133: Intuition isn’t just “spiritual”: The Science of Intuition with Prof Joel Pearson
If you have thought intuition was a bit of a magical "made-up/spiritual” thing…
We are here to tell you otherwise.
This episode of The Essential Shift Podcast we welcome Prof Joel Pearson to share the science behind intuition.
We’ll explore what intuition really is, how it works in our brains, and how we can harness it in our daily lives and business decisions.
Whether you’re a leader, an entrepreneur, or just curious about the power of the mind, this episode gives you profound insights into the science behind intuition.
If you LOVED the episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag me @essential.shift and @profjoelpearson.
✨ Want to learn more about intuition and business? READ MY BOOK: LIGHT IT ✨
KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS
The science behind intuition
Insights into intuition and neuroscience
The definition of intuition
A framework to help you trust your intuition
SHOW RESOURCES
LEARN more about Prof Joel’s Work - HERE
READ my book on Intuition - HERE
FOLLOW me on INSTAGRAM - HERE
Find out more about how to WORK WITH ME - HERE
If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me @essential.shift.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Joel Pearson is a Psychologist, Neuroscientist and public intellectual working at the forefront of science, innovation and agile science and a Professor at UNSW.
Joel started his career in Arts and film, then decided to apply his passion for creative discovery to the scientific mysteries of human consciousness and the complexities of brain, completing his science PhD in 2 years, started two science labs, a company and a one of a kind Innovation lab: The Future Minds Lab @UNSW.
Joel is a company founder, startup and corporate advisor, investor, author and active scientist.
Bless it be.
With love, Laetitia!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Hey, Joel, thank you so much for being on the essential shift. Podcast. My pleasure. It's
Joel Pearson 8:24
great to be here.
Laetitia Andrac 8:25
I am so excited for all of our listeners to discover your work to get to know you. I feel I know you really well after listening to your voice on the audiobook, but listeners who are new to your work would you mind introducing yourself quickly to our audience? Joel? Yes. My
Joel Pearson 8:45
name is Joel Pearson. I'm a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, Professor of cognitive neuroscience which is really like the where neuroscience meets psychology studying the brain how it works. I have a lab there and we do research we do brain scans we study intuition of course how to measure it what it is we study the imagination, mental imagery, a Fantasia, things like that.
Laetitia Andrac 9:11
I love it. It is so amazing. The synchronicity of how we met. Because so let me rewind for all the listeners. You know how I met Joel and how all of this is happening. So I was preparing a keynote for AWS, Amazon Web Services. And I was proving my point around why intuition is essential in the tech industry as a tech printer as a leader. And I was like I need someone to back me from the neuroscience from the data perspective, because my own experience and the experience of hundreds of people that I have supported in that space won't be enough for Amazon Web Services leader. And so I went on the old good Google, and I found you and I started listening to your book and then I reached out to you on LinkedIn and you replied straightaway, so I'm so grateful for you to be here. Because you have so much to teach. And it is beautiful. The research you've done around intuition. It's like a gift for all of us.
Joel Pearson 10:10
Oh, thank you. Yeah, no, I mean any chance I can get it to spread the word. I mean, I think some of our missions are overlapping and aligned. So I meant to really doing the research and understanding the brain but also around particularly around intuition. Like for many, you know, in leadership positions in companies or in politics, it's still a bit of a taboo topic, and I talk to people who say, I use intuition designers, filmmakers, and like CEOs, but they don't want to talk about it publicly. They still feel like that would be like a little bit embarrassing or to woo alternative. And they're very, they're scared to talk about it. And so the idea one of the ideas around the book is to sort of bring intuition away from the taboo and into the mainstream, that we can understand it with neuroscience, we can understand that we understand when you should or shouldn't use intuition. And because of that, you know, it's fine to talk about making big important decisions using intuition because we understand this now, you know, you don't understand everything, but we're rapidly moving towards that. So, yeah, I think we have a aligned mission around intuition. Yeah,
Laetitia Andrac 11:16
definitely breaking the taboo around intuition. And what you mentioned is real. After delivering this keynote, many people came to see me and they were like, Oh, my goodness. Now I think you shine the light on a new way. I could use intuition for a long time. I thought it was spiritual. It was either Tarik but actually it is pragmatic. It is real. It is a skill that I have and we all have it is a muscle and I published my book in September 2021. And I hadn't known about your research until I discovered it a few weeks ago. And I was like, Oh my gosh, thankfully, what I wrote in my book is a live search. So this is beautiful. But how do you define intuition to make sure that we agree on a definition for our listener because in your book, you explained very well, how you define intuition. So I want to make sure before I go deeper on the topic that we agree on the words.
Joel Pearson 12:07
Absolutely. So I have a very specific definition that not everyone will agree with. And I have chosen that definition for very, very sort of reasons. I've thought a lot about and so I define it as the learned productive use of unconscious information for better decisions or actions. And I defined it that way. You know, it does exclude some things, but I wanted to define it in a way that would let people and then we can understand, explain that with all the new neuroscience we already had. And also, as I said, it would build a new sort of field of science around intuition. So I purposely didn't want to include you know, the ideas of the sixth sense or things that we can't explain. Now I don't by not including those I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm not saying it's not a thing I'm saying right now, we don't understand those things. So I'm sort of trying to have a fairly, not conservative but a definition of something at least, we now know we can understand with all the new neuroscience on consciousness on learning that things can go on outside of conscious awareness. And we can utilize that we can build a practical guide based on science that can help people make better decisions. And so yeah, it does exclude some definitions and some of the spiritual stuff that some people really like about intuition. So I'm not making any judgment about them or their beliefs at all. It's just for now. I want to define it this way to help the science along and we'll see in the next few years, maybe this definition will have to broaden to explain some other things that we discover. So stay tuned with that. Well, we'll we'll wait and see.
Laetitia Andrac 13:44
And I love that because we work on a continuum. I see intuition as a whole spectrum. So I see it as an unconscious experience, perception emotion, but I also see it as a universal knowing. So I add the spiritual parts that you haven't proven yet by data and by research and by neuroscience, but I really adds this elements is that we're in the continuum, you know, going into the esoteric space, while being a bridge with all the research that you've done. So I understand that in a lab, it's really hard to prove yet the universal consciousness and this kind of, you know, be
Joel Pearson 14:26
ending but that being said, I mean, things are changing. Now, when I sort of, you know, 20 years or so God got into this field. You know, just talking about consciousness and researching it was like taboo. Now, you know, it's something we all discuss, talk, you know, in the most conservative scientific journals, people are studying consciousness, which model is best to understand consciousness? Are their tests for consciousness? The answer is no. But these topics are now the mainstream, which they weren't you know, when I got into this, now people are discussing models of consciousness. Which talk about everything being conscious, right. It's not something that's limited to biologic biology or humans or anything like that. So yeah, as as things progressed, the ideas are changing, and people I guess, are becoming more open minded about all kinds of things. So yeah, exciting times.
Laetitia Andrac 15:16
It's amazing. So you've done this research set across 20 years, and it's how do you discover intuition? How, how do we know intuition exists in the neuroscience space to make sure that our listener like oh my goodness, because it's really interesting in your book and now disclosing everything in your book, please, everyone. I will mention the book very quickly, but you need to get the intuition toolkit book. And it's available on Audible. You can buy it anywhere. And this is really important for any of you to kind of understand before reading the book or that the research how do you prove that intuition exists in your research?
Joel Pearson 15:56
Yeah, so just very quick, we've been studying consciousness for a long time before we started studying intuition. And one of the ways we study consciousness is to get things into people's brains without being consciously aware of it. And there's all kinds of cool tricks we can do with optical illusions. We can show pictures to one eye and render them unconscious but we know that brain is still processing them. And that's one of the you know these these optical visual illusions are amazing thing. They can let us study and pull apart the mechanisms of consciousness in really interesting ways. So we started you know, about probably 10 years ago just trying to study intuition using these techniques. And we've already developed them in the lab. And so the first ingredient we want we sort of needed to recreate intuition that lab was to get information into people's brains. But that information had to be unconscious and we also want it to be a little bit emotionally charged. And I call this emotional inception. So if people have seen the film Inception, this Christopher Nolan film, where they sort of hack into people's dreams and put ideas in people's heads through their dreams. That's the basic idea. We don't do that with dreams. We do. That in the lab when people are awake, with visual optical illusion, that lets us sort of show people, little pictures that are emotional so we can show them little puppies or flowers or we can show them scary snakes, spiders, sharks, with this sort of more negative emotional charge. So we show them to people and then we can render them unconscious. And we know through neuroscientific measurements that their brain is still processing it, and they're still having an emotional response or their body is still responding, even though they never consciously see the images. So that was kind of the first piece of the puzzle getting the information, the unconscious information into people's brains and at the same time, we have to make unrelated decisions. And the idea is over after decision after decision after decision, do they learn to use this unconscious information? And the answer is yes, people do. And we can track this we can monitor it. We've developed sort of mathematical models to explain this. And so it was really fascinating people could combine conscious and unconscious information in real time and get make better decisions and prove their accuracy. respond more quickly. And they felt more confident in these decisions. So we realized this was a really interesting way to measure and understand and even think about intuition what it could be how to measure it, dissect it in the lab, and we saw a learning effect. People got better at doing this over time and that kind of that first initial discovery set us up for this this new trajectory in studying intuition and me and my lab Oh, famous now for for developing new ways of measuring things that others in neuroscience would put in the too hard basket they say whether it be the imagination or intuition or hallucinations are things that typically they're just too hard to measure. Let's use a questionnaire or do an interview. developing these new ways of measuring things objectively reliably in the lab just opens the door to a whole new realm of research. So that's what we did about 10 years ago. And then we've been doing other research trying to look at how everyday decision making when you do give people questionnaires, how that relates to these lab based measures. But then over that time, as well through talking to lots of people through Twitter and talking to journalists, I started to want to turn this data into a practical guide to help people make decisions and that's where the book came from. It kind of I realized that almost everyone seems to be interested in some way or another and intuition and so see, we can now measure this, we could understand that and explain everything we've documented with neuroscience data we had, we could build a practical guide for that. And that's really the most of this book over the second half of it is really five rules for how to optimize how to trust your intuition. And we you know, and I had this acronym smile in the book, which helps people remember these rules. And we can go through the rules in a minute. But yeah, the idea is to take everything we know about the brain about learning about consciousness about addictive things and turn that into rules that can help people trust their intuition. Because as a bat, as a backdrop to this, just really quickly, you know, in psychology people have been arguing about whether your intuition was good or bad. Can you trust your intuition? And there are examples when it's really good and you can trust it. But there are other examples when it's biased and it leads people astray. When it comes to any numbers and probabilities, right? What terrible intuition. And people were just arguing, like, oh, is this black and white thing? And it turns out, you know, they're both right. Sometimes you can trust it, but other times you can't. So it's not a black and white issue. It's sort of a nuanced issue with gray areas. So sometimes you can't trust it. Sometimes you can't. And for some topics, you can trust it. But some topics, you can't trust it. So that's really the take home message of the book.
Laetitia Andrac 21:09
I love it. We're going to go in the detail of those five rules because it was one of the questions that I had for you. But before we do that, there is a question that I get always asked by leaders by entrepreneurs, and that I and so from my own experience and my own empiric knowledge and that you confirm in your books I would love for you to use your authority and share with everyone is how does it feel when you have an intuitive response in your body? Yeah, this is a lot of people are speaking about the gut intuition, but I'm so glad you're talking more broadly about other body response, because it's how I always answer, but can you bring your research and your experience and then we'll go into Part of How does it feel when we have this response that is intuitive.
Joel Pearson 21:53
So we have this is a great point. This is really important. So yeah, it's called a gut response for a reason. If you if you meet someone doesn't feel right. People will report these feelings in their body in their gut, often sometimes in their chest, sometimes in their sweaty palms or their hands. But often it's this gut response whether it's when you meet someone and something's not right, you walk into a cafe or a restaurant and you think, No, maybe not. Let's go back across the road to this other place. These are feelings we feel in our body. And this is this is gets to the crux of this. It's important to sort of understand that our bodies can respond to things that that are unconscious right before I said, we can even if people aren't aware of these pictures, we're showing them the emotional pictures. Their brains are still processing the pictures and their bodies still respond. We can put a thing on their finger and measure subtle changes. In their sweating. This is not like a you know, going to the gym and dripping with sweat. It's very subtle changes. So as they get more emotionally aroused, a bit more scared, maybe they will sweat a little bit more, their heart rate will go up a little bit, but they have no idea why that's happening. They probably won't even notice it. It's sort of right below that threshold, but we can measure it. So this is the important bit the body responds to stuff in the brain to inflammation in the brain that we're not conscious of. Yes. Right. So to put it another way, you won't even know what's happening but your body is responding Your body knows. And this is something called interoception which is a fancy word to explain internal perception, right? If I feel too hot, too cold, hungry, I need to go to the bathroom. We have a whole system for perceiving the internal state of our bodies which is really important. And that's the system that we use here. Right so when we we feel our body responding we feel the heart rate going up sweating, bit more tension and muscles. Maybe there's a whole range of physiological responses that we're feeling and that's really this this gut response. And so by, by trying to have in other words, you could say you were you were learning to use the body to tap into the unconscious would be another way to say that. Right? And this is never more obvious than in sport, when when people are you know, playing football or whatever the sport. Their bodies can directly tap into the unconscious information. And there's lots of great documentation of this in neuroscience from all kinds of things. Our blind sight is an amazing example of this where people swear they have damage to visual cortex they can't see they can't see they're classified as blind for example, but they can walk down a hallway and walk around obstacles randomly placed in a hallway. While they're stepping around the objects, they will swear they can't see the objects or they can't they have no visual information, but their body respond to the information. So just like the gut response when you walk into the cafe or restaurant or meet someone your body can also respond when playing football or tennis or basketball or whatever it might be. So it's really using the body to access the unconscious.
Laetitia Andrac 25:01
I love that. And this is the m of your smell framework, which is a mastery because you have mastery playing football, you have mastery, playing tennis and then you can really start trusting your intuition. So let's get into that Yeah, to your book and the framework you share in your book about the five rules of when and when not to trust your intuition. So what's funny side note is you have the smile framework in your book, which is the five rules of when to trust and when not to trust your intuition. I have in my book THE LIGHT framework, which is how to trust your intuition in business. So going through the five step on how to use intuition in your business. So would you mind covering for us the five rules of when to trust your intuition going through the smile framework, which I absolutely love? Yeah,
Joel Pearson 25:45
can you can just hang on one second my son just come in. Let me we can cut down on the meeting. Can we just go outside please with mom. Okay, thanks, buddy. Love it. You leave it there. I'll take it out to you.
Laetitia Andrac 25:59
I'll leave it here so that
Joel Pearson 26:02
was my little son. He just came into telling me something cuz I'm working from home today. So yeah, so I So these five rules based on science and I use the acronym smile. So because part of this idea is to try and you know, you want to absorb these rules and remember them practice them so they become very familiar. And you don't have to look at a bit of paper to remember what to do. Before you're gonna use your intuition. You absorb them, they become part of the natural, natural process. So yes, I am in the smallest for mastery, and that's really important. You need to you need to be somewhat of an expert at something have some sort of mastery before you practice it. An example I often give is, if you've never played chess before, you can't start off by being an intuitive chess player. You have to put in the time and effort your brain has to learn the relationships between the patterns on the chessboard and the rules and and you need to train that up and so yeah, you can't use intuition if you have had no experience with something. Yes. Right. How much experience do you need? That's a little bit harder to give a clear one off answer for because the learning system is not like that it for things that are highly emotional, we can learn very quickly. Right? That's kind of more or less what PTSD is. Something like that can be you know, a sink from a car accident. You could have very strong learning or getting food poisoning very strong learning just for that one instance. Other times or business. Yeah, or business
Laetitia Andrac 27:30
failure before this one. I am telling you, I learned from those.
Joel Pearson 27:34
Yeah, the more like the more uncomfortable the more hurts, the more upsetting it is basically, the more rapid you're learning if it's more subtle, you will need many, many, many instances to develop the learning. So it really depends on the emotionality and the outcomes of the decisions. It also depends on how quickly the feedback happens. You know if you do something, and it's a year later, that your brain will find it hard to link the outcome with the earlier event. So before we go any further let's just start let's go back to the s for the beginning of smile. So that's for self awareness. And that's like this idea. of tapping part of the emotional intelligence part of emotional awareness to sort of check in with yourself and see what your emotional state is. And this is important because we know that if you're stressed if you're anxious, you basically should not trust your intuition. Yes. Okay. So you need to be either in a fairly neutral state slightly positive is just as good or probably slightly better. But if you're, you know, at all in a negative state, depressed, anxious, then you don't want to You shouldn't really trust your intuition. You should do a number of things that we have in our toolkits, or that we can get in our toolkits to bring our physiologic physiology back down to baseline, and we can go happy to go into those as well. But yeah, that's sort of a general rule that yeah, don't trust your intuition if you are in this elevated state. But it also is, it's not just negative. It's you know, if you just fall in love, you just won the lottery that also is going to flood the system with strong emotion and it's going to throw off your intuition.
Laetitia Andrac 29:11
And we can think about feelings that sense of groundedness of peacefulness, that's where you know we share I share a lot with leader and entrepreneurs the power of meditation, the power of the morning pages, or a walk in nature, just to really bring that baseline and then you can make a decision which I love about the ass, because a lot of people are like, Why would I make a decision based on my intuition? I am feeling so anxious and so nervous, maybe because you were before you made that this exactly
Joel Pearson 29:40
and one of the things that I find interesting is that in the book, I talk about practicing intuition or daily practice with smaller decisions and then getting very used to that. That's how it feels. What tends to happen is people don't really think about intuition until they're faced with a huge decision, a life or death or a move to this country or start a business shut the business down and get married, get divorced, what those kind of big things and all sudden the emotion comes up and they have these strong emotions. And then all sudden they start I've got to go with my gut. Which is it which is fine. But you what you want to do is practice that so you're familiar with the five rules, you know, so the first time you're using intuition is not with a huge extreme example of a decision. You want to be practiced and used to the feeling so that if you are feeling overly anxious and emotional about a decision, you can bring yourself back down and in the book I go into this example of a first date. I once went on we went rock climbing on a first date and it was this you know, amazing experience was one of those indoor rock climbing gyms, you know, climbing up and falling and it was, you know, it was we just fell for each other the chemistry was amazing. Turned out we weren't that well suited, you know, things didn't progress. And then for years, I kept thinking about well, why did it feel so good that first date, and I realized that was an example of what In science we call arousal Miss attribution, which is again as a kind of fancy way of just saying we're pretty bad at knowing what makes us aroused and not aroused sexually but aroused emotionally. So in that example, you know, we're falling off with rock climbing or a pile full of adrenaline heart rate heart is racing was sweating. And basically our brands confused, confused the source of where that's coming from. We think it's coming from the other person, or less somewhat coming from a person when it's actually just coming from the rock climbing. So we get confused about the source of these things. And so we were overly emotional. We have to be very careful about that. So I often also say if you know, if you're anxious about getting on a flight flying, that's probably not your intuition or a premonition although we can get to premonitions in a bit. It's probably just your anxiety playing up, right? And we want to separate the emotional thinking from what I'm calling true intuition.