what is actually happening psychologically/physiologically when you have a “gut feeling” about something?
In: Biology
With personal interactions: There can be subconscious signals people give off, like their smile doesn’t seem genuine, so you have a “gut feeling” that there’s something shady about the person.
For stories where people “predicted” something bad, like “I had a gut feeling we shouldn’t go on vacation to that resort, and that resort was hit with a hurricane the week we were supposed to be there,” well that’s just good ol’ confirmation bias. You remember the rare times your “gut feeling” turned out correct, but ignore the many more times you had a “gut feeling” about something that didn’t turn out to be true. Also nobody tells stories about the times their gut feelings turned out to be incorrect; they only tell the stories when they turn out *correct,* thus it seems like gut feelings have way more legitimacy than they actually do.
I always say that emotions are logical shorthand.
By which I mean that you don’t have an emotion for no reason whatsoever. Your emotional reaction comes from your brain subconsciously. Processing, what is going on, weighing a bunch of factors you don’t think about consciously.
So if a specific person is making you nervous, it might be because they are showing a few different micro expressions that’s they are considering doing something unethical. Or it might be that they look like somebody who hurt you in the past in some way. There is always some sort of logic going on, but it is not necessarily good or sound logic
I bet the physiological bad gut feeling has something to do with the release of stress hormones.
I do not know the answer here.. But apparently the gut can be viewed as the 2nd brain. The enteric nervous system regulates our gut and sends signals to the brain. As i say i do not know .. Probably way more at work here than we can currently understand.
Your subconscious is sending signals your brain can’t fully process into reasoning. Typically your subconscious leans heavily into past experiences so it’s typically finding similarities to past experience in the current experience so it can be extremely biased.
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