On Intuition

The other day I met someone new at a wedding I was attending, and I noticed an excited flutter in my stomach. I felt physically relaxed around them, and sensed a bodily feeling of warmth as we chatted about our kids. I understood these feelings as an intuition about this person, a feeling of being drawn to them for reasons I could not yet explain in words. Such intuitive feelings have taken on a more central role in my own decision-making in the last five years, a major factor in my choice to change careers, for example, and I have noticed a similar trend in the culture around me. There is a growing focus on intuitive decision-making as a powerful and valid tool, following the centuries-long reign of rationality as the dominant mode of decision-making in the western world, and it has made it all the way to the heart of popular culture and capitalist thinking: I have seen it in Oprah, in Forbes, in a peppy article in the Harvard Business Review that advises business leaders to “leverage feelings and experience” in making business decisions.

I, for one, love the idea of intuition. I’m naturally drawn to it—you might even say that I have a gut feeling that intuition is the answer to a lot of my biggest questions. In particular, the idea of a woman’s intuition, as the writer of a newsletter called The Matriarchy, strikes a chord, and is an idea that I like to invoke in talking about the experience of being a woman engaging in modern work culture. I first encountered the idea of intuition-as-wisdom in alternative medicine communities, where the concepts of body-knowing have been nurtured and transported through time and space from eastern culture to today’s West. Listen to the somatic responses of your body, I learned, and you will be able to channel a wisdom that is beyond the reach of the mind. (I am struck by how different the concept of intuition feels when it is framed as something you “channel” versus something you “leverage.”)

 It seems to me, vaguely, aspirationally, that a society with matriarchal characteristics would tend to lean on intuitive thinking and body-informed decision-making. It is intuitive, for example, that a society needs strong postpartum support and universal early childhood education in order to grow healthy children enmeshed in healthy families. It is intuitive that unchecked economic growth at any cost will not ultimately improve the lives of most people in the US today. What a beautiful concept this is, intuition: a deep knowing that manifests within the body, without conscious thought; an automatic, internal response to a question that points us in the direction we know to be right at the most fundamental level. Oh yes. I could bathe in this idea, lather it all over myself, preach the gospel of intuition into the cold, rational masculinity that surrounds me, hold the warm lantern of intuition to light a path in the icy, logical world. My personal story is in some ways a microcosm for the cultural embrace of the idea—having spent a decade making myself sick in elite and well-respected work environments, I eventually tuned in to the not-so-subtle signs from my body telling me that I needed to get the hell out. I felt intuitively that those workplaces were bad for me, and I was certainly correct.

Furthermore, as a sufferer of a handful of poorly-understood and oft-dismissed autoimmune and gut disorders, in the absence of actual research on the subject, intuition has also provided me with a guiding light in the area of health. I have felt, deeply, intuitively, often after reading this or that article, that gluten has been contributing to my gut issues (the pro-inflammatory quality of the proteins), and that soy is bad for me (the estrogen-imitating compounds), and that pasteurized dairy is bad (the denaturing of the natural proteins that occurs during the heating process), and that sugar is bad (everything about it, really, and the addictiveness), and that citrus is bad (the acidity), and that meat is bad (the saturated fat and the carcinogens), and that large fish are bad (the mercury), and that kale is bad (the thallium), that melons are bad (high glycemic index) and, well, now I’m wondering, will there be any foods left to sustain me after my intuition is through with them? It appears my intuition might also be informed by whatever article I just read. Or, more broadly, it seems that my intuition has a permeable border with fear.

So wait, is intuition actually the amazing magical superpower I want it to be?

Gut feelings

The idea that knowledge comes from inside our bodies was woven into our language long before we had scientific evidence for it, in phrases like “gut feelings,” and “deeper knowing”. The explosion of recent research into gut function, the microbiome, and the gut-brain, brain-gut interaction has started to illuminate how such feelings come to be, and provide a scientific explanation for feelings of intuition. The most foundational recent discovery in this area has been the Enteric Nervous System (ENS), a network of 100 million neurons lining the gut. This outnumbers the neurons in the spine, and is often referred to as the “second brain” because of the complexity and size of the network. The brain and the ENS communicate bidirectionally, brain state affecting digestion, for example, and gut state influencing higher cognitive functions, including motivation and decision-making. These connections still sound a bit far-out to my ear, and the research is still early, but evidence strongly points to a genuine thinking mechanism outside of our heads, giving credence to ways we have long talked about non-rational decision-making, like “getting out of your head.” 

Here’s a fact that landed hard for me, as someone who has taken SSRIs on and off for two decades: 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut and research indicates that gut bacteria influence the production of serotonin and other neurotransmitters. Serotonin influences an individual’s feelings of happiness, ability to learn, sexual behavior, and more. The makeup of bacteria in the gut is increasingly being shown to alter brain chemistry—in one study, altering gut bacteria composition in mice made the animals more bold or more anxious. To even the most logical of minds, such facts suggest a strong likelihood that “gut” and “feelings” are interconnected. 

I have a friend who swears that his mood depends on whether he pooped recently (he knows this about himself, intuitively). Is this right? I don’t know. Seems like it could be. Maybe not. And this is where intuition gets tricky, because it’s not simple, it doesn’t have a clear set of rules, it’s not provable. Returning to one of my favorite themes: we live in a culture that dislikes uncertainty, and therefore a concept like intuition, with its nuance and complications and mysterious elements, can be processed in ways that try to turn it into something clean and clear-cut, and thereby distort it. As Meghan O’Rourke writes, “it seems that most people fall into one of two camps: they tend to either reject the role of the mind entirely or to embrace it so fully they erase the obdurate reality of the body.” Intuition is soft, illogical, unimportant. Intuition is supreme, unquestionable, godly. Or is it, somehow, both?

The many influences on intuition

In his book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk writes, “our gut feelings signal what is safe, life sustaining or threatening, even if we cannot quite explain why we feel a particular way. Our sensory interiority continuously sends us subtle messages about the needs of our organism.” Perfect, I would like to say; this is intuition, we are done here. I knew in my gut that Silicon Valley was hurting me, even though I could not fully explain why. 

But, Van der Kolk continues, the signals about what is safe or threatening start to go sideways in trauma sufferers, whose awful past experiences have primed them to perceive danger everywhere. “Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies. The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.” In other words, for someone who has experienced outsized threats, or an outsized amount of suffering, the gut response would tend to interpret situations as dangerous, even when they are safe. Even for people without severe trauma, it seems that we must all have vestiges of past experiences that can cause us to over-emphasize fear. For my part, my experiences with older male predators in Silicon Valley cause me to have a gut feeling of horror and disgust, a literal stomach ache, upon entering any new glossy tech office, even today. One could argue that this is an accurate intuition—those places are, generally, disgusting—or that my “intuition” about the office is an over-sensitive fear reaction that leads me to “intuitively” stay away from completely benign rooms where totally good things may very well be occurring. 

This is where some of the danger lies in today’s popularized conception of intuition: the risk of interpreting situations or facts from a posture of fear and calling it intuition. “Intuitively,” and particularly since having a baby, I have felt that putting plastic in the dishwasher is unsafe, even when it is labeled “dishwasher safe.” It makes sense to me, intuitively, that the phthalates and parabens in our shampoos and the triclosan in the detergent and toothpaste are dangerous (I believe I read these words somewhere), and that wearing shoes in the house tracks in chemicals from outdoors that could hurt my baby (I think I saw this in a pamphlet that the pediatrician gave us). I feel very strongly that natural products are better than synthetic ones, and I regularly pay more for wood and silicon stuff for my baby in order to avoid plastic. I have appropriated the idea of intuition in these cases to validate my fears. Eula Biss treats this topic beautifully in her stunning book on vaccination, On Immunity, vaccination being an area where this type of partial-fact intuition is heavily applied. “Intuitive toxicology,” is the term Biss digs up for this, saying “fear of toxicity strikes me as an old anxiety with a new name. Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world.” Biss reminds us that one out of every ten children died before their first birthdays in 1900, when everything was much more natural. 

Not to say chemicals aren’t bad, they often are, and I would bet based on my own lay-reading on the subject that the overwhelming amount of chemicals my body has been exposed to likely contributed in some way to my own autoimmune disease. Chemical exposure is a danger of our time, for sure. But how big a danger, and where, is really not something I can know or intuit with the information I currently have. The fact that people around me so often apply intuition in this area, myself included, tilts intuition away from being a name for valuable information from the gut, and towards fear-driven avoidance or confirmation bias about the evils of industrialization.

It can be even more complicated than that. It is intuitive to me, for example, that pesticides are awful for our world, and that I need to keep them away from my body and my baby’s body as much as possible, and further, that no one else’s baby should ever be exposed to them. But here’s a fact: coating interior house walls with DDT is one of the most effective ways to prevent malaria, and was used to eradicate the disease from the US in the middle of the 20th century. I can thank that pesticide for my freedom from worry about my baby getting malaria. Biss catalogs the downstream effects of the DDT ban, “…malaria has resurged in some countries where DDT is no longer used against mosquitoes. One African child in twenty dies from malaria, and more are left brain damaged by the disease.” So then you could say, my intuition about DDT is actually a manifestation of privileged place in the world. 

Perhaps the most embarrassing, raw, misguided, and desperate application of my “intuition” occurred during my infertility journey, when I repeatedly intuited that I was pregnant. I cannot overstate how convinced I was on day 29 of my menstrual cycle for eighteen straight months that I was one hundred percent definitely pregnant. I could feel it in the little aches and pains in my abdomen, I could see it in the quality of my vaginal discharge, I just knew, I knew in my gut, I knew because I am a woman, and when women tune in, we just know. (I was not pregnant any of those times.) There is a vibrant segment of the internet devoted to the decoding of this intuition, the Trying to Conceive (TTC) community, which I have written about before. There, we women-attempting-to-get-pregnant obsesses about, and take shelter in, so-called intuition, in order to achieve a few days or a week of light-filled hope each month before the recurrent fall of darkness, barrenness. For example, this representative anonymous comment: “I knew I was going to get pregnant at the beginning of my cycle…It was like I could feel the baby’s energy or soul or whatever you want to call it hovering just out of reach. I could sense it!” When women in this community do finally achieve pregnancy, many swear (online, in comment threads) that they just knew. I understand this impulse deeply; it was the same for me when I finally got pregnant, I just knew deep down, exactly the way I had known every other previous month. So then, intuition can also be a name for something I really, really want.

Then is intuition valuable at all?

I hate to undermine the validity of intuition, because it feels so right. But perhaps I’m not actually undermining it. I am defining the boundaries, and also exploring the factors that contribute to intuitive feelings. More and more evidence suggests that what I eat may be a contributor to my intuition, influencing the production of neurotransmitters, for example. My experience, and particularly experiences of trauma, are contributors to my intuition, as described by Van der Kolk. The facts I know are contributors, like learning recently that The Toxic Substances Control Act, passed in 1976 to protect us from toxic chemicals, grandfathered in 62,000 chemicals without testing them. What I want deeply contributes to my intuitions, like wanting really badly to be pregnant. Now I’m thinking that intuition, something we tend to view as intrinsic to ourselves, could also be considered a synthesis of one’s whole lifelong context and environment: it is linked to our diet and the accidents that happen to us, the decisions of our parents, the way our society treats us, the microbiomes of our childhood pets who seed our own guts, the facts fed to us by internet algorithms, our food system and chemical regulation—so many factors that it is now feeling a bit impossible to attribute one’s gut feelings only to one person’s individual deep-down wisdom.

Does this, actually, make the argument for the validity of intuition stronger? Taking this networked concept of intuition, we include in our gut feelings the opinions and influences of so many other beings. I like this framing, personally. It breaks me out of the reflexive individualism of Western culture—conceiving of intuition is my own deep knowing—and places my intuition within the context of everything around me, the corporeal response to environment and community and history. For me, this does not at all weaken the argument for listening to intuition, but strengthens it. Our bodies can synthesize certain information, it seems, in ways that our brains alone cannot, and provide us feedback based on everything we have known and experienced. That seems like an incredible power.

At the same time, this multi-input understanding of intuition also signals a need to interpret gut feelings with some caution, and within the context of one’s own experiences and fears. Traumatic experiences, for example, may cause us to have a bodily sense of threat that doesn’t match with reality. The embrace of intuition must be paired with a discussion about the limitations of the thing, as it can so easily be used as a shroud for bias or a manifestation of fear. 

I am rooting for the emergence of intuition in our culture, and I’m hopeful that the legitimacy of gut feelings will continue to become accepted within the broader consciousness. I am excited to follow the science as studies continue to elucidate the physiological mechanisms behind such feelings. Next time I get an icky, tight feeling in my stomach upon entering a space, I will probably try and leave as quickly as I can. 

I will also try and check myself. In a story about a first date, neuroscientist and writer Lisa Feldman Barrett describes feeling a fluttering in her stomach and a flush in her face, a lot like my own excited feelings that I described at the top. She thought: well, I must be very drawn to this person. 

When she got home, she threw up. It turned out she had a stomach flu.

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Artwork by Stephanie Davidson, @asiwillit