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Episode Transcript
The transcript is computer generated. There may be errors.
Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm Sharad Lal. This is episode 72. For a long time, intuition was considered a mysterious phenomenon, lacking scientific evidence and a clear definition. That's changed thanks to the groundbreaking work of our guests, Professor Joel Pearson, who has a PhD in neuroscience.
He has not only created a definition for intuition but also measured it and developed a framework for understanding what intuition is and how it can be applied in our lives.
Based in Sydney. Joel came to signs from a creative background when he got interested after reading about consciousness. He is the founder and director of future minds lab at the university of new south Wales. It's an experimental startup, which is part of an agency. Bought research laboratory at work with a team of psychologists, neuroscientists, data scientists, UX, and visual designers. He's also the founder of mind decks, which is a consultancy that works with companies like Google and Samsung.
In our conversation, we discuss how heightened emotions can be mistaken for intuition, the difference between impulse and intuition, mastery of the best ways to learn, and the smile model of intuition. But before we dive in, thank you for your tremendous support. We're in the top 3% of all podcasts globally and are listened to in over 40 countries.
If you haven't already, please do follow us now. Let's welcome. The incredible Joel Pearson.
Sharad Lal: Hi, Joel. Welcome to the How to Live podcast. Good afternoon to you in Sydney.
Joel Pearson: Good afternoon, Sharad. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Sharad Lal: I was talking to some friends earlier that I'm going to talk to this guy who was the first guy to look into the science of intuition. And that was so remarkable. We talk about intuition so much, but no one's actually gone and done the research. So thank you very much.
We're doing the research on this, putting a framework out there so all of us can know, based on science, what intuition really is, when to use it, and when it works. We're going to get into all of that, Joel, but before we do that, I thought a wonderful place to start, is the point in your book where you talk about, you're on your first date, You're rock climbing, and then you think you are in love, but you later realise it's something else.
So if you can just talk through that story,
Joel Pearson: It was many years ago. Now, I was on a first date with someone.We decided to go to an indoor rock climbing gym here in Sydney. You just strap in, put on the harnesses, clip in the rope, and climb up the wall. Then you keep going until you flip and fall and swing back in and hit the wall.
And it was going amazing. I'd climb up and have it. And then I come down and she'd go up and then we'd change over and we'd push our limits and fall and be sweating. It was exciting. And the chemistry was amazing.
But then something strange happened the next time we met up, it didn't feel the same. And then we met up, I think one more time. And again, the spark was gone. The chemistry was really different. And so we ended up not working out. And it's stuck with me for years.
Why did it feel so amazing and so special on that first date, but not so much afterwards? And then I clicked one day when I realised it was a strong example of what's called arousal misattribution. And it turns out that us humans are just really bad at knowing where our feelings come from, knowing where our emotions come from.
So, in that example, we were rock climbing, we were full of adrenaline, we were sweating, our hearts were racing. And we were confusing that feeling, that response in our physiology. It was actually coming from the heights climbing and all the effort. And we thought it was coming from the other person. We thought the other person was causing our body to react this way.
We're falling for them, and we're not at all. It's the physiology, the adrenaline, everything from rock climbing. And when you start thinking about this, you see this everywhere. In these TV shows, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the producers use these kind of tricks all the time to get people to feel these strong emotions, to get their physiology pumped up, and to get these false feelings for each other. So it's something to be wary of.
And it ends up being important for intuition, right? So this, one of the rules I have around intuition is not to use it when you are feeling overly emotional, when you're feeling super happy or sad or depressed, stressed, anxious. And the key to part of the key to that is self awareness to knowing when you're in these states.
And sometimes we get confused.
You can confuse those sensations with the actual intuition, so we don't want to do that. We want to be careful in those scenarios and try not to use our intuition.
Sharad Lal: I love that, Joel, and that quite often you think that anything that's coming from the subconscious or the unconscious is intuition. And like you painted in your book, there's so many signals we get from the unconscious and not everything is intuition. We need to know what is what.
But before we get into that framework, maybe we should try and talk about what intuition really is. there's six sense, there's eight sense, you've talked about different ways of looking at intuition. So if you can just paint that picture,
Joel Pearson: Intuition is the learned use of unconscious information for better decisions and actions. So, it's something we need to learn. I have this very specific definition for, like I said, a couple of reasons. One is that if we want to study intuition scientifically, we need to at least have a working definition.
We need to say for now, here's the definition, let's run with that definition. It may expand. It may change in the future. That's fine. But if we spend all our time arguing about what it is and what it's not, then we can't get stuck into the science. And if we don't do that,
Then we can't understand how to make it better. better, how to make it more reliable, how to trust it. So that was really the idea behind having this sort of fairly strict definition.
part of the mission of writing the book in the first place was to have something that would help people like to be a practical guide for decision making for everyone, everywhere. And if you define it in all these different ways, or is in this spiritual manner, that is really hard to pull apart. It's really hard to have a practical guide. It's really hard to tell people what steps you need to take to improve your intuition, to trust it.
Sharad Lal: Absolutely. And maybe you can paint a little picture beyond the six senses. There are other senses that come into play. And,that's part of where intuition could potentially lie.
Joel Pearson: So we have five senses in our body, right? Sight, touch, smell, taste—all the things that we're familiar with. Then we have these other quasi-senses. The main one that comes into play here is something called interoception, which is our internal perceptual state.
Are we too hot? Are we too cold? Are we hungry? Thirsty? Do we need to go to the bathroom? This is the whole system for picking up these signals internally, and that ends up being quite important when it comes to feeling things, to feeling the parts of intuition. Our body can react to information in our brains that we're not even aware of.
People have heard of the unconscious. So you won't even know it's there, but your body will respond to it in very predictable ways. So for an example, I can literally show you a picture of a spider in one eye, and I can flash these bright colours in the other eye, and that will render that picture unconscious.
You won't see it. All you'll see is he's flashing dominant patterns in the other eye, but your eyes are still processing the picture of the spider. And so are your visual cortex, the rest of your brain, and, importantly, your limbic system, the amygdala, the emotional parts of your brain, which will still respond to it.
And because of that, your heart rate will go up. You'll start sweating. You'll have this sort of uncomfortable feeling, but you won't know why. your body can respond to the picture of the spider, even though you don't even know it's there. And that's key to understanding intuition, by learning to tap into that interoception. you can get access to the unconscious, You can simply think of it as a way of just tapping into more information in the brain that otherwise you wouldn't have access to. And that's the best way of really thinking about intuition.
Sharad Lal: If you can trust it, it's a way to get access to more information. I find that fascinating that there's so much of this stimuli coming into us.And the body already works with it without our awareness. If some of these things we can bring to our awareness, which are important to us, we can double click and use our intuition in a better way.
So that to me is so fascinating.
Joel Pearson: So the example I often give is you walk into a cafe, and the second you walk through that door, if you haven't been there before, you'll get the sensation, you'll be like, Yeah, okay, let's get a coffee here. Or maybe you think I'm not feeling this coffee shop. Let's go across the road to this other place. So what's happening in that second, as you walk in the door, so your brain's processing hundreds of different things, the temperature, the music, the shape of the tables, if there's tablecloths, the hairstyle of the staff, all kinds of different things, right?
What's happening is that your brain has learned through many other visits to coffee shops which of those things predict good experiences, good coffee or bad coffee. So your brain processes all those hundreds or maybe even thousands of cues very quickly, semi-consciously; a lot of it's unconscious, and they're triggering like a green flag or a red flag.
So you don't have to logically go, what's the probability of, a coffee shop with this kind of music, having good coffee, your brain does all that for you under the hood. unconsciously. And then your body responds and you're picking up on that sensation. You're just feeling it. So intuition is a product of all this learning that every time, maybe you meet a new person on the street, you're talking to them. And again, your brain's learned that when someone's a little bit twitchy, they fidget too much. All these cues. that these predict trustworthy people, untrustworthy, they predict this or that.
Now, it doesn't mean those cues will be 100 percent predictable and valid all the time, but your brain has learned over time that they will be mostly predictable, given you're in the same environment. and a whole bunch of other rules. Once you understand what intuition is and what it's not, we have this scientific understanding, then these natural rules, the rules about learning, and other things unfold.
I love the cafe example because that's something in which we can practically test our intuition without a life or death situation, the way you put it. And we can see how our brains kind of process it. let's go into the model and maybe let's go into, whichever way you want to take the model. Should we go S M I L E one by one and look at each part
Yeah. But let's go through one by one maybe. So the first one to S is for self awareness and self awareness of emotional state. The simple rule behind that is don't trust your intuition when you're highly emotional, when you're stressed, anxious, depressed.
It's not just negative things, though. If you've just fallen in love or won a large sum of money, you should absolutely not trust your intuition in those states either, right? So you're going to have this heightened response, this arousal, misattribution. You're going to confuse these feelings, think they're intuition, when they're not.
But it's going to flood your system with a whole lot of emotional noise, and that's going to mess with the more subtle emotional cues of intuition. Get in the habit of checking in with yourself: Am I stressed? Am I anxious? Am I highly emotional in any way?
Okay, stop. Let me do a cup breathing exercise. Let me just do something to calm myself down a little bit, go back to baseline, then use my intuition.
Sharad Lal: The key here is to build self-awareness so that we can check in and see what emotions are at play so that they don't get misattributed.
What are some ways in which we can do that? I think you may have already described a bit of breathing, but what are some ways that we can build the self awareness to say, no, we're not in an emotional state right now, intuition doesn't come into play.
Joel Pearson: Yeah. So there's some work on this. And so one of the ways that people talk about is simply trying, getting the practice of labelling how you're feeling at any time. it sounds overly simple, like just using a word, I'm feeling ecstatic and amazing now, and now I'm just feeling a little bit down, a little bit negative, a little bit frustrated.
What you're actually doing is building this practice. Stop for just a brief moment and figure out what it feels like to be in these states. You're linking the internal interoceptive feeling with these words.
The data suggests that the more you do that, the better you get at general awareness, at being able to notice quickly what state you're in.
Of course, there's the whole toolkit of other things, such as exercise, eating right, and not drinking too much.
Sharad Lal: very useful. The second one is, like you said, mastery. If you can talk a little bit about mastery, and I found I have one or two deeper questions once you give everyone the context on mastery.
Joel Pearson: Yeah, absolutely. M for mastery. So the simple rule is here. You can't use your intuition for something unless you have learned about it, unless you have some degree of mastery. And if you think about it, if you want to stop playing chess. You can't just sit down and be an intuitive chess player.
You need to train your brain about which patterns predict which outcomes. So, in the cafe example, your brain has to learn which things in the environment—the music, the temperature, the smells—predict good or bad outcomes, such as good or bad coffee. So you need to put in the time for learning, right?
We shouldn't use it for things we don't have experience with. So you've never done something before you've never played tennis. Don't try to be an intuitive tennis player. Just follow the coach, follow the rules, stick to the basics. And over time. You'll see that intuition stops developing almost naturally as you become more and more expert, you have more and more mastery. And this sort of learning is really, it's an automatic kind of learning. It's called associative learning. So your brain, our brains will predict, we'll learn these associations,
Now, how much learning, you're probably going to ask how much learning do we
Sharad Lal: I was going to talk about Malcolm Gladwell and the 10, 000 hour rule.
Joel Pearson: Yeah. So the 10, 000 hour rule in Gladwell's book is not a real thing. He noticed that when people got to a certain stage in their careers by then they'd done at least 10, 000 hours of practice in playing the violin or whatever it was.
But learning is not like that at all. It's not linear, in other words. What I mean by nonlinear is that every hour of practice you put into something doesn't equal one hour of output. In other words, some hours are worth much more than other hours. So if you're learning, if you want to learn which coffee shops have good coffee, that's going to take a lot of visits to coffee shops.
But then we have other instances of learning and PTSD is an interesting one, right? So something traumatic can happen to you can be in a car accident or all kinds of nasty things can happen. And you can have lifelong, very strong learning, basically in an instant, right in a second. One of the main rules is really how emotional or impactful the outcomes are will dictate how strongly or how quickly your brain learns.
So it's the intensity of the experience. Is it also if something is a lot more meaningful, is more purposeful to you that could also accelerate because the emotions involved in learning,
Yeah. So some meanings are important as well, not only about the outcomes, but the whole thing you're learning, right? If it's really important to you, you'll pay a lot more attention. And when you're paying attention, we know that increases the rate of learning.
When you make errors in your learning, that's really important because it focuses your attention. It tells your brain what you're doing wrong, so you can adjust that and do that thing differently. So yeah, meaning is important, yeah, attention, and also making mistakes is important, right?
And maybe just digging on that. If you're looking at learning something new with this framework, let's say making mistakes or finding something more meaningful, what's a good approach for us to actually learn something new so that we can learn it in a deeper way?
Sharad Lal: of different ways to think about this. Like I said, sothe sort of Goldilocks zone, the right amount of difficulty getting almost into a flow state, so not too hard, but not too easy. And then there's also data on how long we do something for. If you just, if you're learning to ski or play tennis and you just do that all day, nonstop, that's a really bad way to learn because you're going to get, your muscles are going to get tired very quickly and you're going to start learning really bad sloppy habits.
Joel Pearson: So we want to limit the bouts of learning, maybe an hour to maybe an hour and 20 or something like that, depending on your skills, your own capabilities, and then have a break. And then there's some interesting data on different things you could do after that. Resting is important. Even having a little nap has been shown, particularly with cognitive learning to boost, sleeping that night after learning is also very important.
If you can reward yourself or punish yourself, it sounds funny if you learn to play tennis or something, but people do that.
they, find ways to reward themselves or buy themselves things when they've learned something, or there's even cases of people trying to punish themselves
But yes, short bouts. Whether it's cognitive, academic, or physical learning, you don't want to go too long because you'll just exhaust yourself, and then you'll start learning bad habits.
Learning is context specific, right? So if you're cramming for an exam at home in your bedroom,
The bedroom is part of that. So when you go into the exam room, it'll actually be much harder to remember.
It's really hard to sum up learning with one simple rule.
but yeah, it is important, paying attention, making errors, learning in short bouts, don't overdo it, recovery, sleep, all these things are important.
Sharad Lal: Very helpful. And I'm glad that while we're talking about intuition, we went deeper into learning as well, because that's something people want to take away. I guess the big point is when you've got some level of mastery, that's when intuition comes into play. If you don't know anything about it, do not use your intuition.
Joel Pearson: Yeah, exactly.
Sharad Lal: part of your model was on I, where you talked about the difference between impulse and intuition. I think that's a big one as well. So if you could talk a little bit about that.
Joel Pearson: So a lot of literature will confuse or conflate or use the idea of an instinct and intuition interchangeably. But they're actually different things. So an instinct is something that is hardwired into our biology that we're born with.
An example of instinct would be if you give a baby a lemon and they bite into it, their face will screw up with the bitter flavour of the lemon, right? And we still do that now. And we always will. That's hardwired.
Whereas intuition, as I said before, is something we learn, we develop mastery for it. So it's dynamic, it changes on the fly, it changes to the environment, as the environment as the world changes, intuition can change along with it.
But instincts don't change as well. And that sort of ends up being important when we think about, we can call, so uncertainty is a big topic at the moment with AI and the world just changing so much so quickly and uncertainty is something that we respond to. Pretty badly. And it's like a fear stimulus, humans, monkeys, and most animals don't like uncertainty, right?
We evolved that way for important reasons a long time ago, and it's an instinct that's permanently there. So even though it's actually become maladaptive, it would be better to embrace it and be okay with it in today's fast-changing, full-of-uncertainty world.
We find that very difficult. I think it's an important distinction to make. It's a little bit subtle, but it's important. And the other one under the eye there is addiction.
Now, addictive things, which of course, you know, your drugs, alcohol, including food, including gambling. So behavioural addiction, social media, Tik TOK, Instagram, Facebook, these things are highly addictive
We shouldn't confuse the two, and we shouldn't try to come up with an excuse. Oh, it's my intuition telling me I need to go and check my social media.
It's BS. It's not my intuition at all. It's just the addictive draw to these behavioural addictions. So it's important not to confuse those two and not to try to use intuition as an excuse to indulge in addictive things. Now, food is a controversial one. So intuitive eating was a bit of a movement in the nineties and two thousand.
If you just follow your intuition and eat whatever you want, as much as you want, then you'll come to some sort of natural baseline and you won't eat too much. It's a nice idea if you're living on a farm and you eat whole foods and very natural foods, but for most people, we have access to a lot of highly processed foods.
And these processed foods—billions of dollars have gone into the engineering behind all the substances, the flavours, the textures, and how they feel in our mouth—basically to make them highly addictive, to make it so that we can just keep on eating them nonstop without feeling full. So because of that, people are writing now about modern food being like a drug.
Sharad Lal: So I think the idea of intuitive eating in a modern world is a very dangerous idea. Very interesting.
The next one you talked about was low probability cases.
And that is again, very fascinating.
Joel Pearson: L in smile is for low probability, but it really applies to all probabilistic thinking. And the bottom line is humans are just bad at probabilities. We're bad at numbers. We shouldn't try and feel numbers or use our intuition for anything around numbers or probabilities.
I live in Sydney here and I'll sometimes joke about calling this the shark attack rule. Because you can tell people the probabilities of event coming across a shark or seeing one, let alone having an encounter with one. It's so low, right? Sharks are much safer than driving.
it's such a low probability that you basically should forget about it when you're in the water. But. Anyone is out in the ocean swimming and you start saying, I wonder if there's a shark and you start imagining a shark, you start feeling fearful.
And so these emotions will flare up and we'll ignore the probabilities. That's just one example of how we're just not good at understanding probabilities. And it extends to all kinds of things.
Great point. And that just reminds me of another very interesting point that you made. I'm a big fan of Daniel Kahneman and his work on heuristics and biases. And I know you talked about the difference between biases and intuition.
Sharad Lal: And just to clarify for folks who read Kahneman's work, the type two thinking, which he talks about, automatic thinking, which is heuristic thinking, isn't intuition. That's different.
Joel Pearson: It's a very general way to think about this. I'm not really a fan of it because what you end up with, it doesn't really link to anything in the brain in terms of neuroscience. It's a very high level idea. and the other thing is like all the things you put in those two buckets, so he would put, intuition, learning, cognitive biases, like all the different things you put in type, the bucket of type one are completely different in nature, they happen at different times, they lead you in different directions.
And to put a group of things that are very different in one bucket, it's not that useful scientifically. So while it's very catchy, and I think it's a useful way to think about choices in the world, it doesn't map onto the brain very well. And it can also be slightly misleading because people just put two very different things into that sort of system in one bucket.
sure. Thank you for clarifying that. And maybe we move to the last part of E, which we talked about earlier, environment,
Yeah, so the E is for environment, yeah, or context. And the learning we're talking about before this associative learning is context specific, the place you learn these things matters.
What does that mean? It means, there's these old jokes that, you come home drunk and throw your keys somewhere. And the next morning you wake up hungover and you can't find your keys and then the afternoon you have a drink. And as soon as you have a drink, you remember where you put your keys, right?
It's a joke, but it actually is true to a certain extent, right? If you recreate the same internal state, you will actually have better access to those memories, whether that be alcohol, caffeine, stress, depression. So in all kinds of internal states, learning is specific to an external location and an internal state.
One of the examples I like to give of this I talk about in the book is Steve Jobs. Steve loved intuition. He went to India and studied intuition there.
He talked about how he used it at Apple for leadership in product design. It was amazingly successful later in his life, his home life, and his health, mainly because he made some very poor decisions.
He was diagnosed with cancer and he put off his treatment for that cancer for many years because he wanted to pursue a very alternative. treatment options. Most people agree that if he had had a surgery straight away, he would have been okay.
So that was where his intuition worked in one context, in one environment, at Apple for business and product design, but it led him astray in a very different area, right? He didn't have the mastery for health decisions for home decisions. And so we just need to be careful when we change contexts like that, because intuition won't.
Always transfer that well.
Sharad Lal: That's such a good point, because sometimes we think we're so smart in this area, we're smart in every area, but that's not true. Steve Jobs, who people admire, was so way off in a very other important area.
Thank you for sharing that. Before we move, I think I'm just going to summarise this framework for everyone so that we don't miss it. We use intuition best if these conditions work. So, first is self-awareness. If we do not have heightened emotions, that's a good time to look at our emotions.
M is mastery. We use it in areas that we've got some mastery. If you're an entrepreneur doing some kind of business, your intuition might come into play there. Instinct addiction is not intuition. That's different. So while gambling, our intuition tells us to go more, no, that's not intuition, that's addiction. Low probability cases, that's not an area to use intuition as well. and the last E is environment and context, whether it's internal environment or external environment, that's where intuition comes into play. That's the framework. I think you've very nicely put in place.
Now, how do we build intuition? How do we access it and build it?
Joel Pearson: Yeah. So in the book, I talk about, yeah, using this acronym, getting really familiar with it, practising with first with small decisions,A lot of people, we'll talk about, when these big decisions is, life and death or getting married, divorced, or moving to another country, buying a house, they start feeling emotion around these big decisions.
And I talk about this gut feeling, I should feel this or that. But if they've never practised intuition, consciously, at least before, then Yeah, it can be a bit dangerous to just jump in the deep end like that. So I talk about trying to practise intuition, building up a daily practice, perhaps getting familiar with those five rules, And getting, at first you're going to have to try and remember them or write them down, look at them, but very quickly, they're going to become pretty automatic. And that's what I tried to build this SMILE acronym,
you want to notice how you feel the interoception, how you're tapping into that internal information in your body, and what you decide, and then what the outcome was, Also, it's worth mentioning that,
Not confusing anxiety or stress and intuition, Your anxiety of getting on the aeroplane is probably not your intuition.
That's one that comes up a lot. People think they're having intuition about the plane's going to crash, I've had discussions with people that have dreams and premonitions about a plane crash and they'll say that in the next day, And I think it's useful, at least at first to think about the probabilities here, because we're not good at probabilities, but
We dream quite a few different dreams every night, and emotional things like a plane crash are highly probable in our dreams. If each person is dreaming, say, five dreams to be conservative per night, five times the number of people in that country, that's happening every night.
And it's a high probability that If you have a dream about a plane crash or anything emotional, then you can, pretty quickly realise that every night, say in America, there's going to be quite a few people dreaming about plane crashes. So every time there's a plane crash or a plane incident, we should expect someone to say, Oh my gosh, I dreamt about that the night before.
We love seeing patterns in things. Even when there are no patterns, we can't help it. When we see something like that happen, we tend to believe there's meaning behind it. It's important. Something caused that, even if it is just random. So that's another interesting anecdote.
That's a very mind opening example when you put it, I remember reading that, that was so great. So Joel, you've done this great work on intuition. You've put it out there. How does it work in the scientific community? How does this move forward from here? My lab is now famous for tackling tricky topics like this. We've done it with intuition, with mental imagery, the imagination, we've done similar things with actual hallucinations. So I'm a huge fan of taking things like that, that a lot of my colleagues will think I am, it's too hard, it's too fluffy.
It's too hard to measure and develop new technologies to measure these things objectively. In psychology, people often use questionnaires or interviews to measure things. They're great, but they quite often lack the reliability and objectiveness of the kind of tests we might want, right?
And I'll often say things like, what I'm talking about is like a blood test for the mind. We want objective, reliable things. You don't go into the doctor's office and he doesn't ask you how you are feeling about your vitamin D levels. Here's a questionnaire. He'll take a blood sample or she'll take a blood sample and I'll measure the vitamin D in there.
So you want something objective like that. And that's what we strive for. We're measuring things in the mind and in the brain. And so when we first started publishing stuff on intuition, there was a bit of pushback and people, my colleagues are like, Oh, it's just really intuition. How do you know, how do you define it?Sure, we could just argue about the definition for the next 10 years. But how's that going to help people? My thing is let's be more agile. Let's take a working definition like the one I put forward the learned productive use of unconscious information for better decisions and actions.
And if we need to, we'll adjust the definition, that's fine. So we don't want to get stuck on definitions and semantics.
It's still very young science. It's very early, and it does take time. Science is still pretty slow. People apply for government grants, and it can take a year or two to get them. Then, it takes many years to do the research. So sometimes, things can take five, six, or seven years to come out.
So it is a bit slow, but the idea is to build a legitimate science around that. And for that to also then seep into society, right? I'll talk to people in senior leadership, CEOs of well known companies. And they'll quite often say, of course, I use intuition.
but I don't want to tell. talk about that publicly, I don't want to talk to the board about that, because it's still a bit taboo, right? It's still a bit undefined, a bit spiritual, and they don't want to be tagged with that kind of label.
Things are changing a bit slowly, but there's still a bit of that. And so that's also part of my mission with science and the book: to say, look, we have science around this. We can understand intuition with all the neuroscience we already have. It doesn't have to be something woo, or something out there in the ether or magical.
We have science; we can talk about it scientifically. If you follow these five rules, you have mastery in your domain, and then you can use intuition at senior leadership.
Sharad Lal: Joel. I was curious as you were speaking, like as a professor, you'd want to be academic and semantic, but you also looking at being street smart, which is a little different from other professors, if I can put it that way, how have these two things come into your personality where you want to solve a problem, you want to give something useful, but not get caught up in ego and semantics and definition and arguments, how have these two parts come into you?
Joel Pearson: I always have had many different interests, before I did a PhD and became a scientist, I went to art school and studied painting and drawing and filmmaking, and I was going to be a filmmaker at that stage. And then I started studying and reading about consciousness and the nature of reality.
And how I was like, how do we study these things? And it became clear that I could try and study quantum mechanics or physics, but the subjectiveness of the whole experience of consciousness was really more neuroscience and psychology. So I put aside filmmaking and went and studied psychology and neuroscience and did a PhD and then went in this different direction.
But maybe it's because of that I've just always had very varied interests. I like to think about applying things to helping people. I've got this whole thing we've developed in the lab about agile science. It's treating science like a startup, trying to be agile, not to waste money and waste time, to try and remember that we don't want to be in our comfort zones with science.
We want to push the boundaries a bit. I also think about science sometimes a bit more like a venture capitalist would. Veg clubs would throw money at all these different startups, and all they want is one, one new Google, one new Facebook, something to blow up and be a big deal.
And that risk-reward is worth it. If there's even a tiny percent chance that it will blow up to be something big and change our understanding of the brain or the nature of reality or whatever it is, it's worth investing in that, even if it seems a bit crazy.
That's so good. And that's why you've done work on this, in this great topic. And you looked at the movie Inception, and then you talked about a lot of your theories through Inceptions. How true are parts of Inception, like at least how they've thought about the unconscious mind?
Sharad Lal: Absolutely.
Joel Pearson: So that first huge Chris Nolan fan loves the film and pretty much all his films. Yeah, a lot of it's fiction.I talk about that in the book because it's a cool way to think about hacking into the unconscious, right? and getting things into our brains into our minds without anyone knowing that.
In the beginning, we talked about that spider example. So we can do things like that in the lab. I can introduce things into your brain, which will change your decisions, behaviour, and perception. And you don't know I'm doing that. And so it's very much like conception, and that's the analogy I use in the book.
It's not through dreams though. So there's some new science on people, piping in sounds and noises, why people are sleeping and that people can learn about those sounds, why they're asleep. So there's some things starting to happen there. And, but yeah, dreams are a fascinating topic. And the idea of lucid dreaming, super cool.
Joel, we've had such a wonderful conversation. Before we wrap up, I was wondering if there is one thought that you'd like to leave listeners with.
yeah, when it comes to intuition, whether you have previously thought it was BS or you're a huge fan of intuition, whether you think it's a spiritual part of who you are.
What I'm here to say is that intuition is real. We can understand it, a certain definition of it, with neuroscience, with all the science we already have. You can follow very simple rules to improve that intuition to make it trustworthy. So, it is real science that can explain it. And maybe, over the coming years, we may expand that as we discover more about how the brain works and how the unconscious works.
A lot of people have trouble combining the logical cognitive side with the emotional side and feelings. Another way to think about this book is how to bring those two together, how to mix feelings and decision-making.
And I think that's a nice way to think about intuition and hopefully the book can really help people. So if this sounds like something that could be helpful to you or anyone else, please pick up a copy.
Sharad Lal: Sure thing. We're going to leave, uh, we're going to leave a link to the copy where people can pick it up. And thank you very much, Joel, for all the good work you're doing. I have an intuition that we are going to hear a lot about you.
Joel Pearson: Thank you, Sharad. I appreciate that. I love your intuition.
The transcript is computer generated. There may be errors.
Sharad Lal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to How to Live, a podcast that explores ways to live a good life. I'm Sharad Lal. This is episode 72. For a long time, intuition was considered a mysterious phenomenon, lacking scientific evidence and a clear definition. That's changed thanks to the groundbreaking work of our guests, Professor Joel Pearson, who has a PhD in neuroscience.
He has not only created a definition for intuition but also measured it and developed a framework for understanding what intuition is and how it can be applied in our lives.
Based in Sydney. Joel came to signs from a creative background when he got interested after reading about consciousness. He is the founder and director of future minds lab at the university of new south Wales. It's an experimental startup, which is part of an agency. Bought research laboratory at work with a team of psychologists, neuroscientists, data scientists, UX, and visual designers. He's also the founder of mind decks, which is a consultancy that works with companies like Google and Samsung.
In our conversation, we discuss how heightened emotions can be mistaken for intuition, the difference between impulse and intuition, mastery of the best ways to learn, and the smile model of intuition. But before we dive in, thank you for your tremendous support. We're in the top 3% of all podcasts globally and are listened to in over 40 countries.
If you haven't already, please do follow us now. Let's welcome. The incredible Joel Pearson.
Sharad Lal: Hi, Joel. Welcome to the How to Live podcast. Good afternoon to you in Sydney.
Joel Pearson: Good afternoon, Sharad. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Sharad Lal: I was talking to some friends earlier that I'm going to talk to this guy who was the first guy to look into the science of intuition. And that was so remarkable. We talk about intuition so much, but no one's actually gone and done the research. So thank you very much.
We're doing the research on this, putting a framework out there so all of us can know, based on science, what intuition really is, when to use it, and when it works. We're going to get into all of that, Joel, but before we do that, I thought a wonderful place to start, is the point in your book where you talk about, you're on your first date, You're rock climbing, and then you think you are in love, but you later realise it's something else.
So if you can just talk through that story,
Joel Pearson: It was many years ago. Now, I was on a first date with someone.We decided to go to an indoor rock climbing gym here in Sydney. You just strap in, put on the harnesses, clip in the rope, and climb up the wall. Then you keep going until you flip and fall and swing back in and hit the wall.
And it was going amazing. I'd climb up and have it. And then I come down and she'd go up and then we'd change over and we'd push our limits and fall and be sweating. It was exciting. And the chemistry was amazing.
But then something strange happened the next time we met up, it didn't feel the same. And then we met up, I think one more time. And again, the spark was gone. The chemistry was really different. And so we ended up not working out. And it's stuck with me for years.
Why did it feel so amazing and so special on that first date, but not so much afterwards? And then I clicked one day when I realised it was a strong example of what's called arousal misattribution. And it turns out that us humans are just really bad at knowing where our feelings come from, knowing where our emotions come from.
So, in that example, we were rock climbing, we were full of adrenaline, we were sweating, our hearts were racing. And we were confusing that feeling, that response in our physiology. It was actually coming from the heights climbing and all the effort. And we thought it was coming from the other person. We thought the other person was causing our body to react this way.
We're falling for them, and we're not at all. It's the physiology, the adrenaline, everything from rock climbing. And when you start thinking about this, you see this everywhere. In these TV shows, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the producers use these kind of tricks all the time to get people to feel these strong emotions, to get their physiology pumped up, and to get these false feelings for each other. So it's something to be wary of.
And it ends up being important for intuition, right? So this, one of the rules I have around intuition is not to use it when you are feeling overly emotional, when you're feeling super happy or sad or depressed, stressed, anxious. And the key to part of the key to that is self awareness to knowing when you're in these states.
And sometimes we get confused.
You can confuse those sensations with the actual intuition, so we don't want to do that. We want to be careful in those scenarios and try not to use our intuition.
Sharad Lal: I love that, Joel, and that quite often you think that anything that's coming from the subconscious or the unconscious is intuition. And like you painted in your book, there's so many signals we get from the unconscious and not everything is intuition. We need to know what is what.
But before we get into that framework, maybe we should try and talk about what intuition really is. there's six sense, there's eight sense, you've talked about different ways of looking at intuition. So if you can just paint that picture,
Joel Pearson: Intuition is the learned use of unconscious information for better decisions and actions. So, it's something we need to learn. I have this very specific definition for, like I said, a couple of reasons. One is that if we want to study intuition scientifically, we need to at least have a working definition.
We need to say for now, here's the definition, let's run with that definition. It may expand. It may change in the future. That's fine. But if we spend all our time arguing about what it is and what it's not, then we can't get stuck into the science. And if we don't do that,
Then we can't understand how to make it better. better, how to make it more reliable, how to trust it. So that was really the idea behind having this sort of fairly strict definition.
part of the mission of writing the book in the first place was to have something that would help people like to be a practical guide for decision making for everyone, everywhere. And if you define it in all these different ways, or is in this spiritual manner, that is really hard to pull apart. It's really hard to have a practical guide. It's really hard to tell people what steps you need to take to improve your intuition, to trust it.
Sharad Lal: Absolutely. And maybe you can paint a little picture beyond the six senses. There are other senses that come into play. And,that's part of where intuition could potentially lie.
Joel Pearson: So we have five senses in our body, right? Sight, touch, smell, taste—all the things that we're familiar with. Then we have these other quasi-senses. The main one that comes into play here is something called interoception, which is our internal perceptual state.
Are we too hot? Are we too cold? Are we hungry? Thirsty? Do we need to go to the bathroom? This is the whole system for picking up these signals internally, and that ends up being quite important when it comes to feeling things, to feeling the parts of intuition. Our body can react to information in our brains that we're not even aware of.
People have heard of the unconscious. So you won't even know it's there, but your body will respond to it in very predictable ways. So for an example, I can literally show you a picture of a spider in one eye, and I can flash these bright colours in the other eye, and that will render that picture unconscious.
You won't see it. All you'll see is he's flashing dominant patterns in the other eye, but your eyes are still processing the picture of the spider. And so are your visual cortex, the rest of your brain, and, importantly, your limbic system, the amygdala, the emotional parts of your brain, which will still respond to it.
And because of that, your heart rate will go up. You'll start sweating. You'll have this sort of uncomfortable feeling, but you won't know why. your body can respond to the picture of the spider, even though you don't even know it's there. And that's key to understanding intuition, by learning to tap into that interoception. you can get access to the unconscious, You can simply think of it as a way of just tapping into more information in the brain that otherwise you wouldn't have access to. And that's the best way of really thinking about intuition.
Sharad Lal: If you can trust it, it's a way to get access to more information. I find that fascinating that there's so much of this stimuli coming into us.And the body already works with it without our awareness. If some of these things we can bring to our awareness, which are important to us, we can double click and use our intuition in a better way.
So that to me is so fascinating.
Joel Pearson: So the example I often give is you walk into a cafe, and the second you walk through that door, if you haven't been there before, you'll get the sensation, you'll be like, Yeah, okay, let's get a coffee here. Or maybe you think I'm not feeling this coffee shop. Let's go across the road to this other place. So what's happening in that second, as you walk in the door, so your brain's processing hundreds of different things, the temperature, the music, the shape of the tables, if there's tablecloths, the hairstyle of the staff, all kinds of different things, right?
What's happening is that your brain has learned through many other visits to coffee shops which of those things predict good experiences, good coffee or bad coffee. So your brain processes all those hundreds or maybe even thousands of cues very quickly, semi-consciously; a lot of it's unconscious, and they're triggering like a green flag or a red flag.
So you don't have to logically go, what's the probability of, a coffee shop with this kind of music, having good coffee, your brain does all that for you under the hood. unconsciously. And then your body responds and you're picking up on that sensation. You're just feeling it. So intuition is a product of all this learning that every time, maybe you meet a new person on the street, you're talking to them. And again, your brain's learned that when someone's a little bit twitchy, they fidget too much. All these cues. that these predict trustworthy people, untrustworthy, they predict this or that.
Now, it doesn't mean those cues will be 100 percent predictable and valid all the time, but your brain has learned over time that they will be mostly predictable, given you're in the same environment. and a whole bunch of other rules. Once you understand what intuition is and what it's not, we have this scientific understanding, then these natural rules, the rules about learning, and other things unfold.
I love the cafe example because that's something in which we can practically test our intuition without a life or death situation, the way you put it. And we can see how our brains kind of process it. let's go into the model and maybe let's go into, whichever way you want to take the model. Should we go S M I L E one by one and look at each part
Yeah. But let's go through one by one maybe. So the first one to S is for self awareness and self awareness of emotional state. The simple rule behind that is don't trust your intuition when you're highly emotional, when you're stressed, anxious, depressed.
It's not just negative things, though. If you've just fallen in love or won a large sum of money, you should absolutely not trust your intuition in those states either, right? So you're going to have this heightened response, this arousal, misattribution. You're going to confuse these feelings, think they're intuition, when they're not.
But it's going to flood your system with a whole lot of emotional noise, and that's going to mess with the more subtle emotional cues of intuition. Get in the habit of checking in with yourself: Am I stressed? Am I anxious? Am I highly emotional in any way?
Okay, stop. Let me do a cup breathing exercise. Let me just do something to calm myself down a little bit, go back to baseline, then use my intuition.
Sharad Lal: The key here is to build self-awareness so that we can check in and see what emotions are at play so that they don't get misattributed.
What are some ways in which we can do that? I think you may have already described a bit of breathing, but what are some ways that we can build the self awareness to say, no, we're not in an emotional state right now, intuition doesn't come into play.
Joel Pearson: Yeah. So there's some work on this. And so one of the ways that people talk about is simply trying, getting the practice of labelling how you're feeling at any time. it sounds overly simple, like just using a word, I'm feeling ecstatic and amazing now, and now I'm just feeling a little bit down, a little bit negative, a little bit frustrated.
What you're actually doing is building this practice. Stop for just a brief moment and figure out what it feels like to be in these states. You're linking the internal interoceptive feeling with these words.
The data suggests that the more you do that, the better you get at general awareness, at being able to notice quickly what state you're in.
Of course, there's the whole toolkit of other things, such as exercise, eating right, and not drinking too much.
Sharad Lal: very useful. The second one is, like you said, mastery. If you can talk a little bit about mastery, and I found I have one or two deeper questions once you give everyone the context on mastery.
Joel Pearson: Yeah, absolutely. M for mastery. So the simple rule is here. You can't use your intuition for something unless you have learned about it, unless you have some degree of mastery. And if you think about it, if you want to stop playing chess. You can't just sit down and be an intuitive chess player.
You need to train your brain about which patterns predict which outcomes. So, in the cafe example, your brain has to learn which things in the environment—the music, the temperature, the smells—predict good or bad outcomes, such as good or bad coffee. So you need to put in the time for learning, right?
We shouldn't use it for things we don't have experience with. So you've never done something before you've never played tennis. Don't try to be an intuitive tennis player. Just follow the coach, follow the rules, stick to the basics. And over time. You'll see that intuition stops developing almost naturally as you become more and more expert, you have more and more mastery. And this sort of learning is really, it's an automatic kind of learning. It's called associative learning. So your brain, our brains will predict, we'll learn these associations,
Now, how much learning, you're probably going to ask how much learning do we
Sharad Lal: I was going to talk about Malcolm Gladwell and the 10, 000 hour rule.
Joel Pearson: Yeah. So the 10, 000 hour rule in Gladwell's book is not a real thing. He noticed that when people got to a certain stage in their careers by then they'd done at least 10, 000 hours of practice in playing the violin or whatever it was.
But learning is not like that at all. It's not linear, in other words. What I mean by nonlinear is that every hour of practice you put into something doesn't equal one hour of output. In other words, some hours are worth much more than other hours. So if you're learning, if you want to learn which coffee shops have good coffee, that's going to take a lot of visits to coffee shops.
But then we have other instances of learning and PTSD is an interesting one, right? So something traumatic can happen to you can be in a car accident or all kinds of nasty things can happen. And you can have lifelong, very strong learning, basically in an instant, right in a second. One of the main rules is really how emotional or impactful the outcomes are will dictate how strongly or how quickly your brain learns.
So it's the intensity of the experience. Is it also if something is a lot more meaningful, is more purposeful to you that could also accelerate because the emotions involved in learning,
Yeah. So some meanings are important as well, not only about the outcomes, but the whole thing you're learning, right? If it's really important to you, you'll pay a lot more attention. And when you're paying attention, we know that increases the rate of learning.
When you make errors in your learning, that's really important because it focuses your attention. It tells your brain what you're doing wrong, so you can adjust that and do that thing differently. So yeah, meaning is important, yeah, attention, and also making mistakes is important, right?
And maybe just digging on that. If you're looking at learning something new with this framework, let's say making mistakes or finding something more meaningful, what's a good approach for us to actually learn something new so that we can learn it in a deeper way?
Sharad Lal: of different ways to think about this. Like I said, sothe sort of Goldilocks zone, the right amount of difficulty getting almost into a flow state, so not too hard, but not too easy. And then there's also data on how long we do something for. If you just, if you're learning to ski or play tennis and you just do that all day, nonstop, that's a really bad way to learn because you're going to get, your muscles are going to get tired very quickly and you're going to start learning really bad sloppy habits.
Joel Pearson: So we want to limit the bouts of learning, maybe an hour to maybe an hour and 20 or something like that, depending on your skills, your own capabilities, and then have a break. And then there's some interesting data on different things you could do after that. Resting is important. Even having a little nap has been shown, particularly with cognitive learning to boost, sleeping that night after learning is also very important.
If you can reward yourself or punish yourself, it sounds funny if you learn to play tennis or something, but people do that.
they, find ways to reward themselves or buy themselves things when they've learned something, or there's even cases of people trying to punish themselves
But yes, short bouts. Whether it's cognitive, academic, or physical learning, you don't want to go too long because you'll just exhaust yourself, and then you'll start learning bad habits.
Learning is context specific, right? So if you're cramming for an exam at home in your bedroom,
The bedroom is part of that. So when you go into the exam room, it'll actually be much harder to remember.
It's really hard to sum up learning with one simple rule.
but yeah, it is important, paying attention, making errors, learning in short bouts, don't overdo it, recovery, sleep, all these things are important.
Sharad Lal: Very helpful. And I'm glad that while we're talking about intuition, we went deeper into learning as well, because that's something people want to take away. I guess the big point is when you've got some level of mastery, that's when intuition comes into play. If you don't know anything about it, do not use your intuition.
Joel Pearson: Yeah, exactly.
Sharad Lal: part of your model was on I, where you talked about the difference between impulse and intuition. I think that's a big one as well. So if you could talk a little bit about that.
Joel Pearson: So a lot of literature will confuse or conflate or use the idea of an instinct and intuition interchangeably. But they're actually different things. So an instinct is something that is hardwired into our biology that we're born with.
An example of instinct would be if you give a baby a lemon and they bite into it, their face will screw up with the bitter flavour of the lemon, right? And we still do that now. And we always will. That's hardwired.
Whereas intuition, as I said before, is something we learn, we develop mastery for it. So it's dynamic, it changes on the fly, it changes to the environment, as the environment as the world changes, intuition can change along with it.
But instincts don't change as well. And that sort of ends up being important when we think about, we can call, so uncertainty is a big topic at the moment with AI and the world just changing so much so quickly and uncertainty is something that we respond to. Pretty badly. And it's like a fear stimulus, humans, monkeys, and most animals don't like uncertainty, right?
We evolved that way for important reasons a long time ago, and it's an instinct that's permanently there. So even though it's actually become maladaptive, it would be better to embrace it and be okay with it in today's fast-changing, full-of-uncertainty world.
We find that very difficult. I think it's an important distinction to make. It's a little bit subtle, but it's important. And the other one under the eye there is addiction.
Now, addictive things, which of course, you know, your drugs, alcohol, including food, including gambling. So behavioural addiction, social media, Tik TOK, Instagram, Facebook, these things are highly addictive
We shouldn't confuse the two, and we shouldn't try to come up with an excuse. Oh, it's my intuition telling me I need to go and check my social media.
It's BS. It's not my intuition at all. It's just the addictive draw to these behavioural addictions. So it's important not to confuse those two and not to try to use intuition as an excuse to indulge in addictive things. Now, food is a controversial one. So intuitive eating was a bit of a movement in the nineties and two thousand.
If you just follow your intuition and eat whatever you want, as much as you want, then you'll come to some sort of natural baseline and you won't eat too much. It's a nice idea if you're living on a farm and you eat whole foods and very natural foods, but for most people, we have access to a lot of highly processed foods.
And these processed foods—billions of dollars have gone into the engineering behind all the substances, the flavours, the textures, and how they feel in our mouth—basically to make them highly addictive, to make it so that we can just keep on eating them nonstop without feeling full. So because of that, people are writing now about modern food being like a drug.
Sharad Lal: So I think the idea of intuitive eating in a modern world is a very dangerous idea. Very interesting.
The next one you talked about was low probability cases.
And that is again, very fascinating.
Joel Pearson: L in smile is for low probability, but it really applies to all probabilistic thinking. And the bottom line is humans are just bad at probabilities. We're bad at numbers. We shouldn't try and feel numbers or use our intuition for anything around numbers or probabilities.
I live in Sydney here and I'll sometimes joke about calling this the shark attack rule. Because you can tell people the probabilities of event coming across a shark or seeing one, let alone having an encounter with one. It's so low, right? Sharks are much safer than driving.
it's such a low probability that you basically should forget about it when you're in the water. But. Anyone is out in the ocean swimming and you start saying, I wonder if there's a shark and you start imagining a shark, you start feeling fearful.
And so these emotions will flare up and we'll ignore the probabilities. That's just one example of how we're just not good at understanding probabilities. And it extends to all kinds of things.
Great point. And that just reminds me of another very interesting point that you made. I'm a big fan of Daniel Kahneman and his work on heuristics and biases. And I know you talked about the difference between biases and intuition.
Sharad Lal: And just to clarify for folks who read Kahneman's work, the type two thinking, which he talks about, automatic thinking, which is heuristic thinking, isn't intuition. That's different.
Joel Pearson: It's a very general way to think about this. I'm not really a fan of it because what you end up with, it doesn't really link to anything in the brain in terms of neuroscience. It's a very high level idea. and the other thing is like all the things you put in those two buckets, so he would put, intuition, learning, cognitive biases, like all the different things you put in type, the bucket of type one are completely different in nature, they happen at different times, they lead you in different directions.
And to put a group of things that are very different in one bucket, it's not that useful scientifically. So while it's very catchy, and I think it's a useful way to think about choices in the world, it doesn't map onto the brain very well. And it can also be slightly misleading because people just put two very different things into that sort of system in one bucket.
sure. Thank you for clarifying that. And maybe we move to the last part of E, which we talked about earlier, environment,
Yeah, so the E is for environment, yeah, or context. And the learning we're talking about before this associative learning is context specific, the place you learn these things matters.
What does that mean? It means, there's these old jokes that, you come home drunk and throw your keys somewhere. And the next morning you wake up hungover and you can't find your keys and then the afternoon you have a drink. And as soon as you have a drink, you remember where you put your keys, right?
It's a joke, but it actually is true to a certain extent, right? If you recreate the same internal state, you will actually have better access to those memories, whether that be alcohol, caffeine, stress, depression. So in all kinds of internal states, learning is specific to an external location and an internal state.
One of the examples I like to give of this I talk about in the book is Steve Jobs. Steve loved intuition. He went to India and studied intuition there.
He talked about how he used it at Apple for leadership in product design. It was amazingly successful later in his life, his home life, and his health, mainly because he made some very poor decisions.
He was diagnosed with cancer and he put off his treatment for that cancer for many years because he wanted to pursue a very alternative. treatment options. Most people agree that if he had had a surgery straight away, he would have been okay.
So that was where his intuition worked in one context, in one environment, at Apple for business and product design, but it led him astray in a very different area, right? He didn't have the mastery for health decisions for home decisions. And so we just need to be careful when we change contexts like that, because intuition won't.
Always transfer that well.
Sharad Lal: That's such a good point, because sometimes we think we're so smart in this area, we're smart in every area, but that's not true. Steve Jobs, who people admire, was so way off in a very other important area.
Thank you for sharing that. Before we move, I think I'm just going to summarise this framework for everyone so that we don't miss it. We use intuition best if these conditions work. So, first is self-awareness. If we do not have heightened emotions, that's a good time to look at our emotions.
M is mastery. We use it in areas that we've got some mastery. If you're an entrepreneur doing some kind of business, your intuition might come into play there. Instinct addiction is not intuition. That's different. So while gambling, our intuition tells us to go more, no, that's not intuition, that's addiction. Low probability cases, that's not an area to use intuition as well. and the last E is environment and context, whether it's internal environment or external environment, that's where intuition comes into play. That's the framework. I think you've very nicely put in place.
Now, how do we build intuition? How do we access it and build it?
Joel Pearson: Yeah. So in the book, I talk about, yeah, using this acronym, getting really familiar with it, practising with first with small decisions,A lot of people, we'll talk about, when these big decisions is, life and death or getting married, divorced, or moving to another country, buying a house, they start feeling emotion around these big decisions.
And I talk about this gut feeling, I should feel this or that. But if they've never practised intuition, consciously, at least before, then Yeah, it can be a bit dangerous to just jump in the deep end like that. So I talk about trying to practise intuition, building up a daily practice, perhaps getting familiar with those five rules, And getting, at first you're going to have to try and remember them or write them down, look at them, but very quickly, they're going to become pretty automatic. And that's what I tried to build this SMILE acronym,
you want to notice how you feel the interoception, how you're tapping into that internal information in your body, and what you decide, and then what the outcome was, Also, it's worth mentioning that,
Not confusing anxiety or stress and intuition, Your anxiety of getting on the aeroplane is probably not your intuition.
That's one that comes up a lot. People think they're having intuition about the plane's going to crash, I've had discussions with people that have dreams and premonitions about a plane crash and they'll say that in the next day, And I think it's useful, at least at first to think about the probabilities here, because we're not good at probabilities, but
We dream quite a few different dreams every night, and emotional things like a plane crash are highly probable in our dreams. If each person is dreaming, say, five dreams to be conservative per night, five times the number of people in that country, that's happening every night.
And it's a high probability that If you have a dream about a plane crash or anything emotional, then you can, pretty quickly realise that every night, say in America, there's going to be quite a few people dreaming about plane crashes. So every time there's a plane crash or a plane incident, we should expect someone to say, Oh my gosh, I dreamt about that the night before.
We love seeing patterns in things. Even when there are no patterns, we can't help it. When we see something like that happen, we tend to believe there's meaning behind it. It's important. Something caused that, even if it is just random. So that's another interesting anecdote.
That's a very mind opening example when you put it, I remember reading that, that was so great. So Joel, you've done this great work on intuition. You've put it out there. How does it work in the scientific community? How does this move forward from here? My lab is now famous for tackling tricky topics like this. We've done it with intuition, with mental imagery, the imagination, we've done similar things with actual hallucinations. So I'm a huge fan of taking things like that, that a lot of my colleagues will think I am, it's too hard, it's too fluffy.
It's too hard to measure and develop new technologies to measure these things objectively. In psychology, people often use questionnaires or interviews to measure things. They're great, but they quite often lack the reliability and objectiveness of the kind of tests we might want, right?
And I'll often say things like, what I'm talking about is like a blood test for the mind. We want objective, reliable things. You don't go into the doctor's office and he doesn't ask you how you are feeling about your vitamin D levels. Here's a questionnaire. He'll take a blood sample or she'll take a blood sample and I'll measure the vitamin D in there.
So you want something objective like that. And that's what we strive for. We're measuring things in the mind and in the brain. And so when we first started publishing stuff on intuition, there was a bit of pushback and people, my colleagues are like, Oh, it's just really intuition. How do you know, how do you define it?Sure, we could just argue about the definition for the next 10 years. But how's that going to help people? My thing is let's be more agile. Let's take a working definition like the one I put forward the learned productive use of unconscious information for better decisions and actions.
And if we need to, we'll adjust the definition, that's fine. So we don't want to get stuck on definitions and semantics.
It's still very young science. It's very early, and it does take time. Science is still pretty slow. People apply for government grants, and it can take a year or two to get them. Then, it takes many years to do the research. So sometimes, things can take five, six, or seven years to come out.
So it is a bit slow, but the idea is to build a legitimate science around that. And for that to also then seep into society, right? I'll talk to people in senior leadership, CEOs of well known companies. And they'll quite often say, of course, I use intuition.
but I don't want to tell. talk about that publicly, I don't want to talk to the board about that, because it's still a bit taboo, right? It's still a bit undefined, a bit spiritual, and they don't want to be tagged with that kind of label.
Things are changing a bit slowly, but there's still a bit of that. And so that's also part of my mission with science and the book: to say, look, we have science around this. We can understand intuition with all the neuroscience we already have. It doesn't have to be something woo, or something out there in the ether or magical.
We have science; we can talk about it scientifically. If you follow these five rules, you have mastery in your domain, and then you can use intuition at senior leadership.
Sharad Lal: Joel. I was curious as you were speaking, like as a professor, you'd want to be academic and semantic, but you also looking at being street smart, which is a little different from other professors, if I can put it that way, how have these two things come into your personality where you want to solve a problem, you want to give something useful, but not get caught up in ego and semantics and definition and arguments, how have these two parts come into you?
Joel Pearson: I always have had many different interests, before I did a PhD and became a scientist, I went to art school and studied painting and drawing and filmmaking, and I was going to be a filmmaker at that stage. And then I started studying and reading about consciousness and the nature of reality.
And how I was like, how do we study these things? And it became clear that I could try and study quantum mechanics or physics, but the subjectiveness of the whole experience of consciousness was really more neuroscience and psychology. So I put aside filmmaking and went and studied psychology and neuroscience and did a PhD and then went in this different direction.
But maybe it's because of that I've just always had very varied interests. I like to think about applying things to helping people. I've got this whole thing we've developed in the lab about agile science. It's treating science like a startup, trying to be agile, not to waste money and waste time, to try and remember that we don't want to be in our comfort zones with science.
We want to push the boundaries a bit. I also think about science sometimes a bit more like a venture capitalist would. Veg clubs would throw money at all these different startups, and all they want is one, one new Google, one new Facebook, something to blow up and be a big deal.
And that risk-reward is worth it. If there's even a tiny percent chance that it will blow up to be something big and change our understanding of the brain or the nature of reality or whatever it is, it's worth investing in that, even if it seems a bit crazy.
That's so good. And that's why you've done work on this, in this great topic. And you looked at the movie Inception, and then you talked about a lot of your theories through Inceptions. How true are parts of Inception, like at least how they've thought about the unconscious mind?
Sharad Lal: Absolutely.
Joel Pearson: So that first huge Chris Nolan fan loves the film and pretty much all his films. Yeah, a lot of it's fiction.I talk about that in the book because it's a cool way to think about hacking into the unconscious, right? and getting things into our brains into our minds without anyone knowing that.
In the beginning, we talked about that spider example. So we can do things like that in the lab. I can introduce things into your brain, which will change your decisions, behaviour, and perception. And you don't know I'm doing that. And so it's very much like conception, and that's the analogy I use in the book.
It's not through dreams though. So there's some new science on people, piping in sounds and noises, why people are sleeping and that people can learn about those sounds, why they're asleep. So there's some things starting to happen there. And, but yeah, dreams are a fascinating topic. And the idea of lucid dreaming, super cool.
Joel, we've had such a wonderful conversation. Before we wrap up, I was wondering if there is one thought that you'd like to leave listeners with.
yeah, when it comes to intuition, whether you have previously thought it was BS or you're a huge fan of intuition, whether you think it's a spiritual part of who you are.
What I'm here to say is that intuition is real. We can understand it, a certain definition of it, with neuroscience, with all the science we already have. You can follow very simple rules to improve that intuition to make it trustworthy. So, it is real science that can explain it. And maybe, over the coming years, we may expand that as we discover more about how the brain works and how the unconscious works.
A lot of people have trouble combining the logical cognitive side with the emotional side and feelings. Another way to think about this book is how to bring those two together, how to mix feelings and decision-making.
And I think that's a nice way to think about intuition and hopefully the book can really help people. So if this sounds like something that could be helpful to you or anyone else, please pick up a copy.
Sharad Lal: Sure thing. We're going to leave, uh, we're going to leave a link to the copy where people can pick it up. And thank you very much, Joel, for all the good work you're doing. I have an intuition that we are going to hear a lot about you.
Joel Pearson: Thank you, Sharad. I appreciate that. I love your intuition.
Sharad Lal: Thank you for supporting me and supporting science and helping out with this mission. I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Joel, for such an insightful conversation. For more enjoyment, you can check out the show notes. Here's something all of us could internalise the smile model. Once again. S for self-awareness and M for mastery. I for impulses, L for low probability cases, and E for environment. Let's start tracking. And see where it works. We can start with something small. Choosing the right cafe. What does eye intuition tell us?
And how does it work for us? From here, we can build it up. Best of luck. I hope you enjoyed this episode. The next one will drop two weeks from now on July 30th. Do join us for that. Till next time, have a wonderful day ahead. Bye bye.