Trusting your gut can actually get the best results

Here is some more support for trusting our enteric nervous system (our gut). It bothers me that when people write these articles that they do not give real credit to the brain in our guts. For example, the enteric nervous system contains 100 million neurons - more than the spinal cord. Most of the major neurotransmitters - serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, norephinephrine, and nitric oxide - can be found in the gut. There are also two dozen small brain proteins, called neuropeptides are there along with the major cells of the immune system. This literally is another brain.

Trusting your gut can actually get the best results

by Mark Fenske

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

How much trust do you put in hunches or intuition? Would you allow part of your liver to be removed, for example, if your surgeon mentioned having a “gut feeling” that this would be best? Or would you rather hear some concrete reasons outlining exactly why the procedure might be needed?

A growing body of research by experimental psychologists and neuroscientists alike has revealed that going with your gut can be surprisingly effective at getting the best out of your brain. But it also seems to critically depend on your level of expertise (if you're the surgeon making that call, you may want to have a few years under your belt) and on your ability to trust your feelings.

More related to this story

• How your brain keeps you from being distracted
• You can think your way out of pain
• Why do we cry when we're happy?

Experiencing a hunch can seem almost mystical. This may explain why such judgments are often described as arriving through inspiration or by way of a still small voice.

Recent research findings suggest that such feelings and impressions may actually arise through brain circuits that are optimized for fast, automatic evaluations of a situation, which take place without our awareness. Other findings suggest that such non-conscious appraisals may recruit memory-intensive regions of the brain that can access neural representations of our prior knowledge and experiences, such as midline areas of the parietal lobe and the front-most sections of the temporal lobes.

From this perspective, intuition can be seen as the brain acting as a master predictor – taking whatever information is available at a given moment and analyzing its similarity to prior experiences to allow us to anticipate what is most likely to happen next and which course of action might be best.

This suggests that the greater our expertise in an area, the better our hunches should be in that domain. Brain scans of individuals playing shogi – a chess-like game popular in Japan – support this notion. Shogi experts rely extensively on an intuitive sense of which of the possible next moves is best. When each game scenario was revealed, players showed increased activity in the precuneus – a memory-related structure in the medial parietal lobe. Furthermore, during quick, intuitive judgments, there was increased activation of the caudate nucleus, a region of the basal ganglia previously shown to be involved in other automatic, highly learned responses. And the strength of this caudate signal was directly associated with accuracy of the corresponding judgment.

But this pattern occurred only in expert shogi players. Game-related brain activity in amateur players appeared to rely far more exclusively on the top and outermost regions of the frontal and parietal lobe – areas typically closely associated with deliberate, conscious analysis.

Neuroimaging during jazz improvisation provides another illustration of how a reduction in conscious control can be a good thing. When compared to brain activity during rote repetition of a tune, brain scans of jazz musicians “in the groove”– composing on the fly – show a dramatic reduction of activity in those top and outermost regions of prefrontal cortex associated with deliberate control and self-conscious awareness, and a simultaneous increase in activation in lower and inner structures associated with more implicit expertise.

But here's where trust comes in. Another set of recent studies has revealed that the power of the brain in making intuitive predictions critically depends on the extent to which individuals trust in their feelings when making decisions. Those expressing higher levels of trust in their feelings were later up to 20-per-cent more accurate in predicting such things as the weather, the outcome of a college football match or who would win a popular televised talent show.

But, like the shogi players, expertise also mattered. Trusting in your feelings will contribute little toward your Fantasy-Football standing unless you have some knowledge about football and the teams and players involved. The same surely applies to success in the operating room.

Mark Fenske, co-author of The Winner's Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success, is a neuroscientist and associate professor at the University of Guelph