INTUITION: FROM SPIDEY SENSE TO THE GUT-BRAIN AXIS
Did you ever just “know.” You can’t explain it, you can’t put your finger on anything, you have no concrete ‘evidence’, you just KNOW. We call this intuition, which to some seem very woo-woo but according to Dr. Judith Orloff, Asst. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and author of “Guide to Intuitive Health”, it is actually the integration of the entire right hemisphere of the brain, the hippocampus and our gut!
Have you ever wondered why it is called a “woman’s intuition”? Well, physiologically the connective bridge called the corpus collosum that connects the right and left halves of the brain are thicker in women than they are in men. This bridge acts as a super highway giving women faster connections to integrate emotions, gut feelings and rapid intuitive decision making skills. This doesn’t mean that men cannot be intuitive, they just have less impulse conductivity moving back and forth between logic and intuition. Society and cultural patterns could have an epigenetic component to this development as well since men historically haven’t been given as much permission to process their emotions as women.
The gut is known as the “second brain”. It is lined with cells that produce neurotransmitters that connect your body to your brain by way of chemical messengers. The sensations that you feel when you are nervous about something are primal. They go all the way back to when we were living in the caves trying to survive the ambush of lions. The hair on the back of your neck rises, you get goose bumps, your pupils dilate, your muscles get tense. All of these feelings are being neurally driven through an involuntary SOS system called the sympathetic nervous system. It is a superhighway that alerts you of danger. Blood automatically rushes from your stomach to your extremities just in case you need them to fight off your attacker or run like the wind. Welcome to today when our primal brain cannot discern if that tough conversation you need to have with your boss is not the same experience of being stalked by a tiger.
Before all of these body felt sensations occur, you begin with “the feeling”, the “gut sink”, the Spidey sense. In fact, the US Office of Naval Research has developed ways to which they study how intuition can help soldiers on the battlefield understand and train their intuition when faced with the highest intensity of combat.
So, when you feel that “thing” in your gut or you notice that “something just doesn’t feel right” TRUST IT!
Share below if you’ve ever acted on your Spidey sense. Do you question your intuition? Inquiring minds want to know!
