I find stories like this fascinating:
The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.
Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.
Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do.
Aside from the fact that a certain individual kind of ruined the notion of going with gut feelings, I honestly do believe there is something to this. It is that little internal trigger that says “this is a bad idea” that every one of us has experienced.
flukebucket
It’s an angel on your shoulder.
ellaesther
I believe that the problem arises when you use your gut instinct to the exclusion of all other evidence…. cough*W.*cough!
I find this fascinating, too, and remember reading that we may have what amounts to something of a second brain in our literal gut. As I type that, I can see it sounds patently ridiculous, so I shall have to search it out! If I find it, I’ll be back with a link.
ellaesther
@ellaesther: I found it! Man, I love Mr. Google. I would have his babies, if I could.
The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes, NY Times, Aug 23, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23gut.html
Redhand
The film. “The Hurt Locker” is a must see. It covers this very subject.
Ugh
OT (but related to Iraq) – anyone else read this horrifying story of veterans back from Iraq in Colorado Springs?
Ken
People take note of emotions (emerging from themselves and others) as a means to shape their behavior. This occurs through the “signal function” of emotions to let others know how to act (i.e. if I’m crying, get me a hanky), and the ways that people use their own feelings as stimuli that require some sort of response. The sociology of emotions has a lot on this… we just use fancier words than “gut.”
Just Some Fuckhead
I believe it’s demons.
BombIranForChrist
I suspect that “going with your gut” is great for situations that require a synthesis of your various senses. Maybe you don’t consciously notice a shift in air flow and smell, for example, but your body does, and it is primed to respond quicker when the smelly teamster tries to sucker punch you.
Not so much re: making public policy.
Brick Oven Bill
An experienced negotiator is able to read body language subconsciously. It becomes a sixth sense. The troops’ situational awareness likely comes from their subtle perceptions of the actions and expressions of others on the street.
In like manner, I can tell that Al Franken is a confused freak.
Xenos
I only read a part of Blink but that seemed to be the main point – in ways the subconscious is an enourmously fast and effective neural network that picks out when something is wrong. These soldiers have learned how to develop and trust that network.
Ugh
Here is part II of the story I linked above.
Tsulagi
Yeah, that pretty much led me to vote for Gore over Bush in 2000. But damn, my gut had no idea how retarded that spoiled brat was.
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
Actually, I think it’s largely a subconscious recognition that things are out of place. For instance, when bird or animal sounds that you normally hear as background noise are absent. Or the landscape just looks a little off because some rocks have moved – you may not have ever noticed those rocks, but you noticed the shape of the landscape and suddenly it looks different.
Things like that, especially if you’re already in a high state of alertness or stress, can set off a trigger that says, “Look around. Something’s not right here.”
.
gex
John, I agree. It’s unfortunate that some can and have abused “gut” feelings. But again I cite Bruce Schneier who claims that our best technology for detecting terrorists is human intuition. And he has a really good example of the Canadians stopping someone at the border based on their intuition.
Unfortunately, you want to have well paid, highly trained, non-thugs to do this to avoid just harassing brown people at will. Our current TSA doesn’t really seem to fit the bill.
The other way that humans are superior to the technology is that the technology is often developed for a specific kind of threat. If the enemy changes the nature of the threat, it can make our security technology obsolete. The human brain is much more adaptable.
Anyhow, I think Schneier is one of our clearest thinkers on security and he’s an interesting read if you are into that kind of thing.
BombIranForChrist
On the other side of the argument, there may also be some confirmation bias here.
A soldier may have a bad feeling 100 times in one day and be wrong about 99 of them, but he remembers the 1 and therefore concludes that his “bad feeling” was an adequate predictor.
I don’t really believe this. I do believe that highly trained soldiers have the ability to pre-consciously determine danger, but, you know, I am just being a contrarian butthole.
Martin
For situations like this, usually our brain is picking up on clues that it can’t quite organize. We can see that something is out of place, isn’t quite right, but it’s not ‘wrong’ enough to categorize or make sense out of or even to focus in on specifically, but we get a bit off balance.
Our brains are VERY good at detecting patterns and small differences, but not very good at dealing with information in isolation. Almost everyone can tell if you touch up the paint on a wall when the color is ever so slightly off, but with the exception of a very few people, if you walked into a paint store there’s almost no way you could grab the paint chip for what you put on that wall. Odds are you’d be way off.
When I go camping with my kids I’ll often comment that it’s going to rain in the next 5 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever, and they’re surprised when I’m right. When I was a kid, I could make the same prediction, but I had no idea why. Later, thanks to hanging out with people smarter than me, and just doing it over and over, I realized I was noticing changes in humidity, temperature drops, changes in the wind and downdrafts, and sometimes just watching how the wildlife change – flying insects usually take shelter before rains because they can’t fly in the rain. I didn’t realize what I was noticing until someone pointed it out to me, but I was noticing it all the same.
It’s how we tell when people are lying. Poker players know how to identify the tells – the eye behavior, the hand jesture, etc. because that’s their job, but the rest of us just somehow ‘know’. We’re noticing the same things, but we don’t really know exactly what we’re seeing.
I’m trying to teach my kids how, when they get that kind of sense, to recognize that something is going on that they don’t yet consciously see, and to stop and try and work out what it might be, and remember the situation for the next time it happens.
gwangung
On the other hand, having false positives and no false negatives IS a good thing when it comes to bare naked survival. The cost to a false positive is kinda trivial….
The Grand Panjandrum
The human mind is a highly developed machine that uses vague, non-Boolean concepts gathered from imprecise data to express high level approximations. Even very subtle are picked up by the subconcious mind. Human beings are superior to any machine when it comes to understanding and interpreting images. That shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Developing technology to assist in these endeavors are worthwhile but we are a very long way from any sort of computer that can match the human brain in some areas. This is one of them.
Leeds man
I was biking through British Columbia years ago, on a two lane highway with gravel shoulders. Big trucks coming up behind would often honk, then pull out to pass. One time, I heard a honk and immediately ditched into the gravel, just in time to see the guy ride by close enough to have clipped me. Whatever warning signs were there, my subconscious must have processed it very fast indeed.
Comrade Jake
I don’t know, I think this gut stuff is mostly BS and pseudo-scientific at best. Of course, if I’m in the hummer and the Marine driving decides he doesn’t like the look of the street ahead, well, I’m not going to protest.
Anyway, much more interesting to me are the studies of the types of people who perform well under intense pressure. For example, there are people who do become more calm, as measured by physiological indicators, when placed in extreme situations. Studies indicate that these are basically the only type of folks who can make it through something like the Navy SEAL school.
There was some article on this awhile ago and scientific attempts to make connections to DNA, etc. Fascinating stuff.
Martin
Damn, how’d that fall in moderation – no footwear, no apparent wang drugs…
You actually want confirmation bias here because assuming that positive hits might be false means that you die when one of them isn’t. Never send a confident statistician into a combat zone – they’ll be dead within minutes.
Legalize
I think it’s merely situational awareness made acute by repetition. If IEDs tend to go off when X, Y and Z conditions are present, then when X, Y and Z happen, the person who has experienced such (over and over), might reasonably ask “where have I seen this before? Oh, yeah!” It’s not “gut”; it’s becoming more aware of the facts.
Scott H
Good pattern recognition is a valuable skill to develop; however, it requires sound experience to be advantageous. Obviously, it can just as easily be malformed.
cbear
I get that “this is a bad idea” feeling quite often. It usually comes a few seconds before I turn on the TV and see/hear how badly the goopers are fucking up our country.
gex
@BombIranForChrist: No, I don’t think you are a butthole. I think that is a good and important point. Like so much in life, there’s a middle ground, but the push and pull of human interactions can often lead to extremes one way or another. In this case “contrarian buttholism” is an important counterweight to the over-reliance on gutty truthiness.
Timmy Mac
Somewhere I read an explanation of intuition as subconscious perception, which the author expressed as “intuition is executive summary.”
EthylEster
@Scott H: Good pattern recognition is a valuable skill to develop
Yes. But pattern recognition is not the same as a gut feeling. In fact it is the opposite. Because, as you note, it requires pertinent experience. There is nothing instinctive about pattern recognition.
Cat
@gwangung:
It maybe trivial to the guy making the false positive because the costs are almost always externalized. The costs for the other parties in the false positive can range from nothing to death.
fish
When exactly does a soldier not have a bad feeling in Iraq?
Until false positive rates are measured, this is meaningless…
Sasha
Good gut feeling come from people with years of knowledge and experience on a subject.
An untrained gut (as per the unnamed individual) is just a blind man throwing darts.
Anton Sirius
@Redhand:
+1
Tim F.
The gut has a better record predicting bad outcomes than good ones.
Geeno
I believe BOB was actually on to something before his digression in the last sentence. These “gut” feelings come from a thousand clues being noticed and analyzed in such an automatic fashion that you don’t really realize what you’re doing. The situation just “feels” wrong.
Geeno
@Tim F.: probably because most of the “clues” are warning signs not positive indicators.
Cat
“The Hurt Locker” and “Generation Kill” are both examples of how good training coupled with an above average IQ turn what would be a ‘gut feeling’ into situational awareness.
These feelings could be distilled down to a set of ‘rules’ in a static situation.
1) Bob always parks his red accord in front of the his house 2 feet from the south corner.
2) Tim sells fruit from a cart across the street from Pete’s coffee house, with outside seating, which never has a car parked in front of it.
Now when Tim’s fruit cart is now in front of Bob’s house and Bob’s car is in front of Pete’s coffee house with the outdoor seating nowhere to be found you can be an indicator that something is wrong. If you are in a war zone, noticing these things can be the difference between life and death.
This line of research would be great, but the military will never give it to the majority of its personnel who need it. The cost of researching this and then providing this training to all their combat personal would be prohibitively high. The military has a wide range of IQ levels and good portion of its personnel will not have the ability to take a specific example, like the one above, and translate it into a loose set of rules and then apply correctly to another situation.
wilfred
Substitute intuition for gut feeling and you access an entire esoteric tradition where intutition is understood not as a mixture of reason and emotion but something other than and superior to both.
“The Vizier flees when the King arrives”.
Missouri Buckeye
I believe “going with your gut” makes sense when you have sufficient experience. For these soldiers, “going with their guts” makes sense, since they have seen so many situation where attacks have happened. Our brains are very good at synthesizing lots of information. In my opinion, these “gut feelling” are the bits of synthesis that the soldiers are doing, essentially without thinking.
On the other hand, GWB never had enough experience to have “gut feelings” that truly met the situations. His “gut feelings” were ones that matched his inner biases.
RememberNovember
There are “gut feelings”- ie signals we process unconsciously that can aid us personally, but when it involves 300 million other people, the gut needs to take some Pepto and chill- let the brain work it out.
Just Some Fuckhead
Gut feeling is prolly what Gates relied on to keep from being tasered, beaten and killed by Crowley.
jenniebee
It’s basically a repeat of what Werner Von Braun said: there still isn’t a computer capable of matching the chemical analog power of even the dimmest human brain. What we’re calling “gut feeling” is really a circumstance in which our brains’ analysis capabilities are far outstripping their descriptive capabilities, so they can tell that something’s hinky without being able to explain what or how. (Of course, some deciderers have lousy analysis and it’s worth noting that the poor guys who got blown up had gut feelings, too. Evolutionary pressure, etc…)
Mnemosyne
@EthylEster:
I think that’s a distinction without a difference. Very rarely do people claim to have a “gut feeling” about something they know nothing about. In fact, that’s where we get disasters like the Bush years — Bush was convinced he knew more than everyone around him, so therefore they should go with his instincts rather than insist he look at the evidence.
As Sasha said, a “gut instinct” is something that you develop through experience and practice. Very few people will be able to articulate exactly what steps they went through to arrive at their conclusion unless, like Martin at #16, they stop and consciously examine a process that they’re already successful at doing.
slippytoad
I think Bush’s gut had the blue wire and red wire crossed at some point, because it always seemed like if presented with a choice that made my stomach churn, Bush took that choice.
Of course, maybe that’s because he was a fucking psychopath who mistook evil for good and enjoyed pain as pleasure. I don’t know.
Keith G
A genetic based behavior allowing for better survival when we were more likely to be eaten than to eat.
Some theorize this may be related to a “god” gene.
Emma Anne
The book “The Gift of Fear” talks about this a lot. The authors definitely thinks that people synthesize a lot of information they don’t notice and fear is a red flag based on the synthesis. However, he also points out that anxiety can swamp this ability and isn’t very useful.
Brachiator
I hate crap like this. What’s next, they’re going to hire a psychic to look for IEDs? Or an old fashioned dowser?
I take the article’s point that humans do it better (and cheaper) than high-tech equipment, but the mumbo-jumbo about intuition, hunches and “gut feeling” is mystifying training and some perhaps not yet quantifiable but real talent at diagnosing danger. Another quote from the article is very provocative:
Magicians work by using misdirection, and yet there are people who still think that magic is real. The talent needed to figure out where some bombs might be planted may be similar to the skill needed to watch a magician and figure out how the trick is done.
RSA
A few random observations (I’ve done research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science):
One way to think about attention (visual, aural, etc.) is that it’s a filter on the enormous amounts of information we perceive, so that our brains can work on what’s potentially relevant. All that information still comes in, even if we don’t notice it, and some of it is processed without conscious effort (in ways that aren’t completely understood). Any conclusions might be thought of as “gut feelings”.
Even experts can find it very hard to articulate how they’re making their decisions, either what they’re attending to or how they’re evaluating it. Formalizing the kind of judgment we’re talking about (IED detection) might not be feasible, given practical constraints.
“Pattern recognition” is a really general term that encompasses lots of different approaches and phenomena. It’s not generally true that humans are better in an absolute sense than machines. It’s rather for that the kinds of situations humans find pattern recognition useful, we haven’t yet been able to develop machines to match human performance. (Though we’ve been making progress–vehicle navigation, face recognition, voice recognition, etc.) There are other sorts of domains in which machines are just better, though. Think about judging whether a string of ones and zeroes has an odd or even number of ones, for example. Hard for us, built into hardware for a machine.
Et Tu Brutus?
Ain’t the 1st time the Federales have looked into training people to rely on their intuition to avoid danger. Happened in the ’90s under Clinton with several Fed agencies, including the Forest Circus ( USFS). They called it ‘LFTA’: listen for the alarm, trying to get folks to focus in particular on that feeling in the gut many people get shortly before the shit hits the fan. It was based on research that showed a majority of workplace accident victims had funny sensations or pain in their stomachs prior to the accident, sometimes by as much as several hours before.
blondie
Sounds like Stephen King territory …
John Hamilton Farr
Jesus Christ, yes!
The Saff
Comrade Jake @ 20: “Anyway, much more interesting to me are the studies of the types of people who perform well under intense pressure. For example, there are people who do become more calm, as measured by physiological indicators, when placed in extreme situations…”
This sounds similar to how Richard Wolffe describes Barack Obama in “Renegade.” If things are going a little too smooth, Obama tends to get bored and coast. When the pressure is up, he hits his stride. He talked about it often when he was getting ready go give big speeches, like the one on race in March 2008 and his acceptance speech in Denver last August.
The book is really good.
Balconesfault
I’ve worked with firms that do “predictive modeling” for industrial plant systems when they’re trying to figure out how to optimize something. It might be bringing temperatures into a specific range to minimize NOx production, it might be how to best control a certain flow rate of a raw material while maintaining product control. You end up taking all the data that’s monitored at the site, letting algorythyms churn it around for awhile, and it figures out which variables seem to most importantly effect what you’re trying to accomplish. Often the result is something completely counter-intuitive … but when you work it back mechanistically through how the system and electronics and chemistry work, it will make complete sense.
I bring it up, because a lot of time you end up finding that the old guy who has been sitting at the control panel for the last 25 years is doing everything as close to perfectly as you can get … even if he has no idea of the all the process engineering rationales that lie behind him turning a certain knob whenever he sees a certain something to get an optimal result.
steve s
What if your gut goes Galt?
Tax Analyst
Brachiator said:
“Aside from the fact that a certain individual kind of ruined the notion of going with gut feelings, I honestly do believe there is something to this. It is that little internal trigger that says “this is a bad idea” that every one of us has experienced.
I hate crap like this. What’s next, they’re going to hire a psychic to look for IEDs? Or an old fashioned dowser?
I take the article’s point that humans do it better (and cheaper) than high-tech equipment, but the mumbo-jumbo about intuition, hunches and “gut feeling” is mystifying training and some perhaps not yet quantifiable but real talent at diagnosing danger.”
Agreed. Just because there are several TV programs that have protagonists with psychic, telepathic or other apparently paranormal abilities doesn’t mean we should have people depending on hunches or intuition in life-or-death situations as a POLICY. Even conceding that some people MIGHT indeed have extra-special intuitive powers, how would you know which ones might be for real and which ones are just over-confident fools?
OR – to state it differently, who amongst you would want to trust some old wheezer who THINKS he’s got it figured out to devine whether there was an IED 6 feet ahead and 18 inches to the right? Remember, if he’s wrong, you’re gone.
Balconesfault
@Tax Analyst:
Depends if he’s using a divining rod …
currants
Along those lines (or maybe on the other side of the highway heading north, I don’t know), anybody see this last summer in the New Yorker? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_lehrer It’s a quick write up about research on those “Eureka!” moments–it opens with a striking example of forest firefighters. Worth reading/thinking about, because I think it’s in the same ballpark as the “gut” feeling.
No, actually, now that I think about it–they aren’t the same. What we call a “gut feeling” comes from magnificent (subconscious) analysis of myriad indicators, as in Martin’s camping/rain example in #16 above, while the “eureka” is an insight based on that analysis.
Betsy
I agree both that the “gut feeling” is likely a result of the brain processing information in a useful way very quickly, and that there’s huge confirmation bias here.
For instance, the post immediately made me think of an incident from when I was working at the homeless shelter. There was a particular guest who all the other staff liked a lot, thought was charming, etc. I always *hated* him and was a little perplexed by the intensity of my feelings. He’s the only one out of hundreds of guests during my stint I felt that way about. So, long story short, one day he violently attacks a case manager. Everyone else was shocked; I was horrified but unsurprised. The dude was just bad news and I knew it from the moment I laid eyes on him.
But…if I’m being honest with myself, there are also lots of times when my intuition about people hasn’t been accurate. But those don’t spring to mind as readily. I can’t help but think this is true of most people – we generally prefer to remember the times when we’re right. :)
Cat
@The Saff:
I find it odd that a lot of the markers for Psychopathy are traits we admire in leaders. I use “we” in a loosest possible sense.
yam
Get Bush in there — he can use his gut to find them…
Cassidy
There are several comments I want to respond to, and hopefully I can give a current perception of this. There are a couple things involved here and they run the gamut from pattern recognition to years of experience. As for pattern recognition, whoever mentioned that is right to a certain degree. We are trained to look for the little clues that makes things look out of place. And, being combat arms Soldiers, generally speaking we look at terrain and ask ourselves “would I attack someone here?” If the answer is yes, proceed with caution. Repeat.
Also, as mentioned above, a lot of “gut instinct” is simply experience. When you have been through the situation enough times, training+experience, equals survival.
But, I think the one component missing is the level of indoctrination Soldiers go through. Some of you in the past have called it brainwashing and whatnot, but regardless of your opinion on it, from the very first day a new Soldier walks into replacement, the mantra “attention to detail” is pounded into your head. And every single common task in the Army falls back onto that mantra. So, it”s not like I’m scanning an area with heightened ninja senses, but on a subconscious level Soldiers are noticing that something does seem out of place. It’s that little extra bit of indoctrination. I’m sure Cole can tell you plenty of occasions where he was in his tank and something just didn’t seem right: the turbine whined a little higher, the turret moved a little slower, the coax was off just a little, etc.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Aside from the fact that a certain individual kind of ruined the notion of going with gut feelings, I honestly do believe there is something to this. It is that little internal trigger that says “this is a bad idea” that every one of us has experienced.
I point out that there’s a selection bias – you don’t account for things going wrong without that feeling, you don’t tend to remember when that feeling hit and it turned out alright anyway, nor do you know when you acted on it and it would have turned out okay anyhow.
But when you have that feeling, you go ahead, and it goes wrong then you remember it.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Oh, and also, it’s very easy to reconstruct memory. You’re patrolling Iraq, you’re on the edge the whole time, and then something blows up. AFTERWARDS you say you had a bad feeling about it – yeah, you had a bad feeling about everything. If you replay the “memory” enough, you become convinced you had a danger sense screaming at you.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
You actually want confirmation bias here because assuming that positive hits might be false means that you die when one of them isn’t.
Try dealing with a hundred false positives and you won’t be able to patrol a hundred feet from your front gate. And if you convince yourself you can detect danger, you might walk into the bomb you never suspected.
Brachiator
@Betsy:
Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine, has written about this phenomenon in Why People Believe Weird Things and other works.
Humans are pattern seeking animals. And one of the things that appears to validate everything from “hunches” to psychic readings is that people tend to remember the hits and throw away the misses, creating a false pattern of “I just knew that something was going to happen.”
Here’s a link to an interview in which Shermer discusses this and related topics:
http://www.noneuclideancafe.com/issues/vol2_issue3_Spring2007/shermer.htm
On the other hand, I wonder how many people would go to a doctor who said the following: “I never paid attention to any of my classes and barely passed the med board exams. I’m not sure what’s wrong with you. I’ll just go with my gut feeling.”
By the way, the WikiTubes has a great article on the history of bomb disposal. One of the cat-and-mouse games of World War II (great TV series about this called “UXB”) was how the bomb makers tried to throw additional traps in the face of the disposal squads:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_disposal
And of course, some of the squads had appalling losses. Hunches and gut feelings could not guarantee success.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
It was based on research that showed a majority of workplace accident victims had funny sensations or pain in their stomachs prior to the accident, sometimes by as much as several hours before.
And did the research have them logging these “funny feelings” before the accident, or reporting on them afterwards and spontenously, or when a researcher prompted them to think about it?
jenniebee
A little OT, but did anybody else see this on ObWi?
Damn you, Scott Beauchamp!
Anne Laurie
People with the brain-chemistry issues we currently shorthand as ADD/ADHD are notorious for this particular “counterintuitive” response. The downside for individuals with ADD, and the people around them, is that we can become addicted, consciously or not, to starting “crisis situations” (aka ‘stirring shite up’) because such situations make us feel calm & in control. (Especially if we’re feeling besieged by the calm, rational, powerful-seeming neurotypicals that make up 90% of the human race, who don’t do as well when the mortar rounds are coming in over the walls.) ADD/ADHD has a strong genetic component, and Dubya Bush’s family has an established history of the ailments that epidemiologists use as markers for ADD — including multiple family members over several generations with documented histories of substance abuse and/or depression, and siblings with Crohn’s disease (Marvin) and dyslexia (Neil). Even if you don’t believe that Dubya himself has ADHD, it’s arguable that he “learned”, starting in infancy, that Stirring Shite Up was a guaranteed method of drawing attention away from his own shortcomings / feelings of inadequacy. Thus the Second Iraq War, apart from any discussion of its political expediency, can also be perceived as Bush’s simultaneous neurological craving for excitement and his desire to achieve a “crisis state” where he could be more calm and the uncooperative bureaucrats around him less so.
Tax Analyst
jenniebee said:
“A little OT, but did anybody else see this on ObWi?
Damn you, Scott Beauchamp!”
Yes, I saw it through another link on another thread here earlier today. And let me just add, “UGH!”. It’s not very encouraging to say the least, either for the situation over there or the eventual situation(s) we will have to deal with over here.
mantis
Of course there’s something to it. Everyone who’s seen Star Wars knows that.
Brachiator
@Anne Laurie:
Or it may not exist at all.
One study noted the following: “The number of people diagnosed as ADHD in the United States dwarfs any other country. The U.S. produces and uses 80% of the world’s stimulants such as Ritalin–ten times more than Europe and industrialized Asia.”
And then there is the class and race angle:
As with “hunches,” there’s a lot of selectivity and confirmation bias surrounding ADHD diagnoses. Obviously, there are real behavioral issues underlying many ADHD diagnoses, but there is also a lot of noise surrounding the issue that is inhibiting or misdirecting some of the understanding of what is happening here.
ominira
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Gut feeling is also prolly what Crowley relied on to write in his police report that he was responding to a call about two black males with backpacks breaking into a home.
(Transcripts of the 911 call show that the caller had to be prodded by the 911 dispatcher into hazarding a guess that one of the suspects was Hispanic and clearly stated that she didn’t see what the 2nd suspect looked like. The caller’s lawyer also tells CNN she had no discussion of the suspects’ race with Crowley at the scene, completely contradicting his written report.)
@ellaesther: Neurons in the gut? Too much serotonin causing irritable bowel syndrome? Who knew? Absolutely fascinating article.
iwantcssfile
cookie!
Et Tu Brutus?
@ Phoenician #63:
Please, the answer to that question is obvious; moreover, the question itself is misleading. Rather than assuming that suggestion via researchers causes retroactive interference to memories of a traumatic event ( actually less likely the more traumatic the event or distant in time), or perhaps respondent bias causes the subjects to tell researchers what they ‘want to hear’, it would be more germane to ask if victims of workplace accidents were more susceptible to having those accidents because their stomachs hurt beforehand, perhaps distracting them at a critical moment.
Shell Goddamnit
Gut feelings
I think it’s just that sometimes our subconscious is smarter than we are – it puts together the clues we’re ignoring & comes up with “wait a minnit”…
BretH
“It was after he’d already held the gun to my head, after he raped me. It was after that. He got up from the bed, got dressed, then closed the window. He glanced at his watch, and then started acting like he was in a hurry.”
“I gotta be somewhere. Hey, don’t look so scared. I promise I’m not going to hurt you.” Kelly absolutely knew he was lying. She knew he planned to kill her, and though it may be hard to imagine, it was the first time since the incident began that she felt profound fear.
He motioned to her with the gun and said, “Don’t you move or do anything. I’m going to the kitchen to get something to drink, and then I’ll leave. I promise. But you stay right where you are.” He had little reason to be concerned that Kelly might disobey his instructions because she had been, from the moment she let go of that bag until this moment, completely under his control. “You know I won’t move,” she assured him.
But the instant he stepped from the room, Kelly stood up and walked after him, pulling the sheet off the bed with her. “I was literally right behind him, like a ghost, and he didn’t know I was there. We walked down the hall together. At one point he stopped, and so did I. He was looking at my stereo, which was playing some music, and he reached out and made it louder. When he moved on toward the kitchen, I turned and walked through the living room.”
Kelly could hear drawers being opened as she walked out her front door, leaving it ajar. She walked directly into the apartment across the hall (which she somehow knew would be unlocked). Holding a finger up to signal her surprised neighbors to be quiet, she locked their door behind her.
“I knew if I had stayed in my room, he was going to come back from the kitchen and kill me, but I don’t know how I was so certain.”
“Yes, you do,” I tell her.
She sighs and then goes over it again. “He got up and got dressed, closed the window, looked at his watch. He promised he wouldn’t hurt me, and that promise came out of nowhere. Then he went into the kitchen to get a drink, supposedly, but I heard him opening drawers in there. He was looking for a knife, of course, but I knew way before that.” She pauses. “I guess he wanted a knife because using the gun would be too noisy.”
“What makes you think he was concerned about noise?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” She takes a long pause, gazing off past me, looking back at him in the bedroom. “Oh … I do know. I get it, I get it. Noise was the thing–that’s why he closed the window. That’s how I knew.”
Since he was dressed and supposedly leaving, he had no other reason to close her window. It was that subtle signal that warned her, but it was fear that gave her the courage to get up without hesitation and follow close behind the man who intended to kill her. She later described a fear so complete that it replaced every feeling in her body. Like an animal hiding inside her, it opened to its full size and stood up using the muscles in her legs. “I had nothing to do with it,” she explained. “I was a passenger moving down that hallway.”
What she experienced was real fear, not like when we are startled, not like the fear we feel at a movie, or the fear of public speaking. This fear is the powerful ally that says, “Do what I tell you to do.” Sometimes, it tells a person to play dead, or to stop breathing, or to run or scream or fight, but to Kelly it said, “Just be quiet and don’t doubt me and I’ll get you out of here.”
Kelly told me she felt new confidence in herself, knowing she had acted on that signal, knowing she had saved her own life. She said she was tired of being blamed and blaming herself for letting him into her apartment. She said she had learned enough in our meetings to never again be victimized that way.
“Maybe that’s the good to come from it,” she reflected. “The weird thing is, with all this information I’m actually less afraid walking around now than I was before it happened–but there must be an easier way people could learn.”
The thought had occurred to me. I know that what saved Kelly’s life can save yours. In her courage, in her commitment to listen to intuition, in her determination to make some sense out of it, in her passion to be free of unwarranted fear, I saw that the information should be shared not just with victims but with those who need never become victims at all. I want this book to help you be one of those people.
Because of my sustained look at violence, because I have predicted the behavior of murderers, stalkers, would-be assassins, rejected boyfriends, estranged husbands, angry former employees, mass killers, and others, I am called an expert. I may have learned many lessons, but my basic premise in these pages is that you too are an expert at predicting violent behavior. Like every creature, you can know when you are in the presence of danger. You have the gift of a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guide you through risky situations.
I’ve learned some lessons about safety through years of asking people who’ve suffered violence, “Could you have seen this coming?” Most often they say, “No, it just came out of nowhere,” but if I am quiet, if I wait a moment, here comes the information: “I felt uneasy when I first met that guy…” or “Now that I think of it, I was suspicious when he approached me,” or “I realize now I had seen that car earlier in the day.”
Of course, if they realize it now, they knew it then. We all see the signals because there is a universal code of violence. You’ll find some of what you need to break that code in the following chapters, but most of it is in you.”
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/becker-fear.html
The Gift Of Fear was mentioned above. A very worthwhile read.
BrianM
Gary Klein’s Sources of Power talks about this. Among other people, he studied how fire chiefs know how things are going badly without being to explain how they know.
Clever Hans
Too lazy to read all the comments, but I see others have said that intuition does have an underlying rationale, it’s just that our conscious mind doesn’t get how the unconscious arrives at it’s conclusions and so tends to discount those unconscious judgments as unfounded. People who are more comfortable trusting their unconscious information processing, i.e., their “gut”, are better able to integrate unconscious information with the conscious kind. People like me, who always thought unconscious feelings were completely irrational and should be resisted and excluded from decision-making, don’t do hunches so well.
All of this is said much better in this book, which is changing my life as it helps me slowly learn to trust messages from my unconscious brain.
http://www.amazon.com/Gut-Feelings-Intelligence-Gerd-Gigerenzer/dp/0670038636