Going with your gut
There is a lot of self-talk that goes on within all of us. You know the kind of thing: “Stupid! Why did I have to mention the echidna?!” or “This shirt is really workin’ for me today! Smokin’!” Or, “Will I look like a pig if I eat that last biscotti? I really want it, though. Maybe if I create a distraction by setting the packets of sugar on fi re, I can grab it while everyone debates whether a latté will put out a sugar fire?”
While you may have not had those exact thoughts, you will have had others according to your own inner voice. Undoubtedly, your inner thoughts contribute to your outer decisions and behaviour, but they are not the entire story. There will also have been times when you have had a gut feeling or instinct about a situation that was beyond rational understanding. In a highly rational age, we tend to dismiss those gut instincts because they don’t fit a scientific model of sequential reasoning and understanding. However, the more we study gut feelings, the more we realise they contain valuable information and can lead to better decision-making.
Unconscious information
Did you know you have sensory organs that gather information? Your eyes, ears and taste buds all register what is happening in the world around you and send data to your brain, which synthesises that data and makes decisions. However, that is not the end of the data-gathering network that your brain has at its disposal.
Sensors in your muscles, organs and bones all send additional streams of data to a part of the brain called the insula. Signals such as breathing rate, heart rate and body temperature are all somatic markers that provide feedback to your brain. This accessing of unconscious information that occupies the fringes of your awareness is known as “interoception” and it forms a vital component of good decision-making. When you encounter a new situation, your brain is unconsciously scrolling through stored past experiences, looking for patterns that match your current experience. When a potentially relevant pattern is detected, it is your somatic markers that let your brain know, through changed breathing, altered heart rate or tensed muscles. This is all an unconscious process, but it translates into nameless feelings, your gut instinct.
On top of external stimulation and interoceptive data, your brain also accesses your current active thoughts. This treasure trove of data is integrated into a single snapshot of your condition at any given moment, and your brain sums it all up, making
decisions as to what a scenario means and what you need to do.
While the conscious parts of awareness are easy to value simply because you are aware of them, your unconscious, interoceptive gut feelings are less valued but equally as useful. In fact, a study published in the journal Cognition found that damage to a part of the prefrontal cortex in the brain can decouple the brain from interoceptive input, which does not reduce intellect but does impair the ability to learn from negative feedback. Your gut feelings, the interoceptive information that your body sends to your brain, are a vital part of how you navigate the world.
Your body knows
The stock market is by no means a warm and fuzzy place. Large sums of money are exchanged, and it is all based on rationality. Or is it? Research tells us that stock market traders are highly influenced by their gut feelings. One study from the journal Scientific Reports asked high-frequency male hedge fund traders to count their own heartbeats without touching their chest or pulse points. Compared to a control group of male university students, the stock market traders were much better at detecting and counting their own heartbeat. The traders with the most experience were even better than other traders, and ability to detect heart rate was directly correlated with how long they had been trading. The researchers made the point that gut feelings are important for stock market traders in making decisions and they will often go with what “feels right”, responding to their own internal interoceptive signals, even if they are not aware that they are doing so.
Research by Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has repeatedly shown that your body can work out patterns long before your brain does. If you can tap into that knowledge, then you can make better decisions, even when they are major life decisions.
Big decisions
Deciding to get married is a big call. Marriage can be a challenging business and should not be entered into lightly after sharing a couple of glasses of champagne and some tonsil hockey at your friend’s housewarming party. You do need to give some careful conscious thought to your choice of partner, but your gut feelings can play a vital role, too.
A study published in the journal Science asked 135 heterosexual couples who had been married less than six months to answer questions about their relationship. The individuals were asked to report their relationship satisfaction and the nature and degree of their relationship problems. The conscious attitudes of the participants toward their relationship were also assessed by asking them to choose adjectives to describe their relationship from opposing pairs such as “good” or “bad” and “satisfied” or “unsatisfied”.
That was fine as far as establishing the participants’ conscious attitudes, but the researchers wanted to establish their gut feelings, or unconscious attitudes, as well. To do this, they flashed a photo of the participant’s partner on a computer screen for one third of a second followed by a positive word like “awesome” or “terrific” or a negative word such as “awful” or “terrible”. The participants then had to press a key on a keyboard to indicate whether the word was positive or negative.
It has been established in other research that people who have a positive feeling about their spouse are quick to recognise positive words but slower to recognise negative words. Similarly, people with a negative attitude are quick to identify negative words but slower to identify positive words.
So having established the conscious and unconscious attitudes of the individuals, the researchers then charted the course of the couples’ relationships over the following years.
They found that what the individuals consciously said had no relationship to their marital happiness over time. However, people who had the most negative or even lukewarm unconscious attitudes reported the lowest levels of marital satisfaction four years later. It seems that gut feelings may be an accurate indicator of what will happen in a marriage.
Enhancing your interoception
There are natural individual differences in how attuned we are to our gut feelings. However, given how useful gut feelings can be, it is worth thinking about how you can optimise your own interoceptive abilities.
Mindfulness practices such as meditation and breathwork are aimed at stilling the conscious chatter of the mind to enable you to connect to what is happening within you, therefore allowing you to better access your gut feelings.
Activities such as yoga, gym work and any form of physical exercise can help you better access what your body is telling you. If you are fit, then your body mass index (BMI) lowers and your baseline heart rate drops. This physical fitness improves heart rate detection ability and connects you more to what your body is telling you.
The bacteria that exist in your gut, your microbiome, are vitally important to your wellbeing. Research has shown that your thoughts and feelings can be shaped by an interplay between your microbiome and your brain.
For instance, one study from the journal Neurogastroenterology & Motility examined differences in behaviour between adult mice that had normal bacteria in their gut compared to mice that had bacteria-free intestines. They found that the germ-free mice showed significantly more anxious behaviour than the mice with normal bacteria.
The researchers found that the bacteria present in the gut regulate the hormonal link between the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland and the adrenal glands. This is the “hormonal axis” involved in the stress response. They also showed that genes linked to learning and memory are altered in germ-free mice and they are altered in one of the brain’s central areas for memory and learning, the hippocampus. Having a healthy microbiome is essential for the flow of information between your gut and your brain. Eating foods rich in probiotics, such as natural or Greek yoghurt, and prebiotics, such as legumes and leeks, may well enhance your ability to detect your own gut feelings.
There is indeed a lot of talk going on within you, and not all of it is coming from your head. Your body is sending your brain a stream of additional information and those gut feelings can help you make decisions, so you would be wise, or wiser, to listen.
