10:06):
intuition as a productive use right of unconscious information and
it's learnt, right, So we can't we'll get to in
a second, I'm sure, but you can only use intuition
really for something you have experience with and that turns
out to be important.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
So give us, give us more of a sense of
this then. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
So the example I like to give is you walk
into a cafe, right, and you at the second you
walk through the door, your brain's processing a thousand different things, right,
the music, what the staff are wearing, if there's tablecloths,
no tablecloths, the temperature, how clean the floor is, smells, this,
the hundreds of things, and you're not consciously aware of them,
all right, and as you walk in, you're going to go, yeah,
(10:46):
let's get coffee here, or let's go across the road
to the other place, right, And that people are going
to sometimes will report as they don't know why, but
this is something off that they felt sometimes in the gut, right,
the gut response.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
That's kind of the way I tend to introduce intuition.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
And what's happening in that those few seconds the second
as you walk in the door, is that things in
the environment are triggering positive or negative associations, and that
is based on past learning, right, the classic Pavlovs dogs,
classical conditioning.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
So you go to enough cafes where it's really hot
in there and there's bad music and this coffee is terrible,
your brain will learn that. Whether you consciously remember that
or not, your brain will start to learn these associations.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
If you get food poisoning and sick, it's going to
learn it really quickly. And so you go to enough cafes,
you go to one hundreds of thousands, your brain will
learn which cues the environment predicts good or bad food
or coffee. And that's what's happening. So all the things
in the environment are triggering red flag, green flag, right,
and you feel it and you don't know why, right,
(11:50):
and you either get the coffee or you go somewhere else. Yes,
So that's I think the best way to think about it.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Cool. And this is why I think about intuition as
long as it's just having a wide angle lens on
the There's a lot of interest in neuroscience obviously about
cognition where you're deciding, okay, what's the next chest move
here and so on? And that's what all lots of
AI is about, is how do I make a really
smart decision here? But but in a sense with intuition,
it's I'm going to take in the whole cafe, and
(12:17):
you know something's going to bubble up saying go or stay.
So I'm really interested in this issue of misintuition though, because,
as you phrase it, because there are lots of times
that people have intuitions that are totally incorrect, like, oh,
this coffee shop, there's something that creeps me out about that.
Like the guy in the corner there, I feel like
(12:38):
he's a mass murderer, even though maybe the guy has
you know, something like Parkinson's disease, where people have you know,
blank facial expressions. I've seen this a bunch of times
where someone has Parkinson's and other people think, oh my gosh,
that guy's creepy. There's something wrong with that guy because
they don't know about it. Right, Okay, So so give
us a sense of misintuition and how when you feel
(12:59):
like his intuition mostly right, mostly wrong, totally random.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
So I'm glad you are.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
So the second half of the book, he unpacks based
on these five rules and I use the word the
acronym smile so people can try to remember this right.
So the first half of the book is really about
the science we've done, the lab, how you measure it,
how you create the lab. And it's not always good.
Sometimes you should use it, sometimes you shouldn't. And that's
what the rules unpack. So let's sort of tell people
when it's safe to trust their intuition. And an example
(13:26):
of this I give often is Steve Jobs, who talked
about using his intuition at Apple, both for product design
and running the company in all different you know, and
he was a master at it. He went to India
and studied it. He was really into it when it
came to his health decisions later in life, and some
of his other decisions not so much right. And that's
interesting because.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Wait, can you impack that for people who don't know
about his health.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
So he died from cancer in the end, he actually
or his doctors and his family wanted him to get treatment,
to get an operation, and he said no, he didn't
want to get have that sort of be invaded surgically
like that, and he put off the treatment, put it off,
and put it off, until it's basically too late. And
this idea that intuition is specific to a particular environment
(14:09):
or context, and it makes sense because the learning that
I'm saying that it seems to be based on is
context specific. And this is one of those rules is
actually the E at the end of smile for environment.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
So if you learn.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
It at you know, you craft your intuition expertly at work.
When you go home, when you're on holiday in a
different context, different environment, that learning is not going to
apply so well. So we need to be careful and
we change the environment because when you learn something in
the environment gets sort of attached to that. Right when
you're studying for the exam in your bedroom, not only
are you learning all information, you're learning the information imprinted
(14:43):
to your bedroom. So we have to be careful with that.
So that's an example of where you can be led astray.
Now s the beginning smile is self awareness, and that
really is a trigger for emotions. So we shouldn't trust
our intuition when we're emotional and we're stressed, anxious, or
depressed for a number of reasons for something called arousalor misattribution,
which is something so humans are not very good at
(15:05):
understanding where particular feelings or stress or emotion come from,
and we can go we can deep dive into this.
This classic experiments in psychology that are now a lot
of data to support this. Right, But basically, you know,
if there was a snake right here on the floor,
we both get adrenaline, we'd both be sweating and scared
of the snake, and then later on we confuse that
and say, man, that podcast was amazing, Right, we'd confuse
(15:27):
the emotion for the situation with the emotion from the snake.
We're just bad to understanding the source of these things.
So that's a number one rule. If you're emotional stressed, don't.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Follow your intuition. Just just put it aside, follow the
logic as best you can. Right. So that's s.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Then M is for mastery, and that we mentioned learning before,
So that's really that you need to build these associations
in your brain between the environment, the triggers, and good
or bad outcomes. So you've never played chess before, you
can't sit down and just be a grand master intuitive
chess player, right. Your brain needs to learn the associate
between patterns outcomes, what's good what's bad. Likewise, for anything
(16:03):
so you need to sort of put the time in
and build that experience. How much experience ten thousand hours,
not so much, We don't know, right, depends how emotional
things are.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
We know that something like PTSD, you can learn something
very strong, you know, in a moment it was just
good or bad coffee. It's going to take a lot
of learning, a lot of iterations. But if something is
highly emotional, then you'll learn it very very quickly. So yeah,
so you need to have experience with that. And now
it's a really interesting one. I is really for impulses,
but also addiction. So I heard started hearing from people
(16:36):
that things that have addictive nature, so you alcohol, drugs,
but also social media, checking your email. So behavioral addictions.
People have this urge is strong pull towards them, and
they can confuse that or call it intuition. But I
didn't want that to be part of intuition. I think
that's something a little bit different. So one of the
rules is just to stay clear of anything that's addictive
(16:58):
and don't confuse that with intuition, right, including food. And
that's a controversial one because there's a whole movement of
intuitive eating, which is a hot topic which we can
deep dive into it.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
What is that movement? So there's a whole idea.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
There's all these books on intuitive eating, and this is
this idea that you just follow how you feel about
the food, right, you and you eat as much as
you want, whenever you want, and your body will naturally
come to an equilibrium more or less, right, I'm summarizing it.
The problem is modern food's highly engineered, right, billions of
dollars going into making food basically like a drug addictive,
and that's a very dangerous thing. I'm against that idea
(17:31):
unless you're out in the country and you're eating a
whole food diet and maybe that that can work. And
then L is for low probability, but it really it's
for anything around probabilities and numbers.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
So psychology textbooks are full of examples where people just
get these probability tests and it's completely wrong, right, And
our brains just don't process numbers very well, or probabilities particularly,
And so again, anything around probabilities and numbers, stay away
from intuition, right.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
Just don't don't use your intuition for anything around numbers.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Right, as in, I don't want to drive over the
bridge because I've seen lots of stories of bridges collapsing.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
In fact, it's terribly low probability. People get scared to
get the gut feeling of not wanting to do that.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Is so I live in Sydney.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Sometimes I'll call it the shark attack rule right where
the sharks, you know, I think you're more likely to
be get this For an AUSSI stat more likely to
be injured by a kangaroo than a shark, right, and
certainly more likely to be hurt in a car crash
than a shark. But people don't think twice about getting
in the car or patting a kangaroo, but they'll be
you know, once you start imagining a sharks, you know,
in the water, then you get reoody scared of it.
(18:40):
So for a range offer reasons, we're just not good
at following the numbers and probabilities. Emotions other things creep in.
So anything around that don't follow the feelings, don't follow intuition.
Stick with the numbers and the probabilities, you know.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
One example that here in Silicon Valley is with self
driving cars. The probabilities and self driving cars are terrific,
as in you're much less likely to get an accident
with those. But there's something about control and the other
emotions involved there that make it so people just can't
do it. They'd rather have a much higher risk drive
than do something safe.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
Yeah it's a funny, Yeah, yeah, it's an odd thing.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
So the l is what does the advice to people though,
that if it's a low probability event, don't try.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Anything abound probabilities, smoking, climate change, or anything around numbers
and probabilities. Don't feel it, don't like follow the numbers,
do the math, just follow whatever the numbers say, don't
try and feel your way through it.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Right.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
And then E was the environment.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
So I mentioned before with Steve Jobs that the learning
is context and environment specific.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
So when you're on.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Holiday, right, I'm in a different country now, you know,
I look to the wrong side, and I feel like
I should look to the to the to the right
and right the cars coming from the left here in America,
and they're all you know, when there's there's all kinds
of very subtle things like that when you're traveling that
I have to really pay attention to, not just do
my usual intuitive thing and sort of think, go back
(20:05):
to sort of first principles and think logically about what
I'm doing.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
So that's smile.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
There's these five rules that fall out of the science
around intuition.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
It's just so curiosity. Why did you call it smile
instead of miles or slime?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
My wife helped me with that. Essentially came up with that.
I wanted something positive because a lot of.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
The rules that don't do this don't use your intuition,
Like I like the idea of smile before you intuit,
smile before you use your intuition, and the idea that
of people to have a daily practice and you know,
getting really used to those rules, like you know, going
to the gym or something in practicing right, I suggest
people have a sort of an intuition practice diary or
a table where they'll keep track of things and learn
(20:45):
to use it. So one of the things that people,
you know, small decisions. They may not use intuition when
they're going to get married or get divorced, or change
live somewhere else, move overseas or a new job or
leave a job. All of a sudden, they start talking about, oh,
my gut says this, I'm feeling it this way or
that way. And they're not well practiced at following these
kind of rules. Might they might be finding highly anxious, right,
(21:06):
and their intuition.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Is not going to work when they're anxious.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So I like the idea of starting with small decisions
and working up to the larger ones.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
That's excellent. That's so good because people write about intuition,
and I feel like they often give way too much
credit to intuition. So what you're doing is so important
to say, look, here are the times, listen do it
here at the times not to listen to it, because
you might drift into the realm of misintuition there, which
people do all the time. And obviously, people with anxieties
(21:34):
about things or misapprehensions about things, including you know, whatever
it is, maybe they're divorced from reality or they just
overrepresent something. People will often follow their gut but incorrectly.
So this is a really important thing that you're doing here.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
If you're anxious about flying and getting on the plane,
it's probably not your intuition telling you something is going
to happen, unless you know you're a mechanic and line
mechanic and you're an expert, right, It's not that it's something.
It's just your anxiety, so don't confuse the two.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
How do you measure this in the lab?
Speaker 2 (22:07):
Yes, we started off on this quest almost a decade
ago now, well actually no a decade, so we had
this sort of rough definition of intuition and we've been
studying consciousness. So we do a lot of consciousness research
in my lab, and we have ways of rendering things unconscious.
What do I mean by that? So we have a
way to show people a picture in one eye and
then flash bright colors in the other eye, and that
(22:29):
can render that picture completely unconscious. So it's kind of
like just me doing this, right, I see you and
this eye and my hand there.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
For the audio audience, he's covering his one of his eyes.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Yes, so if you're on YouTube there, yes, So that
puts the visual system into this binoch the rival with
this this state of competition. Right, And if the thing
and in the other eyes is bright enough and you
make it flicker, you'll never see the picture in the
other eye.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
So let me just unpack this, which is that you've
got two eyes. They normally fuse their picture so you
see the world, but in fact, you can in the
laboratory give a stimulus to one eye and different stimulus
to the other eye, and you can have them compete.
And by doing this cleverally, you can make it so
that the input going into one eye you're not conscious of,
even though your visual system still sees it, just FAPs exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
So I call this inception, and we're doing it with
emotional images. I call it emotional inception, like the Christopher
Nolan film. Right, So we don't we're not hacking dreams
or anything, but we're getting and this is what we need.
It's like the ingredients you need if you want to
study intuition. How can you get something into the brain
and you know it's unconscious And this is a way
of doing that. So what we do is we show
people sort of nasty images snakes, spiders, sharks, guns, these
(23:39):
kind of things in one eye and we have a bright,
flickering stimulus to the other eye and so they never
see the scary image, but we know their brain is
processing it. We can put a little thing around their
finger and we can see that they start sweating a
little bit more in those conditions when there's an emotional
thing there, so we know what is being processed. So
that's the first ingredient. The second ingredient that needs to
be a decision right to see making. So at the
(24:01):
same time, we have this noisy cloud of dots just
moving all over the place on the screen, a bit
like the old school analog TVs right, but there's that
fuzzy snow so a bit like that, but it's slightly
drifting left or right a little bit more, but it's
kind of hard to pick if it's going left or right.
So super simple, all people have to do is say, oh,
it's going left.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
That's it. That's the end of a trial.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Then we do it again and again, and so they
don't know we're doing this, but at the same time
they're deciding whether it's moving or left or right, we're
showing them a positive or a negative image. And then
what we see over time is their brain starts to
associate the positive or negative with the direction, and their
performance starts to go up.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
They get better and better at it.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Right, their reaction times get faster and faster, so their
accuracy goes up, their responsors are faster, and if you
ask them how confident they are, their confidence goes up
as well. Right, And then if you give them a
questionnaire and say, how do you make decisions in everyday life?
Speaker 3 (24:56):
You know, outside the lab, the.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
People that are report making more intuitor decisions are much
better or they get it more of a boost from
these unconscious images. So so I know to a lot
of people they're like, wow, this is kind of a
strange way to measure intuition. And it is, but I
think it's an interesting sort of technology in a way
to measure and dissect something in the lab so we
can understand it, right, but it is different to how a.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Lot of people may think about intuition.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
And tell us about intuition and AI.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, So at the end of the book and the
very last the last chapter, I started talking about this
and it's something that came up early and journalists would
ask this question. And I realized that the way I'm
defining it right, unconscious learning. Things in the world become
associated with positive negative outcomes in your brain. Unconscious learning.
That's kind of how these new versions of AI operate.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
We don't think they're conscious and they're learning, so unconscious
learning and they're learning this thing predicts this thing positive
negative outcome. So there's something interesting between those two that
it's just a nice parallel there, and that's interesting itself.
The second is the question of will we be able
to outsource our intuition to an AI assistant?
Speaker 1 (26:08):
Right?
Speaker 3 (26:09):
And could we you.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Know, if we have all these wearables and we're going
to get a lot more of them soon, could the
AI use all these wearables to basically tell us what
our intuition is saying?
Speaker 3 (26:18):
Right?
Speaker 2 (26:19):
So can we outsource it? And this, you know, would
be interesting to everyone, but i'd be interesting to certain
populations who don't have people with mental disorders or addiction
is one interesting area where we know decision making doesn't
work that well in people that have an addiction, and
intuition cerainly doesn't work. So could you outsource intuition to
(26:39):
an AI, your personal AI assistant?
Speaker 3 (26:42):
I think it's a really fascinating question.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
So we're actually doing something at my company in your sensory,
which is an interesting version of this. So, just as
one example, there were some students at us SEE who
took the risk band and for people with autism who
have a hard time reading the emotional of the person
they're talking to, the wristband listens in real time and
makes a machine learning decision, Oh the person is happy, sad, angry,
(27:07):
things like that, and then just buzzes to tell you ways,
oh that person. So if you're a kid with autism
who can't read that, you're just being told the answer
to that.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
And do you see learning? Do they get better as
I learned?
Speaker 1 (27:18):
I don't know yet, but presumably because you're just telling
them like, hey, this guy's angry, so to adjust your
behavior appropriately. So it's just a memorization thing. But I'll
give you another example. Something we did is we got
these smart watches that measure horr ate and herd variability
and galvinx can response and so on, and we use
the API to take that data out and feed it
(27:39):
into this wristband that vibrates in different ways so that
these invisible states of your body can become visible to you.
So you can actually feel, oh, it's not this thing
that is making you know. It's not the cafe's fault,
but it's that I drank too much coffee earlier, or
whatever the issue is. You can start actually reading these
(28:00):
signals from your bodies in ways that are typically invisible
to us. I'll tell you the really interesting spread we did,
which is we fed that data through the Internet to
the risk band. And the reason we did that is
so that, for example, your spouse could wear the watch
and you're wearing the vibrating wristband, so you're feeling your
spouse's physiology, so you know she's feeling nervous or stressed,
(28:22):
even if you're on the other side of the world.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
I love it, she'll cut the argument.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
But no, this is this must have an application for
you know, emotional intelligence and emotional awareness. So people have
some people don't have good emotional awareness. They're not aware
when they're angry or stressed, right, So this is part
of that s that first rule for using intuition. People
just don't realize when they're stressed or anxious. But this
could be a really interesting way of sort of training
people up in this self awareness of their own physiology.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
I like them, you know. I think about the time.
I just heard a statistic this morning. I don't know
if it's true, but it's true. Truth to you though,
But which is that eighty five percent of the jobs
that will exist when our kids are adults don't even
exists yet, And so who knows if the number is
exactly right, But it strikes me as Wow, what a
world we're entering into. But in this context, the world
(29:08):
of maybe everyone's just going to have the opportunity be
much more emotionally intelligent because we'll all tap into this
stuff and get these signals and no because my you know,
Apple Vision proglasses or something. We'll say, hey, eaglman, your
heart rates going up. You're gotving skin response to spiking.
And I'll say, oh, okay, I wouldn't have known that,
but now, thank goodness, I'm being told that piece of cake.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
I hope so, because I mean this data showing that
emotional intelligence has actually gone down of the last decade.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
And it's been linked to tech use.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
So it's hard to pull out the causation here, but
there's some that it suggested the more young people use tech,
they're lower their emotional intelligences.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Anyway, Well good, so we'll rescue it with tech things.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Cool. Yeah. I think I
think this as you and I study our whole careers.
The brain is this entire cosmos happening in there. There's
so much information that you're picking up from the world
you have no access to. We are so low bandwidth
(30:05):
in terms of our conscious understanding of any of this stuff.
But because the data is in there, it should be extractable.
And what that means is that what intuition becomes in
fifteen years is maybe you know, you'll write a sequel
to the book with this new world.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
But yeah, I mean interception, right, That's kind of what
it is. It's you can think of it as as
our bodies, our physiology tapping in, so our bodies have
this access to the unconscious information in our brains, which
sounds like a funny way to put it. Our bodies
get access to something we don't if we use our consciousness,
but it kind of does so by tapping into your
gut response, your heart rate, your sweating or not, you're
(30:44):
getting this extra source of information, the unconscious.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
And it's kind of like that.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
It's just sort of using interception, this internal perceptual stet
of the body to get access to extra information. And
who wouldn't want that if we can trust.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
It exactly, because maybe you can think of an example,
thinking off the top of my head, where we confuse
our emotional state or intuition about what's you know, we
misinterpret what's happening you gave the example before and if
there's a snake on the floor and then and everything. Wow,
that was a really exciting podcast. But we're we're mixing,
we're confleting some things. I mean, it is a very
(31:18):
exciting podcast.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
But a great story, a great story from the book
is I went on a date many before I got married,
and it was a first date and we went rock
climbing one of those indoor rock climbing gyms, right, and
we're climbing and falling and blaying and then we swap
and it's exciting. It's like wow, and we were like,
the chemistry is amazing. And next time we meet up,
it's like, huh, not so much. Turns out we were
(31:39):
not suited for each other at all. And I was like,
but it felt so amazing that first date, and it
struck It puzzled me for years, and I was like, ah,
arousal misattribution, that's exactly what's going on. All the adrenaline
from the falling and the climbing. We thought it was
coming from each other and it wasn't.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
So yeah, right, aren't There are these studies where you
have people crossing a rope bridge over a cliff and
you have the female assistant with the clipboard who asks
the person questions while they're on the rope bridge, and
then later the question is something about like, hey, would
you would you like to get her number and go
on a date something like that, versus the exact same
assistant with the same clipboard asks the same questions but
(32:16):
in a boring situation on campus.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Yes, it's the same thing. Yeah, the rickety bridge experience.
It's very family rickety bridge experiment. And yeah that people
just confuse these feelings with drenaline from the height with
a person in front of them.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
It's yeah, yes, So we're entering a very exciting future
as we get better sensors and better AI being able
to essentially summarize things and tell them to our low
band with conscious mind and just say, hey, pal, here's
how you're feeling. You know, don't confuse this. So maybe
you'll have to add another letter to your smile.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah, I think absolutely, David.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
I think the things we can imagine now this is
like a passion of mine in my labs is measuring
things in the mind that we thought were too hard
to measure, right, And I call it like a blood
test for the mind. We want objective, reliable measurements of
mental things like a blood test that we can rely on.
When you interview someone, give them a questionnaire. It's good,
but it's not that reliable. We need this objective test.
(33:12):
It's a different way of thinking about tech and technology,
but it can be done now.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
We can do this now.
Speaker 1 (33:17):
The book is The Intuition Toolkit. And thank you so
much for me to Joel.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
I'll pleasure David.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
And before we go, I want to say thank you
for inspiring me with expanding what academia can be and
writing books and TV shows and companies and all the
cool things you do. I think it's groundbreaking in that
you're breaking open the classic academic model.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
So thank you, Thank you, Joel.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
So that was Joel Pearson talking about his new book,
The Intuition Toolkit, and now I want to bring it
back to the big picture. I'm always struck by how
(34:00):
much we do at the unconscious level that we don't
have access to. And a couple of episodes ago, I
was talking with Ed Katmull who's the founder of Pixar Films,
and one of the topics we touched on in our conversation,
which I didn't include in that episode was this topic
of intuition, the kind of intuition that an animator might have.
(34:21):
So here's a short clip from that conversation with Ed's
thoughts about that.
Speaker 4 (34:31):
The ability to animate means you you understand motion and emotion,
and you are observing things, and you're you're conveying things
at a subconscious level, and that's not really a visualization
element I know in the in the case of our
our brains is that we take a lot of subtle clues,
(34:55):
but we're taking them unconsciously. So the way we move
our face.
Speaker 5 (35:00):
Or our lips or our body motion, we're kind of
aware that we convey information to our body, but we
don't know exactly what that is or how we do it.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
If you actually.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
Understand how important that is, and then a good animator
will sort of get that and see it and then
convey it if they can, if they put it in
the animation, then people will see it and they'll get
information at this level, not knowing that they're getting it.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
I mean.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
One of my favorite examples in Twist Story two, where
Jesse that the doll was very upset because her owner
had actually discarded her. But while she was talking.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
She was taking your pigtail and she was twisting it.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
Almost nobody would notice that she would was twisting her pigtail.
They wouldn't notice at a conscious level, but an unconscious level,
that would mean that she's really torn up inside, along
with the other things that are there. So we've got
different levels of getting information from the world. There's the
(36:11):
direct words we're saying, and sometimes the direct words we're
saying are the opposite of what we really mean, and
so you've got like that's one level, and the other
is the body motion conveying something. That whole process means
that the animator is observing these different levels and putting
(36:31):
them into the character, and of course the actor also
provides layers to that. And when you get all of
that right, you have something which is complex and is interested,
it's observing multiple levels and isn't just about the pictures, it's.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
About all of this coming together. That was Ed Catmull,
founder of Pixar Films, talking about the intuition that's for
an animator. Sometimes they can consciously articulate what they're up to,
and sometimes they can't. But for a good animator, they
pick up on those cues and they transmit those cues,
(37:10):
sometimes all under the radar of consciousness. And of course
these animators are working on areas where their intuition makes
good sense because they have mastered their data and they're
working in familiar and predictable contexts. So let's wrap up
for today. Intuition is about putting together vast information that
(37:31):
your brain has picked up on to give you a
final nudge in one direction or another, and it's massively
important for our functioning in the world. But we shouldn't
romanticize it to believe that it's always correct and always
to be listened to. Instead, we need to be clever
about when to trust it and under what circumstances. As
(37:53):
Joel suggests, we need to take into account whether we're
feeling too emotional, in which case, don't trust you tuition.
You need to master data before trusting your intuition on something.
Don't mistake impulses an addiction for intuition, don't use your
intuition for very low probability judgments, and you should really
(38:16):
only trust your intuition in familiar and predictable contexts. In
the end, each of us carries vast computational resources comparable
to Google or Meta or Apple. But instead of it
weighing eight ounces and us carrying in our back pocket,
we have three pounds of this computational material and we
(38:38):
lug it around on our shoulders the way that we
carry other things that are heavy and important. This is
all you have to make your decisions in the world,
and think about it this way, in the same way
that you might tell a student how to leverage the
computational might of the Internet while retaining appropriate skeptic about
(39:00):
some of the results. So it goes with the massive
networked biological landscape of our own brains. It is up
to us to learn how to become good users. Go
to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and
(39:21):
to find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts
at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check
out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos
of each episode and to leave comments until next time.
I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.
Host
David Eagleman
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