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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Ok so intuition is complex. Its pretty simple on the face of it but the nitty gritty gets complicated.
Short version: your brain is picking up data from your environment and running that data through your experience. Anything that ‘pings’ as an answer one way or another triggers some sort of response. Emotion works pretty well.
And its always better (evolutionarily) to have a false positive than a false negative.The former is embarrassing, the second kills you.
An example of this is what’s called the “Cheater Detection Module” (cheater as in one who does not cooperate). Its a theorized neural structure [or diffusion of structures-depends on who you ask] that’s sole function is to alert you to somebody that might be a cheater. (As a cooperative social species this is how we stay alive).
So when you get introduced to somebody this module takes in a bunch of information like body language, verbal cues, face shape, whatever, and it compares this information to what it knows to be cheating behavior.
And if it ‘pings’ you are presented with an extremely visceral emotional response. That “oh i dunno about this person” response. Seems like a perfectly fine person but your gut is saying something is weird. That’s your brain telling you “Danger! May attempt to harm you in some fashion! Danger!”
Trust those responses. You get them for a reason.
More in line with your question, things are similar but more complicated. Because you’re not dealing with behavior, which as social creatures we tend to just be better at, you are dealing with memory. Memory is fickle at best, it is designed to be adaptive to make you learn and keep you alive. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to work. And it works by being fast. Left or right? Lion or bush? Enemy or friendly? Your brain is designed to analyze a situation and throw up an answer before you consciously think about it because that is faster.
Consciousness is really really really slow compared to all the things your brain does. Trust your ‘gut’ it tends to know what its doing.
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