Speaker 1: Today we're going to talk about intuition. Why do you
Speaker 1: experience a feeling when you walk into a place that
Speaker 1: you don't like this restaurant and you want to go
Speaker 1: to this other restaurant, Or you trust this person but
Speaker 1: you don't quite trust that person. Or you might have
Speaker 1: a sense that something is wrong with your pet or
Speaker 1: your child, even if you can't articulate what the issue is.
Speaker 1: So in all these cases, what are the signals that
Speaker 1: the brain is picking up on and what fraction of
Speaker 1: those signals does your consciousness have access to? And importantly,
Speaker 1: does intuition sometimes steer us wrong? What we call intuition
Speaker 1: is not something to be trusted automatically. It quite often
Speaker 1: steers us the wrong way. So what are the features
Speaker 1: of the situation to look for where you might feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: my intuition is more likely to be useful here than
Speaker 1: in this other situation, where my intuition is more likely
Speaker 1: to steer me wrong. And what is the future of
Speaker 1: intuition as we build new technologies that might take the
Speaker 1: myriad signals racing around in the darkness of our brains
Speaker 1: and bodies and bring them to light. Welcome to inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos with me. David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
Speaker 1: author at Stanford, and I've spent my career at the
Speaker 1: intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is about that gut feeling that we call intuition. Now,
Speaker 1: if you've been listening to this podcast for a while
Speaker 1: or reading my books, you've definitely heard me talk about
Speaker 1: all the stuff that transpires unconsciously in the unconscious mind.
Speaker 1: This is all the computations we have no access to
Speaker 1: and really no acquaintance with. So think about how you walk,
Speaker 1: all the sophisticated coordination of muscles and balance that's required there.
Speaker 1: Until very recently, that was an impossibly difficult task to
Speaker 1: get robots to do this. But ever since you were
Speaker 1: two years old or so, you've been doing it just fine. Now,
Speaker 1: you can't articulate how you walk and how you keep
Speaker 1: your balance. It's much like riding a bicycle in that way.
Speaker 1: And presumably you can do several things while you're walking
Speaker 1: or riding a bike. You can have a conversation or
Speaker 1: maybe punch out a text on your phone while you're
Speaker 1: doing it. But if I ask you to describe to
Speaker 1: me what you are doing with all that beautiful sophisticated musculature,
Speaker 1: it's simply not possible. You put the years of work
Speaker 1: into learning how to walk and how to ride a bicycle,
Speaker 1: and it resulted in expertise, but and inability to articulate
Speaker 1: what was going on there under the hood. And it's
Speaker 1: like this with most of the actions that you take,
Speaker 1: whether that's deciding what you want to eat, or who
Speaker 1: you're going to marry, or how you're identifying a smell
Speaker 1: from some mixture of molecules or whatever. You just find
Speaker 1: that your brain can magically do it because all these
Speaker 1: operations are happening in silence, in the darkness of this
Speaker 1: vast computational vault. So your conscious mind is like the
Speaker 1: broom closet in the mansion of your brain, and all
Speaker 1: of the rest involves work that's happening that you can't see.
Speaker 1: And why is that the case. It's because the data
Speaker 1: being pulled in from all your senses is way too
Speaker 1: detailed to be useful. Your retina at the back of
Speaker 1: your eye that transmits visual input at about ten million
Speaker 1: bits per second, which is similar to an ethernet connection.
Speaker 1: But if you had conscious access to all that data,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't be able to operate at your level of
Speaker 1: space and time. At your level, what you care about
Speaker 1: is where the heck did I put my toothbrush? Or
Speaker 1: what can I read on this menu? Or where is
Speaker 1: my friend's face in this crowd of people? You just
Speaker 1: want simple, high level answers to important questions. You want
Speaker 1: the abstractions, not the details. So your brain takes in
Speaker 1: enormous amounts of data, but what you want is the headline.
Speaker 1: In Silicon Valley where I live, for example, all my
Speaker 1: venture capitalist friends talk about this as pattern matching. They
Speaker 1: have thousands of new companies coming in to give them pitches,
Speaker 1: and in each of those pitches there are a million
Speaker 1: details that they can't know, but they think, you know.
Speaker 1: In my career, I've seen all these pitches and patterns emerge.
Speaker 1: I don't even know why. I sometimes feel like, wow,
Speaker 1: this team of founders is really great, or this team
Speaker 1: of founders is never going to make it, even though
Speaker 1: the idea seems strong. So those assessments rely on their intuition,
Speaker 1: and what they're trying to do is make their intuition
Speaker 1: good and refine it and refine it with practice. So
Speaker 1: in many situations. In all of our lives, we have
Speaker 1: lots of practice at something and we see a new
Speaker 1: situation and we make an assessment like yes or no,
Speaker 1: or good or bad, or take it or leave it.
Speaker 1: And the extraordinary thing about brains is that they can
Speaker 1: summarize a complex situation and say, look, although there are
Speaker 1: a million details here, the big picture is that you
Speaker 1: should approach that or avoid that. And you rarely have
Speaker 1: access to the details about why. Sometimes you might think
Speaker 1: you have access, but that is often just a retrospective story. Now,
Speaker 1: in neuroscience jargon call this unconscious inference, meaning you are
Speaker 1: inferring something about the situation and you're not doing it consciously,
Speaker 1: presumably because of the amount of data that is involved.
Speaker 1: And in popular parlance we call this intuition. But intuition
Speaker 1: sometimes gets a bad name because it's often hijacked by
Speaker 1: spiritual guru types who say you should always trust your intuition.
Speaker 1: Now here's the truth. You should not always trust your intuition.
Speaker 1: After all, your intuition is not a perfect predictor. In
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley, for example, four out of ten companies that
Speaker 1: are backed by those venture capitalists, they lose money or
Speaker 1: they go bankrupt, and many times the intuitive decisions that
Speaker 1: we make, let's say about relationships, turn out to be
Speaker 1: bad decisions. Just because the computations are happening under the
Speaker 1: hood and they're vast and complex, it doesn't mean they're
Speaker 1: guaranteed to be correct. Intuition is quite often wrong or
Speaker 1: makes a decision based on things that you wouldn't feel
Speaker 1: proud of doing if you had access to it. For example,
Speaker 1: what if your intuition tells you not to sell your
Speaker 1: house to this guy, but it's because of some deep down,
Speaker 1: unconscious racism that you weren't even aware of. What if
Speaker 1: your intuition tells you that there's something creepy about that
Speaker 1: guy over there, and you don't want to do business
Speaker 1: with him, and you say, look, I'm just trusting my
Speaker 1: gut on this one. But it turns out the poor
Speaker 1: guy has early Parkinson's disease, and so as a result,
Speaker 1: he's unable to make expressive facial expressions and instead his
Speaker 1: face is mostly blank, and that creeps you out because
Speaker 1: you don't get what's happening. Because let's say you're not
Speaker 1: a clinician. Or what if you're sitting on a jury
Speaker 1: and you think there's something about this guy that makes
Speaker 1: me feel like he should be put away for a
Speaker 1: long time. But it turns out it's because he's not
Speaker 1: handsome but ugly. There's an extensive litery sure on this
Speaker 1: that ugly people get longer sentences than good looking people.
Speaker 1: So the idea that we should always trust our intuition
Speaker 1: turns out to be mistaken. But the good news is
Speaker 1: it turns out that we can be a little bit
Speaker 1: smarter about when to look to our intuition or ignore it.
Speaker 1: Researchers have been working to figure out the circumstances under
Speaker 1: which your intuition might be more trustworthy or less trustworthy.
Speaker 1: So for this I decided to have a conversation with
Speaker 1: my friend and colleague Joel Pearson. Joel's a professor of
Speaker 1: cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Speaker 1: He's recently written a book about this called The Intuition Toolkit.
Speaker 1: So Joel and I sat down together to dig into
Speaker 1: this topic. Joel tell us about intuition, Yeah, so a
Speaker 1: topic I love.
Speaker 2: We've been studying it for over a decade now, and
Speaker 2: I've recently just published a book the Intuition Toolkit. So
Speaker 2: a decade ago we started looking at the landscape of intuition,
Speaker 2: and people define it as a spiritual thing. Other people
Speaker 2: in psychology and neuroscience defind it very very differently. You
Speaker 2: have all these different definitions. So I wanted to come
Speaker 2: up with a clear definition, the most practical and what
Speaker 2: I think is the most useful definition, and that is
Speaker 2: the productive learnt use of unconscious information for better decisions
Speaker 2: and actions.
Speaker 1: By the way, does intuition always give better this is me?
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, that's how I'm so. So this was part
Speaker 3: of the problem.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to introduce a couple of words. So
Speaker 2: this is what I did.
Speaker 3: At the beginning.
Speaker 2: I came up with another word called misintuition. Right, I know,
Speaker 2: it sounds like a miss universe contest, but it's not.
Speaker 2: I wanted a word that so I wanted to sort
Speaker 2: of split apart the misfiring of intuition when it goes wrong,
Speaker 2: because there are times when you should absolutely not use
Speaker 2: it and other times where it is useful. So I
Speaker 2: wanted to split that apart and came up with this
Speaker 2: other word misintuition and intuition. So that's why I define
Speaker 2: intuition as a productive use right of unconscious information and
Speaker 2: it's learnt, right, So we can't we'll get to in
Speaker 2: a second, I'm sure, but you can only use intuition
Speaker 2: really for something you have experience with and that turns
Speaker 2: out to be important.
Speaker 1: So give us, give us more of a sense of
Speaker 1: this then. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the example I like to give is you walk
Speaker 2: into a cafe, right, and you at the second you
Speaker 2: walk through the door, your brain's processing a thousand different things, right,
Speaker 2: the music, what the staff are wearing, if there's tablecloths,
Speaker 2: no tablecloths, the temperature, how clean the floor is, smells, this,
Speaker 2: the hundreds of things, and you're not consciously aware of them,
Speaker 2: all right, and as you walk in, you're going to go, yeah,
Speaker 2: let's get coffee here, or let's go across the road
Speaker 2: to the other place, right, And that people are going
Speaker 2: to sometimes will report as they don't know why, but
Speaker 2: this is something off that they felt sometimes in the gut, right,
Speaker 2: the gut response.
Speaker 3: That's kind of the way I tend to introduce intuition.
Speaker 2: And what's happening in that those few seconds the second
Speaker 2: as you walk in the door, is that things in
Speaker 2: the environment are triggering positive or negative associations, and that
Speaker 2: is based on past learning, right, the classic Pavlovs dogs,
Speaker 2: classical conditioning.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So you go to enough cafes where it's really hot
Speaker 2: in there and there's bad music and this coffee is terrible,
Speaker 2: your brain will learn that. Whether you consciously remember that
Speaker 2: or not, your brain will start to learn these associations.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: If you get food poisoning and sick, it's going to
Speaker 2: learn it really quickly. And so you go to enough cafes,
Speaker 2: you go to one hundreds of thousands, your brain will
Speaker 2: learn which cues the environment predicts good or bad food
Speaker 2: or coffee. And that's what's happening. So all the things
Speaker 2: in the environment are triggering red flag, green flag, right,
Speaker 2: and you feel it and you don't know why, right,
Speaker 2: and you either get the coffee or you go somewhere else. Yes,
Speaker 2: So that's I think the best way to think about it.
Speaker 1: Cool. And this is why I think about intuition as
Speaker 1: long as it's just having a wide angle lens on
Speaker 1: the There's a lot of interest in neuroscience obviously about
Speaker 1: cognition where you're deciding, okay, what's the next chest move
Speaker 1: here and so on? And that's what all lots of
Speaker 1: AI is about, is how do I make a really
Speaker 1: smart decision here? But but in a sense with intuition,
Speaker 1: it's I'm going to take in the whole cafe, and
Speaker 1: you know something's going to bubble up saying go or stay.
Speaker 1: So I'm really interested in this issue of misintuition though, because,
Speaker 1: as you phrase it, because there are lots of times
Speaker 1: that people have intuitions that are totally incorrect, like, oh,
Speaker 1: this coffee shop, there's something that creeps me out about that.
Speaker 1: Like the guy in the corner there, I feel like
Speaker 1: he's a mass murderer, even though maybe the guy has
Speaker 1: you know, something like Parkinson's disease, where people have you know,
Speaker 1: blank facial expressions. I've seen this a bunch of times
Speaker 1: where someone has Parkinson's and other people think, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: that guy's creepy. There's something wrong with that guy because
Speaker 1: they don't know about it. Right, Okay, So so give
Speaker 1: us a sense of misintuition and how when you feel
Speaker 1: like his intuition mostly right, mostly wrong, totally random.
Speaker 3: So I'm glad you are.
Speaker 2: So the second half of the book, he unpacks based
Speaker 2: on these five rules and I use the word the
Speaker 2: acronym smile so people can try to remember this right.
Speaker 2: So the first half of the book is really about
Speaker 2: the science we've done, the lab, how you measure it,
Speaker 2: how you create the lab. And it's not always good.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you should use it, sometimes you shouldn't. And that's
Speaker 2: what the rules unpack. So let's sort of tell people
Speaker 2: when it's safe to trust their intuition. And an example
Speaker 2: of this I give often is Steve Jobs, who talked
Speaker 2: about using his intuition at Apple, both for product design
Speaker 2: and running the company in all different you know, and
Speaker 2: he was a master at it. He went to India
Speaker 2: and studied it. He was really into it when it
Speaker 2: came to his health decisions later in life, and some
Speaker 2: of his other decisions not so much right. And that's
Speaker 2: interesting because.
Speaker 1: Wait, can you impack that for people who don't know
Speaker 1: about his health.
Speaker 2: So he died from cancer in the end, he actually
Speaker 2: or his doctors and his family wanted him to get treatment,
Speaker 2: to get an operation, and he said no, he didn't
Speaker 2: want to get have that sort of be invaded surgically
Speaker 2: like that, and he put off the treatment, put it off,
Speaker 2: and put it off, until it's basically too late. And
Speaker 2: this idea that intuition is specific to a particular environment
Speaker 2: or context, and it makes sense because the learning that
Speaker 2: I'm saying that it seems to be based on is
Speaker 2: context specific. And this is one of those rules is
Speaker 2: actually the E at the end of smile for environment.
Speaker 3: So if you learn.
Speaker 2: It at you know, you craft your intuition expertly at work.
Speaker 2: When you go home, when you're on holiday in a
Speaker 2: different context, different environment, that learning is not going to
Speaker 2: apply so well. So we need to be careful and
Speaker 2: we change the environment because when you learn something in
Speaker 2: the environment gets sort of attached to that. Right when
Speaker 2: you're studying for the exam in your bedroom, not only
Speaker 2: are you learning all information, you're learning the information imprinted
Speaker 2: to your bedroom. So we have to be careful with that.
Speaker 2: So that's an example of where you can be led astray.
Speaker 2: Now s the beginning smile is self awareness, and that
Speaker 2: really is a trigger for emotions. So we shouldn't trust
Speaker 2: our intuition when we're emotional and we're stressed, anxious, or
Speaker 2: depressed for a number of reasons for something called arousalor misattribution,
Speaker 2: which is something so humans are not very good at
Speaker 2: understanding where particular feelings or stress or emotion come from,
Speaker 2: and we can go we can deep dive into this.
Speaker 2: This classic experiments in psychology that are now a lot
Speaker 2: of data to support this. Right, But basically, you know,
Speaker 2: if there was a snake right here on the floor,
Speaker 2: we both get adrenaline, we'd both be sweating and scared
Speaker 2: of the snake, and then later on we confuse that
Speaker 2: and say, man, that podcast was amazing, Right, we'd confuse
Speaker 2: the emotion for the situation with the emotion from the snake.
Speaker 2: We're just bad to understanding the source of these things.
Speaker 2: So that's a number one rule. If you're emotional stressed, don't.
Speaker 3: Follow your intuition. Just just put it aside, follow the
Speaker 3: logic as best you can. Right. So that's s.
Speaker 2: Then M is for mastery, and that we mentioned learning before,
Speaker 2: So that's really that you need to build these associations
Speaker 2: in your brain between the environment, the triggers, and good
Speaker 2: or bad outcomes. So you've never played chess before, you
Speaker 2: can't sit down and just be a grand master intuitive
Speaker 2: chess player, right. Your brain needs to learn the associate
Speaker 2: between patterns outcomes, what's good what's bad. Likewise, for anything
Speaker 2: so you need to sort of put the time in
Speaker 2: and build that experience. How much experience ten thousand hours,
Speaker 2: not so much, We don't know, right, depends how emotional
Speaker 2: things are.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: We know that something like PTSD, you can learn something
Speaker 2: very strong, you know, in a moment it was just
Speaker 2: good or bad coffee. It's going to take a lot
Speaker 2: of learning, a lot of iterations. But if something is
Speaker 2: highly emotional, then you'll learn it very very quickly. So yeah,
Speaker 2: so you need to have experience with that. And now
Speaker 2: it's a really interesting one. I is really for impulses,
Speaker 2: but also addiction. So I heard started hearing from people
Speaker 2: that things that have addictive nature, so you alcohol, drugs,
Speaker 2: but also social media, checking your email. So behavioral addictions.
Speaker 2: People have this urge is strong pull towards them, and
Speaker 2: they can confuse that or call it intuition. But I
Speaker 2: didn't want that to be part of intuition. I think
Speaker 2: that's something a little bit different. So one of the
Speaker 2: rules is just to stay clear of anything that's addictive
Speaker 2: and don't confuse that with intuition, right, including food. And
Speaker 2: that's a controversial one because there's a whole movement of
Speaker 2: intuitive eating, which is a hot topic which we can
Speaker 2: deep dive into it.
Speaker 1: What is that movement? So there's a whole idea.
Speaker 2: There's all these books on intuitive eating, and this is
Speaker 2: this idea that you just follow how you feel about
Speaker 2: the food, right, you and you eat as much as
Speaker 2: you want, whenever you want, and your body will naturally
Speaker 2: come to an equilibrium more or less, right, I'm summarizing it.
Speaker 2: The problem is modern food's highly engineered, right, billions of
Speaker 2: dollars going into making food basically like a drug addictive,
Speaker 2: and that's a very dangerous thing. I'm against that idea
Speaker 2: unless you're out in the country and you're eating a
Speaker 2: whole food diet and maybe that that can work. And
Speaker 2: then L is for low probability, but it really it's
Speaker 2: for anything around probabilities and numbers.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So psychology textbooks are full of examples where people just
Speaker 2: get these probability tests and it's completely wrong, right, And
Speaker 2: our brains just don't process numbers very well, or probabilities particularly,
Speaker 2: And so again, anything around probabilities and numbers, stay away
Speaker 2: from intuition, right.
Speaker 3: Just don't don't use your intuition for anything around numbers.
Speaker 1: Right, as in, I don't want to drive over the
Speaker 1: bridge because I've seen lots of stories of bridges collapsing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, it's terribly low probability. People get scared to
Speaker 1: get the gut feeling of not wanting to do that.
Speaker 3: Is so I live in Sydney.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I'll call it the shark attack rule right where
Speaker 2: the sharks, you know, I think you're more likely to
Speaker 2: be get this For an AUSSI stat more likely to
Speaker 2: be injured by a kangaroo than a shark, right, and
Speaker 2: certainly more likely to be hurt in a car crash
Speaker 2: than a shark. But people don't think twice about getting
Speaker 2: in the car or patting a kangaroo, but they'll be
Speaker 2: you know, once you start imagining a sharks, you know,
Speaker 2: in the water, then you get reoody scared of it.
Speaker 2: So for a range offer reasons, we're just not good
Speaker 2: at following the numbers and probabilities. Emotions other things creep in.
Speaker 2: So anything around that don't follow the feelings, don't follow intuition.
Speaker 2: Stick with the numbers and the probabilities, you know.
Speaker 1: One example that here in Silicon Valley is with self
Speaker 1: driving cars. The probabilities and self driving cars are terrific,
Speaker 1: as in you're much less likely to get an accident
Speaker 1: with those. But there's something about control and the other
Speaker 1: emotions involved there that make it so people just can't
Speaker 1: do it. They'd rather have a much higher risk drive
Speaker 1: than do something safe.
Speaker 3: Yeah it's a funny, Yeah, yeah, it's an odd thing.
Speaker 1: So the l is what does the advice to people though,
Speaker 1: that if it's a low probability event, don't try.
Speaker 2: Anything abound probabilities, smoking, climate change, or anything around numbers
Speaker 2: and probabilities. Don't feel it, don't like follow the numbers,
Speaker 2: do the math, just follow whatever the numbers say, don't
Speaker 2: try and feel your way through it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: And then E was the environment.
Speaker 2: So I mentioned before with Steve Jobs that the learning
Speaker 2: is context and environment specific.
Speaker 3: So when you're on.
Speaker 2: Holiday, right, I'm in a different country now, you know,
Speaker 2: I look to the wrong side, and I feel like
Speaker 2: I should look to the to the to the right
Speaker 2: and right the cars coming from the left here in America,
Speaker 2: and they're all you know, when there's there's all kinds
Speaker 2: of very subtle things like that when you're traveling that
Speaker 2: I have to really pay attention to, not just do
Speaker 2: my usual intuitive thing and sort of think, go back
Speaker 2: to sort of first principles and think logically about what
Speaker 2: I'm doing.
Speaker 3: So that's smile.
Speaker 2: There's these five rules that fall out of the science
Speaker 2: around intuition.
Speaker 1: It's just so curiosity. Why did you call it smile
Speaker 1: instead of miles or slime?
Speaker 3: My wife helped me with that. Essentially came up with that.
Speaker 3: I wanted something positive because a lot of.
Speaker 2: The rules that don't do this don't use your intuition,
Speaker 2: Like I like the idea of smile before you intuit,
Speaker 2: smile before you use your intuition, and the idea that
Speaker 2: of people to have a daily practice and you know,
Speaker 2: getting really used to those rules, like you know, going
Speaker 2: to the gym or something in practicing right, I suggest
Speaker 2: people have a sort of an intuition practice diary or
Speaker 2: a table where they'll keep track of things and learn
Speaker 2: to use it. So one of the things that people,
Speaker 2: you know, small decisions. They may not use intuition when
Speaker 2: they're going to get married or get divorced, or change
Speaker 2: live somewhere else, move overseas or a new job or
Speaker 2: leave a job. All of a sudden, they start talking about, oh,
Speaker 2: my gut says this, I'm feeling it this way or
Speaker 2: that way. And they're not well practiced at following these
Speaker 2: kind of rules. Might they might be finding highly anxious, right,
Speaker 2: and their intuition.
Speaker 3: Is not going to work when they're anxious.
Speaker 2: So I like the idea of starting with small decisions
Speaker 2: and working up to the larger ones.
Speaker 1: That's excellent. That's so good because people write about intuition,
Speaker 1: and I feel like they often give way too much
Speaker 1: credit to intuition. So what you're doing is so important
Speaker 1: to say, look, here are the times, listen do it
Speaker 1: here at the times not to listen to it, because
Speaker 1: you might drift into the realm of misintuition there, which
Speaker 1: people do all the time. And obviously, people with anxieties
Speaker 1: about things or misapprehensions about things, including you know, whatever
Speaker 1: it is, maybe they're divorced from reality or they just
Speaker 1: overrepresent something. People will often follow their gut but incorrectly.
Speaker 1: So this is a really important thing that you're doing here.
Speaker 2: If you're anxious about flying and getting on the plane,
Speaker 2: it's probably not your intuition telling you something is going
Speaker 2: to happen, unless you know you're a mechanic and line
Speaker 2: mechanic and you're an expert, right, It's not that it's something.
Speaker 2: It's just your anxiety, so don't confuse the two.
Speaker 1: How do you measure this in the lab?
Speaker 2: Yes, we started off on this quest almost a decade
Speaker 2: ago now, well actually no a decade, so we had
Speaker 2: this sort of rough definition of intuition and we've been
Speaker 2: studying consciousness. So we do a lot of consciousness research
Speaker 2: in my lab, and we have ways of rendering things unconscious.
Speaker 2: What do I mean by that? So we have a
Speaker 2: way to show people a picture in one eye and
Speaker 2: then flash bright colors in the other eye, and that
Speaker 2: can render that picture completely unconscious. So it's kind of
Speaker 2: like just me doing this, right, I see you and
Speaker 2: this eye and my hand there.
Speaker 1: For the audio audience, he's covering his one of his eyes.
Speaker 2: Yes, so if you're on YouTube there, yes, So that
Speaker 2: puts the visual system into this binoch the rival with
Speaker 2: this this state of competition. Right, And if the thing
Speaker 2: and in the other eyes is bright enough and you
Speaker 2: make it flicker, you'll never see the picture in the
Speaker 2: other eye.
Speaker 1: So let me just unpack this, which is that you've
Speaker 1: got two eyes. They normally fuse their picture so you
Speaker 1: see the world, but in fact, you can in the
Speaker 1: laboratory give a stimulus to one eye and different stimulus
Speaker 1: to the other eye, and you can have them compete.
Speaker 1: And by doing this cleverally, you can make it so
Speaker 1: that the input going into one eye you're not conscious of,
Speaker 1: even though your visual system still sees it, just FAPs exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I call this inception, and we're doing it with
Speaker 2: emotional images. I call it emotional inception, like the Christopher
Speaker 2: Nolan film. Right, So we don't we're not hacking dreams
Speaker 2: or anything, but we're getting and this is what we need.
Speaker 2: It's like the ingredients you need if you want to
Speaker 2: study intuition. How can you get something into the brain
Speaker 2: and you know it's unconscious And this is a way
Speaker 2: of doing that. So what we do is we show
Speaker 2: people sort of nasty images snakes, spiders, sharks, guns, these
Speaker 2: kind of things in one eye and we have a bright,
Speaker 2: flickering stimulus to the other eye and so they never
Speaker 2: see the scary image, but we know their brain is
Speaker 2: processing it. We can put a little thing around their
Speaker 2: finger and we can see that they start sweating a
Speaker 2: little bit more in those conditions when there's an emotional
Speaker 2: thing there, so we know what is being processed. So
Speaker 2: that's the first ingredient. The second ingredient that needs to
Speaker 2: be a decision right to see making. So at the
Speaker 2: same time, we have this noisy cloud of dots just
Speaker 2: moving all over the place on the screen, a bit
Speaker 2: like the old school analog TVs right, but there's that
Speaker 2: fuzzy snow so a bit like that, but it's slightly
Speaker 2: drifting left or right a little bit more, but it's
Speaker 2: kind of hard to pick if it's going left or right.
Speaker 2: So super simple, all people have to do is say, oh,
Speaker 2: it's going left.
Speaker 3: That's it. That's the end of a trial.
Speaker 2: Then we do it again and again, and so they
Speaker 2: don't know we're doing this, but at the same time
Speaker 2: they're deciding whether it's moving or left or right, we're
Speaker 2: showing them a positive or a negative image. And then
Speaker 2: what we see over time is their brain starts to
Speaker 2: associate the positive or negative with the direction, and their
Speaker 2: performance starts to go up.
Speaker 3: They get better and better at it.
Speaker 2: Right, their reaction times get faster and faster, so their
Speaker 2: accuracy goes up, their responsors are faster, and if you
Speaker 2: ask them how confident they are, their confidence goes up
Speaker 2: as well. Right, And then if you give them a
Speaker 2: questionnaire and say, how do you make decisions in everyday life?
Speaker 3: You know, outside the lab, the.
Speaker 2: People that are report making more intuitor decisions are much
Speaker 2: better or they get it more of a boost from
Speaker 2: these unconscious images. So so I know to a lot
Speaker 2: of people they're like, wow, this is kind of a
Speaker 2: strange way to measure intuition. And it is, but I
Speaker 2: think it's an interesting sort of technology in a way
Speaker 2: to measure and dissect something in the lab so we
Speaker 2: can understand it, right, but it is different to how a.
Speaker 3: Lot of people may think about intuition.
Speaker 1: And tell us about intuition and AI.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So at the end of the book and the
Speaker 2: very last the last chapter, I started talking about this
Speaker 2: and it's something that came up early and journalists would
Speaker 2: ask this question. And I realized that the way I'm
Speaker 2: defining it right, unconscious learning. Things in the world become
Speaker 2: associated with positive negative outcomes in your brain. Unconscious learning.
Speaker 2: That's kind of how these new versions of AI operate.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: We don't think they're conscious and they're learning, so unconscious
Speaker 2: learning and they're learning this thing predicts this thing positive
Speaker 2: negative outcome. So there's something interesting between those two that
Speaker 2: it's just a nice parallel there, and that's interesting itself.
Speaker 2: The second is the question of will we be able
Speaker 2: to outsource our intuition to an AI assistant?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: And could we you.
Speaker 2: Know, if we have all these wearables and we're going
Speaker 2: to get a lot more of them soon, could the
Speaker 2: AI use all these wearables to basically tell us what
Speaker 2: our intuition is saying?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: So can we outsource it? And this, you know, would
Speaker 2: be interesting to everyone, but i'd be interesting to certain
Speaker 2: populations who don't have people with mental disorders or addiction
Speaker 2: is one interesting area where we know decision making doesn't
Speaker 2: work that well in people that have an addiction, and
Speaker 2: intuition cerainly doesn't work. So could you outsource intuition to
Speaker 2: an AI, your personal AI assistant?
Speaker 3: I think it's a really fascinating question.
Speaker 1: So we're actually doing something at my company in your sensory,
Speaker 1: which is an interesting version of this. So, just as
Speaker 1: one example, there were some students at us SEE who
Speaker 1: took the risk band and for people with autism who
Speaker 1: have a hard time reading the emotional of the person
Speaker 1: they're talking to, the wristband listens in real time and
Speaker 1: makes a machine learning decision, Oh the person is happy, sad, angry,
Speaker 1: things like that, and then just buzzes to tell you ways,
Speaker 1: oh that person. So if you're a kid with autism
Speaker 1: who can't read that, you're just being told the answer
Speaker 1: to that.
Speaker 3: And do you see learning? Do they get better as
Speaker 3: I learned?
Speaker 1: I don't know yet, but presumably because you're just telling
Speaker 1: them like, hey, this guy's angry, so to adjust your
Speaker 1: behavior appropriately. So it's just a memorization thing. But I'll
Speaker 1: give you another example. Something we did is we got
Speaker 1: these smart watches that measure horr ate and herd variability
Speaker 1: and galvinx can response and so on, and we use
Speaker 1: the API to take that data out and feed it
Speaker 1: into this wristband that vibrates in different ways so that
Speaker 1: these invisible states of your body can become visible to you.
Speaker 1: So you can actually feel, oh, it's not this thing
Speaker 1: that is making you know. It's not the cafe's fault,
Speaker 1: but it's that I drank too much coffee earlier, or
Speaker 1: whatever the issue is. You can start actually reading these
Speaker 1: signals from your bodies in ways that are typically invisible
Speaker 1: to us. I'll tell you the really interesting spread we did,
Speaker 1: which is we fed that data through the Internet to
Speaker 1: the risk band. And the reason we did that is
Speaker 1: so that, for example, your spouse could wear the watch
Speaker 1: and you're wearing the vibrating wristband, so you're feeling your
Speaker 1: spouse's physiology, so you know she's feeling nervous or stressed,
Speaker 1: even if you're on the other side of the world.
Speaker 3: I love it, she'll cut the argument.
Speaker 2: But no, this is this must have an application for
Speaker 2: you know, emotional intelligence and emotional awareness. So people have
Speaker 2: some people don't have good emotional awareness. They're not aware
Speaker 2: when they're angry or stressed, right, So this is part
Speaker 2: of that s that first rule for using intuition. People
Speaker 2: just don't realize when they're stressed or anxious. But this
Speaker 2: could be a really interesting way of sort of training
Speaker 2: people up in this self awareness of their own physiology.
Speaker 1: I like them, you know. I think about the time.
Speaker 1: I just heard a statistic this morning. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's true, but it's true. Truth to you though,
Speaker 1: But which is that eighty five percent of the jobs
Speaker 1: that will exist when our kids are adults don't even
Speaker 1: exists yet, And so who knows if the number is
Speaker 1: exactly right, But it strikes me as Wow, what a
Speaker 1: world we're entering into. But in this context, the world
Speaker 1: of maybe everyone's just going to have the opportunity be
Speaker 1: much more emotionally intelligent because we'll all tap into this
Speaker 1: stuff and get these signals and no because my you know,
Speaker 1: Apple Vision proglasses or something. We'll say, hey, eaglman, your
Speaker 1: heart rates going up. You're gotving skin response to spiking.
Speaker 1: And I'll say, oh, okay, I wouldn't have known that,
Speaker 1: but now, thank goodness, I'm being told that piece of cake.
Speaker 2: I hope so, because I mean this data showing that
Speaker 2: emotional intelligence has actually gone down of the last decade.
Speaker 3: And it's been linked to tech use.
Speaker 2: So it's hard to pull out the causation here, but
Speaker 2: there's some that it suggested the more young people use tech,
Speaker 2: they're lower their emotional intelligences.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Well good, so we'll rescue it with tech things.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. Cool. Yeah. I think I
Speaker 1: think this as you and I study our whole careers.
Speaker 1: The brain is this entire cosmos happening in there. There's
Speaker 1: so much information that you're picking up from the world
Speaker 1: you have no access to. We are so low bandwidth
Speaker 1: in terms of our conscious understanding of any of this stuff.
Speaker 1: But because the data is in there, it should be extractable.
Speaker 1: And what that means is that what intuition becomes in
Speaker 1: fifteen years is maybe you know, you'll write a sequel
Speaker 1: to the book with this new world.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean interception, right, That's kind of what
Speaker 2: it is. It's you can think of it as as
Speaker 2: our bodies, our physiology tapping in, so our bodies have
Speaker 2: this access to the unconscious information in our brains, which
Speaker 2: sounds like a funny way to put it. Our bodies
Speaker 2: get access to something we don't if we use our consciousness,
Speaker 2: but it kind of does so by tapping into your
Speaker 2: gut response, your heart rate, your sweating or not, you're
Speaker 2: getting this extra source of information, the unconscious.
Speaker 3: And it's kind of like that.
Speaker 2: It's just sort of using interception, this internal perceptual stet
Speaker 2: of the body to get access to extra information. And
Speaker 2: who wouldn't want that if we can trust.
Speaker 1: It exactly, because maybe you can think of an example,
Speaker 1: thinking off the top of my head, where we confuse
Speaker 1: our emotional state or intuition about what's you know, we
Speaker 1: misinterpret what's happening you gave the example before and if
Speaker 1: there's a snake on the floor and then and everything. Wow,
Speaker 1: that was a really exciting podcast. But we're we're mixing,
Speaker 1: we're confleting some things. I mean, it is a very
Speaker 1: exciting podcast.
Speaker 2: But a great story, a great story from the book
Speaker 2: is I went on a date many before I got married,
Speaker 2: and it was a first date and we went rock
Speaker 2: climbing one of those indoor rock climbing gyms, right, and
Speaker 2: we're climbing and falling and blaying and then we swap
Speaker 2: and it's exciting. It's like wow, and we were like,
Speaker 2: the chemistry is amazing. And next time we meet up,
Speaker 2: it's like, huh, not so much. Turns out we were
Speaker 2: not suited for each other at all. And I was like,
Speaker 2: but it felt so amazing that first date, and it
Speaker 2: struck It puzzled me for years, and I was like, ah,
Speaker 2: arousal misattribution, that's exactly what's going on. All the adrenaline
Speaker 2: from the falling and the climbing. We thought it was
Speaker 2: coming from each other and it wasn't.
Speaker 1: So yeah, right, aren't There are these studies where you
Speaker 1: have people crossing a rope bridge over a cliff and
Speaker 1: you have the female assistant with the clipboard who asks
Speaker 1: the person questions while they're on the rope bridge, and
Speaker 1: then later the question is something about like, hey, would
Speaker 1: you would you like to get her number and go
Speaker 1: on a date something like that, versus the exact same
Speaker 1: assistant with the same clipboard asks the same questions but
Speaker 1: in a boring situation on campus.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's the same thing. Yeah, the rickety bridge experience.
Speaker 2: It's very family rickety bridge experiment. And yeah that people
Speaker 2: just confuse these feelings with drenaline from the height with
Speaker 2: a person in front of them.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, yes, So we're entering a very exciting future
Speaker 1: as we get better sensors and better AI being able
Speaker 1: to essentially summarize things and tell them to our low
Speaker 1: band with conscious mind and just say, hey, pal, here's
Speaker 1: how you're feeling. You know, don't confuse this. So maybe
Speaker 1: you'll have to add another letter to your smile.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think absolutely, David.
Speaker 2: I think the things we can imagine now this is
Speaker 2: like a passion of mine in my labs is measuring
Speaker 2: things in the mind that we thought were too hard
Speaker 2: to measure, right, And I call it like a blood
Speaker 2: test for the mind. We want objective, reliable measurements of
Speaker 2: mental things like a blood test that we can rely on.
Speaker 2: When you interview someone, give them a questionnaire. It's good,
Speaker 2: but it's not that reliable. We need this objective test.
Speaker 2: It's a different way of thinking about tech and technology,
Speaker 2: but it can be done now.
Speaker 3: We can do this now.
Speaker 1: The book is The Intuition Toolkit. And thank you so
Speaker 1: much for me to Joel.
Speaker 3: I'll pleasure David.
Speaker 2: And before we go, I want to say thank you
Speaker 2: for inspiring me with expanding what academia can be and
Speaker 2: writing books and TV shows and companies and all the
Speaker 2: cool things you do. I think it's groundbreaking in that
Speaker 2: you're breaking open the classic academic model.
Speaker 3: So thank you, Thank you, Joel.
Speaker 1: So that was Joel Pearson talking about his new book,
Speaker 1: The Intuition Toolkit, and now I want to bring it
Speaker 1: back to the big picture. I'm always struck by how
Speaker 1: much we do at the unconscious level that we don't
Speaker 1: have access to. And a couple of episodes ago, I
Speaker 1: was talking with Ed Katmull who's the founder of Pixar Films,
Speaker 1: and one of the topics we touched on in our conversation,
Speaker 1: which I didn't include in that episode was this topic
Speaker 1: of intuition, the kind of intuition that an animator might have.
Speaker 1: So here's a short clip from that conversation with Ed's
Speaker 1: thoughts about that.
Speaker 4: The ability to animate means you you understand motion and emotion,
Speaker 4: and you are observing things, and you're you're conveying things
Speaker 4: at a subconscious level, and that's not really a visualization
Speaker 4: element I know in the in the case of our
Speaker 4: our brains is that we take a lot of subtle clues,
Speaker 4: but we're taking them unconsciously. So the way we move
Speaker 4: our face.
Speaker 5: Or our lips or our body motion, we're kind of
Speaker 5: aware that we convey information to our body, but we
Speaker 5: don't know exactly what that is or how we do it.
Speaker 1: If you actually.
Speaker 4: Understand how important that is, and then a good animator
Speaker 4: will sort of get that and see it and then
Speaker 4: convey it if they can, if they put it in
Speaker 4: the animation, then people will see it and they'll get
Speaker 4: information at this level, not knowing that they're getting it.
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 4: One of my favorite examples in Twist Story two, where
Speaker 4: Jesse that the doll was very upset because her owner
Speaker 4: had actually discarded her. But while she was talking.
Speaker 1: She was taking your pigtail and she was twisting it.
Speaker 4: Almost nobody would notice that she would was twisting her pigtail.
Speaker 4: They wouldn't notice at a conscious level, but an unconscious level,
Speaker 4: that would mean that she's really torn up inside, along
Speaker 4: with the other things that are there. So we've got
Speaker 4: different levels of getting information from the world. There's the
Speaker 4: direct words we're saying, and sometimes the direct words we're
Speaker 4: saying are the opposite of what we really mean, and
Speaker 4: so you've got like that's one level, and the other
Speaker 4: is the body motion conveying something. That whole process means
Speaker 4: that the animator is observing these different levels and putting
Speaker 4: them into the character, and of course the actor also
Speaker 4: provides layers to that. And when you get all of
Speaker 4: that right, you have something which is complex and is interested,
Speaker 4: it's observing multiple levels and isn't just about the pictures, it's.
Speaker 1: About all of this coming together. That was Ed Catmull,
Speaker 1: founder of Pixar Films, talking about the intuition that's for
Speaker 1: an animator. Sometimes they can consciously articulate what they're up to,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they can't. But for a good animator, they
Speaker 1: pick up on those cues and they transmit those cues,
Speaker 1: sometimes all under the radar of consciousness. And of course
Speaker 1: these animators are working on areas where their intuition makes
Speaker 1: good sense because they have mastered their data and they're
Speaker 1: working in familiar and predictable contexts. So let's wrap up
Speaker 1: for today. Intuition is about putting together vast information that
Speaker 1: your brain has picked up on to give you a
Speaker 1: final nudge in one direction or another, and it's massively
Speaker 1: important for our functioning in the world. But we shouldn't
Speaker 1: romanticize it to believe that it's always correct and always
Speaker 1: to be listened to. Instead, we need to be clever
Speaker 1: about when to trust it and under what circumstances. As
Speaker 1: Joel suggests, we need to take into account whether we're
Speaker 1: feeling too emotional, in which case, don't trust you tuition.
Speaker 1: You need to master data before trusting your intuition on something.
Speaker 1: Don't mistake impulses an addiction for intuition, don't use your
Speaker 1: intuition for very low probability judgments, and you should really
Speaker 1: only trust your intuition in familiar and predictable contexts. In
Speaker 1: the end, each of us carries vast computational resources comparable
Speaker 1: to Google or Meta or Apple. But instead of it
Speaker 1: weighing eight ounces and us carrying in our back pocket,
Speaker 1: we have three pounds of this computational material and we
Speaker 1: lug it around on our shoulders the way that we
Speaker 1: carry other things that are heavy and important. This is
Speaker 1: all you have to make your decisions in the world,
Speaker 1: and think about it this way, in the same way
Speaker 1: that you might tell a student how to leverage the
Speaker 1: computational might of the Internet while retaining appropriate skeptic about
Speaker 1: some of the results. So it goes with the massive
Speaker 1: networked biological landscape of our own brains. It is up
Speaker 1: to us to learn how to become good users. Go
Speaker 1: to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and
Speaker 1: to find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts
Speaker 1: at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check
Speaker 1: out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos
Speaker 1: of each episode and to leave comments until next time.
Speaker 1: I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.