Today we're going to talk about intuition.

Why do you experience a feeling when you walk into a place that you don't like this restaurant

and you want to go to this other restaurant?

Or you trust this person, but you don't quite trust that person.

Or you might have a sense that something

is wrong with your pet or your child, even if you can't articulate what the issue is.

So in all these cases, what are the signals that the brain is picking up on?

And what fraction of those signals does your consciousness have access to?

And importantly, does intuition sometimes steer us wrong? What we call intuition is not something to be trusted automatically.

It quite often steers us the wrong way. So what are the features of the situation to look for?

Where you might feel like, okay,

my intuition is more likely to be useful here than in this other situation where my intuition

is more likely to steer me wrong? And what is the future of intuition as we build new

technologies that might take the myriad signals racing around

in the darkness of our brains and bodies and bring them to light.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and I've spent

my career at the intersection between how the brain works and how we experience life.

Today's episode is about that gut feeling that we call intuition.

Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while or reading my books,

you've definitely heard me talk about all the stuff that transpires unconsciously in the unconscious mind.

This is all the computations we have no access to and really no acquaintance with.

So think about how you walk, all the sophisticated coordination of muscles and balance that's required there. Until very recently, that was an impossibly difficult

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