Joel Pearson on Intuition

UNSW Centre for Ideas: UNSW Centre for Ideas

Ann Mossop: Welcome to the Curiosity Lecture Series supported by UNSW Sydney. I'd like to acknowledge that we meet on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. Before we start, I want to let you know that speakers will be signing books after the event in Bay 21.

This lecture features Joel Pearson on intuition. Joel is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UNSW Sydney and the founder of the Future Minds Lab. He's the author of The Intuition Toolkit - The New Science of Knowing What Without Knowing Why. Please welcome him to the stage.

Joel Pearson: Good afternoon everyone. It's great to see so many faces ready for intuition. So let's start off with a bit of audience participation. Let's do a little experiment. Put up your hand if you agree with this statement. If you think that intuition is something that feels a little bit spiritual, that is something that is connecting the energy of the world, of the universe, something that science probably can't explain, put up your hand.

Interesting. Keep your hand up if you would say you use intuition on a daily basis, or you feel like you do. Very interesting. Okay. Next. Now, if you think intuition is a bit of BS, you don't believe in it. Not a fan. You think it's just made up by some woo woo spiritual thing? Put up your hand - a few hands. Not many.

A couple of people sitting next to people that put up their hand the first time. All right, one more. Now put up your hand if you think intuition is something that science can explain, that neuroscience and psychology can explain with all the data we already have. Okay. It's a tie. That was probably a winner. My kind of crowd.

All right, so I want to start off by talking about an Australian explorer called John Muir. And John grew up in Wollongong, not far from here, just down south from here. And when he was young, he saw a documentary about Mount Everest. And that kind of set his life in a direction - a fascination with exploration, with climbing mountains, with climbing, rock climbing, and generally all kinds of expedition, whether it be walking across Australia, solo kayaking, basically, if you can imagine some kind of extreme adventure, he's probably done it and probably holds world records in it.

So we're going to talk - I want to talk a little bit about an expedition he was doing to summit Everest in 1984. And back in those days, it wasn't like it is now. You may have seen, you know, documentaries on Netflix or Discovery Channel where the safety team is putting up ropes and ladders and there's oxygen and there's Sherpas.

You know, it wasn't like that. Then you're on your own. There was a big build up for this kind of expedition, right? Years in the making, years in the planning. Got to raise some money. You have to get yourselves over there, get to base camp, be fit, be ready. And he talks about the vibe. When you're doing that, all the attitude is all go, go, go up, up, up, right.

And it's hard summiting Everest. You have to have that mental mentality, that mental thing that just go, go, go up, up, up. And John's a fascinating character. When I met him, he was wearing a kilt, a singlet, layers of leather necklaces with animal teeth and feathers and a big bushy beard. And he speaks with a real kind of Australian pure essence, almost like he's streamlining some kind of adventurous spirit.

So they were at the final camp, ready to do the final push to the summit. Now, as you may know, they get up in the blistering cold and it's dark and they're ready to make that final push. One of them stayed back at the tents and four of them set off to make the summit on this particular day. So they're walking, they're trudging through that freezing cold in the dark ice and snow, and they're approaching the ridge where it's kind of a point of no return, where the wind's howling up - and John starts to feel some kind of heaviness in his body, in his gut. ‘A sinking dis-ease’ as he states it. And he's famous for having a sort of iron clad, stainless steel stomach.

Right. He can eat from food stores from India to Thailand. He doesn't get sick. So this kind of feeling he knows is not something he's eaten. And they're approaching step by step the point of no return. And all of a sudden he just stops and says, that's it. This is not right. I'm not going any further. We should stop.

And the rest of the team are kind of horrified and shocked, almost offended. Right? So this attitude that all this push to get to the summit, right? And it's the last chance they're going to have for the season. It's late in summer, it's too cold to summit in winter. So this is it's make or break. So the team splits up.

Two of them decide to continue to the summit and two decide to back climb - so him and another person. So they start back, climbing back down the mountain for a few hours and they’re climbing, and all sudden they hear a noise coming from above. They think it's an avalanche. And it's actually those two climbers who went for the summit, and they come hurtling down and almost take them out - just missed them, and they fall to their death.

And John talks about this sort of inner feeling, this intuition that's led him and guided him in all of his expeditions, not just mountain climbing. So the inner voice of his soul as he as he states it. So I like this example. It's an example of a sort of intuition in action.

So let me unpack what I think's going on there. As I said, he's - John is an experienced mountain climber. He's climbed mountains all over the world in Australia and New Zealand, almost in every country I think. So he's had a lot of experience. So what's happening on that mountaintop on Everest? So his brain is processing a ton of information, it’s processing the way the clouds are moving, the wind, how sunny the temperature, how hard or crispy the snow might be, and hundreds of other variables I wouldn't even know about.

And through all his vast experience, his brain has learned which things in the environment predict good outcomes or bad outcomes. Okay? So through all that experience, this learning has occurred. And that's triggering, if you like, red flags or green flags in his brain. But he's feeling the information. Crucially, he's not logically and consciously tapping into it. He's feeling it in his gut.

And it’s this this gut response we've all heard about. So interestingly, our body has access to information, unconscious information in our brains that we can't access. Right? So I can take you into the lab and show you a scary image - say a spider and render it unconscious, and you'll never see it, but your body will still respond to it.

Your heart rate will go up. You'll start sweating. So your body can respond to things that you have no idea about, that's purely unconscious. And that's what's happening up there on the mountain top. That's what's happening during intuition. Your body's tapping into things that you're not aware of based on prior learning, and you're feeling that information in your body.

People feel it in the gut. Like I said, ‘the gut response’. Some people in the chest. Some people the palms, sweaty palms or fingertips tingling. And so we're using your body to tap into unconscious information. And the way we do that is called interoception. It's just a fancy way of talking about the internal perceptual state of your body. Am I too hot? Am I too cold? Am I hungry? Do I need to go to the bathroom? And that's interoception. And that's a crucial part of intuition.

So almost a decade ago now we started studying intuition in my lab at UNSW, and we needed a way to sort of develop it or create it in the lab. So we used a method - it's called binocular rivalry and it's pretty simple. So we have two eyes. And if I'm looking at you guys and I put a hand up in front of the other eye, I'm putting my visual system into a state of conflict.

One eye sees you guys, the other eye sees my hand. And so normally I'd have two streams of data and that would fuse into a beautiful three dimensional picture. When the images are different, the brain can't fuse them together. And so I see one or the other. I can't see both. All I have to do is instead of my hand, I show very bright colours flashing colours, and that will actually render whatever's in the other eye unconscious.

So I can show a picture of this eye and I'll never see it. That's what I referred to before when I said that's how we do those experiments, how we study consciousness. So I can do that with a picture of a spider or a snake, something emotional and you'll never see it, but your body will still respond to it.

So we use techniques like that in the lab to get unconscious information into the brain, and we know what that information is. And once we do that, we can have people make very simple decisions at the same time and we can track how good people are at tapping into the unconscious information to improve their decision making. I said before that John had to learn all that information.

And we see in the lab when we run these experiments, you can't use the information straight away. If I'm showing - if I'm piping in emotional information, positive or negative. Your brain has to learn the difference between those two and learn how to use that in a decision task. And I won't go - and I won't get too nerdy into this, but we've developed a way to do that in the lab, when we could show that people could get better at making these decisions, their accuracy would go up, they'd get faster, and if we asked them how confident they were, their confidence goes up.

And it sounds a bit mechanistic, a bit kind of technical, but it was the first example to show how we could integrate unconscious and conscious streams in real time. In other words, it was a way to think about and understand intuition. And when we have a way to do that, when we can create it and we can measure it in the lab like that, it opens the science around something. That's kind of like having a brain scanner or building a telescope.

Once we can measure something, we can start studying it. We can start seeing how it works. So I should also mention that when we ask people how they make the decisions every day, like I did with you guys before, the people who say they make very intuitive decisions in their life. When we bring them into the lab and we test them in this experiment, they're much better at using this unconscious information, right? Their brain's better at fusing those two streams in the lab, and they learn faster and they benefit from it more.

So that's almost a decade ago now. And we've been studying intuition - we've done all kinds of control experiments. We've been looking into it. And I've built a framework around that. And that's kind of part of what this book is about. I've been trying to unpack that and turn it into useful, practical tips -ways of trusting and understanding and building a science around intuition.

So in the book, I have this acronym, S.M.I.L.E. And it's five rules that naturally come out of the science, that come out of the science around learning about consciousness. And it's sort of a way to guide people through decision making, using intuition. So in psychology and neuroscience, there was this sort of argument back and forward for years saying intuition is good, we can trust it.

Other people saying, no, no, no, we can't trust it. It's bad, it's biased, it leads you astray. And turns out they're both right. It's much more nuanced. Sometimes we can trust intuition, but other times we can't. And for some topics we can trust intuition, but for other topics, not so much - we can't. And that's kind of why these five rules end up being important.

So I said S.M.I.L.E right? So the first letter S is for self-awareness right. And self-awareness is there to remind us to tap into how we're feeling our emotional state. Why is that important? Because if you're stressed, if you're anxious, if you're depressed, suffering from anxiety, you should not trust your intuition. You shouldn't use intuition. It's not just on the negative side.

If you're just falling in love, won the lottery or anything like that, you shouldn't trust your intuition either, right? We confuse - we're not good at understanding where feelings come from, where emotions come from. This reminds me of a story I talk about in the book where on a first date many years ago, I went rock climbing with someone - one of those indoor rock climbing gyms, right?

And we're putting the harnesses on. We're climbing up. I'm climbing up first and I fall down, hit the wall. She’s belaying. We swap over, we're sweating and, you know, full of adrenaline, full of excitement. The chemistry was amazing. The next date after that, not so much. Turns out we didn't like each other that much.

We didn't fall for each other at all. And it took me a little while. I was like, why was the chemistry so amazing that first date? But afterwards and afterwards, not so much. And it turns out we were sort of tricked by something called arousal misattribution, right? Doesn't mean sexual arousal, but just general emotional arousal. And it turns out humans are not good at understanding where these feelings come from.

And in that example, in that story, we were confusing the sweating, the sweaty palms, the elevated heart rate, the adrenaline from rock climbing, with the response to each other. Right. And this is a nasty or dirty trick that, you know, producers of shows like The Bachelor or Bachelorette will use in reality TV to get people to feel things or think they feel things for the others on the show.

So that's an example of why you shouldn't trust your intuition if you're emotional. So that's the first rule. That's S for S.M.I.L.E. The second letter is M and that's for Mastery. So we need to have experience. We need to have mastery for the thing before you use your intuition for it. So John was very experienced on mountains and rock climbing.

He had vast amounts of experience. And think about it for a second, right? If you want to sit down and be an intuitive chess player, you can't just sit down and have never played chess before and use your intuition to play chess. You need to put in the hours. You need to build that pattern recognition. You need to train your brain to know which patterns, pretty good outcomes or bad outcomes.

So you need to have experience. You need to have some level of mastery before you use your intuition. How much mastery? That's a hard question to answer. The Gladwell ‘10,000 hour rule’. Not so much. Learning is not really like that. It's not a linear thing. With each hour gives you a bit more learning. So something like post-traumatic stress disorder right? You can be in a car accident and in a moment you can have very strong learning that's too strong, that's becomes problematic.

So how emotional - the emotional sort of strength of what you're doing will drive the learning. If you're just trying to learn what kind of things in a cafe predict good coffee or bad coffee, the learning is going to be much slower. And you need many, many, many, many iterations of going to a cafe. So that's the second rule that you need some level of mastery before you can trust your intuition.

Right. So next is I. And that's for Instincts or Impulses and addiction. So what do I mean by that? Instincts are different to intuition. So a lot of people use the two phrases interchangeably. But instincts are something we're born with. So if I bite into a lemon, my face will screw up. If a baby bites into a lemon, their face will also screw up, right?

That's something that responds to the really bitter flavours. It’s there from day one. And there's other instincts like we humans and all primates have a fear of uncertainty, and it's there throughout our life. Some people more than others, but it's there in all of us. So why is this important? Well, these things are hardwired. They don't change.

So often they become maladaptive as the world changes. Whereas intuition is dynamic, it's based on learning, like I said. So there's a clear difference there. And in fact, uncertainty is something that is becoming more and more maladaptive as the world becomes more uncertain. With AI, climate change, and all the things that are happening. I mentioned addiction. So, the pull towards, the craving, towards addiction, addictive things can feel a lot like intuition, but it's not.

Whether it be a drugs, your alcohol, food. So I include food here a little bit controversial, right. So modern food is highly engineered. It's sort of a lot of it's moved more towards the category of drugs, but also behaviours; gambling, social media, checking your email. The pull towards those things, that craving can feel a lot like intuition, right?

And often you know something I fall for - I want to check my email. I kind twitchy thumb to check my email on my phone, right? And I'll try and convince myself that my intuition is telling me I should check that it's something important, that important email is going to come right? And it's not intuition. It's an addictive system in our brains driving it.

So don't confuse those things. Don't use intuition as an excuse for something that's addictive. So that's I. Next is L when else for Low probability. But it really applies to everything around probabilistic thinking. So humans is just terrible at understanding probability - and most of us. We don't experience probabilities very well, so we can't feel our way through it.

We can't use intuition for it. Whether it be, you know, the link between smoking and cancer or how warm or cold it is today, and climate change - we just don't get probabilities. Right? And there's this hundreds or thousands of papers in psychology just showing how bad we are at this. And I'll sometimes call this the ‘shark attack rule’, because you can sit someone down and tell them the probabilities about sharks and how safe they are, right?

That it's more dangerous getting in a car and driving, that more people get injured by kangaroos in Australia than sharks. But if they're swimming in the water and you start telling them about sharks and they start imagining a shark, they start hearing the Jaws music in their minds ear, right? The emotional parts of the brain are going to fire up that if they have strong imagery and they're going to get scared, they're going to get out of the water, right?

No matter what probabilities you've told them. So the emotions can build up there, and we just throw the probabilities out the window. So that's just an example of how we're not good at using or understanding the probabilities. So the blanket rule there is, just don't use your intuition for anything around numbers or probabilities. Go back the numbers, calculate it, look at the numbers, the graphs, whatever it might be. Don't use your intuition.

The final letter is E at the end of S.M.I.LE And that is for Environment or context. And so the kind of learning I was talking about with M and the learning, you know, behind intuition is something called ‘associative learning’. But we associate the different cues in the environment on the mountaintop or in a cafe, and our brain learns over exposures, which cues predict which things.

But it doesn't just learn those cues, it also imprints the physical context, the room, the space. So if you've honed your intuition at work and you go home or you go somewhere else, it won't transfer that well. So it's important to be aware of this. All right? I often talk about the example of Steve Jobs here because he was a huge fan of using intuition at Apple.

He honed it well. He went to India, he studied it, and he was a master at using it for product design and how to manage Apple. Later in his life when it came to his health decisions, he also followed his intuition, and many people think that he made some really poor decisions there. So he put off treatment for his cancer until basically it was too late, for multiple years.

And so this honed intuition at work didn't apply well at home; his home life and his health decisions. So that's kind of a poignant example to hopefully draw that out a bit. But there's all kinds of interesting experiments in psychology that unpack that. Another way to think about that would be if you are studying, or you have kids that are studying, right, they're cramming at home in the bedroom, and then they go to the exam room the next day for a test.

And the learning imprints the bedroom. And their recall is going to be worse in the exam room. So there's all these learning hacks online, right? Put a fragrance on your wrist and then put the same fragrance in the exam room. Chew gum at home, chew gum during the exam trying to recreate that environment. And it's not just the physical environment, it's the internal environment.

If you're highly caffeinated, highly stressed - if you're drunk, that is that is part of the internal environment. So the learning is better in that same state, right? So that old joke where you will come home drunk and throw your keys and phone somewhere, and the next morning you can't find it. In the afternoon you have a few drinks and then you remember straight away.

It's kind of true, right? You're learning is context; outside and inside dependent. So the rule here with E is to be careful when you change context. I've just been traveling in the US and that's, this is one of the rules I find hard to follow when I'm navigating in a different city or going for a run in the in the forest there, things are different. Also, gestures and body language is in different parts of the world very different. So you've got to sort of whole hold off on using intuition. So that's the five rules, that’s S.M.I.L.E. And in the book I talk about this as something to try and absorb. And I like the idea of building a daily practice of using intuition.

So a lot of people will say and tell me that when a big decision comes up, like life or death, or maybe not that extreme, but, you know, getting married, getting divorced, moving overseas, buying or selling a house, they start feeling the emotions around that. They have a gut response. I just, it just feels wrong. It just feels right.

I have to do it. Doesn't matter what the logic is. But often they don't practice intuition with smaller decisions. They wait for these big things to come up. So I'm a fan of the idea of practicing intuition first with smaller decisions, getting used to what it feels like, following these five rules. What does it feel like to feel them?

Do you feel in the gut? In the chest, the hands? What does it feel like, that interoception thing I mentioned before, getting used to that. Even keeping a diary, keeping track of how you do, what did it feel like? Where did you feel it? Were you happy with that decision if you followed your intuition? And see how you go and see if you can improve that over time.

One of the other things that people often bring up, and I should mention is bias. So we've seen bias in AI, in artificial intelligence systems. And we've seen that when you train an AI on junk or out of date or biased data or any kind of inappropriate data, the AI system will also be biased. And it's kind of an interesting analogy to think about an AI system being driven by unconscious learning and intuition, also being driven by unconscious learning.

But just like an AI system, if you train your intuition on junk data or biased data or things that are out of date, it's also going to lead you astray. It's going to be biased. So what do I mean by that? If you binge watched a lot of television from the 70s or 80s, right, all the James Bond films or whatever it's going to be right?

You're going to absorb a lot of things that don't translate well to this, to right now, today. So gender bias, racial bias, all kinds of other things. Right? Maybe there’s things about drugs and smoking in there that might not be appropriate. So if you watched enough of that, you would absorb some of that into your decision making, into your intuition.

Right? And that stands for any workplace. So any way you train your intuition - if you're learning things that are inappropriate the way you want to apply it, that is a way to think about bias and intuition. So you need to be careful about the bias there as well.

So I've talked about a few things, I gave this example of John on the mountaintop of interoception, of tiny taste of some of the research we've been doing. And then this S.M.I.L.E thing and how to apply it. So the reason I wrote this book was to one try and build a science around intuition. Right? It's very early days.

We don't know a lot about it, but we needed first the tools and the technology to measure intuition. I think we now have that. So now I want to build out the science around that and two, I would talk to a lot of people in leadership, all kinds of leadership. And I would say they use your intuition in business.

They have to now there's no time. The data is too complicated. But I felt embarrassed to talk about it publicly. There is still for some people, a bit of a taboo around intuition. So the idea is building that science around that is to make it more legitimate, more acceptable, so that if you are an expert and you follow these five rules, then there's some legitimacy to using intuition, right?

It's nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed or it’s not ‘woo woo’. Right? Not that I'm saying that the spiritual side of intuition and the for all the people that put their hands up for that very first question, I'm not saying that's wrong or I'm not putting that down at all. I'm trying to bring these two different sides together the rational, the emotional, and integrate it into a science that we can all use, all trust and all understand to improve our decision making and hopefully improve our lives.

So that's been my goal; to build the science around intuition so we can all use it. We can all share it. So if you know someone who is having trouble with decision making, has a big decision ahead of them, then hopefully some of this information might be useful.

So thank you very much for listening to me. I will be over in the next room signing books afterwards. If you have any questions or anything, come and find me. I'll be wandering around. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for your support in science. Thank you for having a keen interest, hopefully, in intuition and science. Thank you very much.

UNSW Centre for Ideas: Thanks for listening. This event was presented by the UNSW Centre for Ideas and the Sydney Writers Festival as part of the Curiosity Lecture Series. For more information, visit unswcentreforideas.com. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.