Neuroscientist Joel Pearson Reveals the Perfect Time to Follow Your Gut

Neuroscientist and The Intuition Toolkit author Joel Pearson reveals when it’s a good time to follow your gut (and when it’s your biases talking).

CEOs will say in private that they use intuition. Yet they won’t mention it to their board or the public because it’s still taboo and a bit woo-woo. But intuition is real and can be understood and measured with science. It’s the learnt use of unconscious information to improve your actions or decisions.

Intuition can be both good and “misintuition” or misguided feelings. It’s like AI – junk in, junk out. If you’ve trained your intuition in a workforce dominated by one type of person, you might underestimate others’ abilities. And we should never try to “feel” our way around numbers. When a trend or technology takes off exponentially there’s that hockey stick function but the way our brains work is linear. We are blind to exponential functions and get probabilities totally wrong.

Intuition that works well in one context won’t transfer to another. Steve Jobs leaned into intuition during his leadership in product design at Apple. His intuition was phenomenal, honed by experience to a sharp level of mastery. But when faced with challenges outside work – his health – he made poor decisions. During the pandemic, people who’d honed their intuition at work noticed they couldn’t apply it as well at home – it was a mismatched environment.

Don’t use intuition when you’re emotional. We tend to confuse emotional arousal with intuition. The level of emotion, like noise, can drown out intuition.

By early next year, I think we’ll have digital personal assistants and outsource biological intuition. An AI assistant will track everything from our emails to our physiology via wearables, learn from the patterns and point out biases in decision-making – “I just noticed your heart rate spiked when you talked to X. Was it something they said?” Such AI raises hundreds of questions, of course, but it’s basically inevitable.

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