People are often able to make correct decisions based on kind of a “gut feeling” but will arrive at a different, incorrect conclusion when trying to make that gut feeling conscious. How does that work? Why do I sometimes hear the response of a person I know well in my head before they actually say it, but when I consciously try to guess what they’re gonna say, I almost always get it wrong? Looking for a psychological explanation here, I know there are lots of spiritual ones but I’m agnostic so I’d probably end up just being even more confused by those.
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So, your brain is great at finding patterns. It’s literally the thing it does best. It’s a human being’s superpower.
Any time your brain gets a bit of information about the outside world, it tries to categorise it. That’s why you can recognise a chair as being a chair even though you’ve never seen this particular type of chair before. Your brain looks at it, cross-references it with everything you’ve ever seen before, and goes, “Aha! That looks like the things in my ‘chair’ file! It must be a chair!” And your brain does this *so fast* that there is no lag. You just *know* what you’re looking at.
This served us really well when we were trying to survive on the savannah in the prehistoric era. When we heard a specific rustle, our brains would *instantly* bring up that time we heard that exact same rustle and a lion jumped out and we nearly died. So this time, we know there is a lion!
In the modern world, there are very few lions. But our brains still use this phenomenal power. You can put together a series of circumstances and realise what is about to happen based on your own experience. This is called *intuition*.
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