Kelly reconnects with Northeastern University professor Laura Huang to dig into the science behind intuition and gut feelings. Her new book is called, “You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition.”  

You write in the book that when you wanted to focus your studies on gut feel and intuition, you did not get a resounding yes. 

“The term gut feel is so loaded in the sense that we all think we know what gut feel is, but then when we actually dig a little bit deeper, we all have very, very different definitions of what it is, right? So, everything from some people think of it like a mystical kind of superpower. Other people are like no, no, no, no, it can’t be trusted, right? It’s something that you need data to back up and to really trust. There were all these sorts of lay definitions of what gut feel was. And so, when I said, I want to study gut feel, I want to put some science behind it, people were like, ‘Wow, that’s like super risky.’” 

You talk about these three different kinds of gut feel, what are they? 

“What I found is that our gut feel really appears to all of us in one of three ways. So, the three waves, these general kind of buckets, right? The first is as a eureka moment. The second is a Spidey sense – ugh, something doesn’t feel right. Like, I don’t know what this is, but I have this gut feeling that something’s not right. That’s Spidey sense. And the third is a jolt. It’s this moment of recognition where we realize that something has changed. Something has shifted. What we thought we had always understood is now really, really different.” 

There is so much cross over to improv – when you talk about priors and prompts – but also how gut, like improvisation, is wholly dependent on each individual and what they bring to the stage.  

“When you’re engaging in improv, there are absolutely the priors, which is all that you know. It’s like who you are. It’s the experiences you have that you bring into improv. You definitely have the prompt, whether it’s one that’s staged and you’re giving one, but the sort of pre-screening, if you’re bringing in things from other people, it takes away from you being in that experience and engaging in that. Right. This is why one of the key principles of what I’ve studied around gut feel is that we’re asking the wrong question. And that’s related to what you’re saying. It’s not what is gut feel. It’s who is gut feel. Who is gut feel and the gut feel is you. Your gut feel is going to be very different from my gut feel. Even if we’re in the same exact situation. We can have all of the same context, we can have all of the same parameters, we can have all of the same things that we’re interacting with, but you will have a very different gut feel than I will because you bring with yourself different background, different experiences, different expertise, different learnings, all sorts of things.”