Improve Your Important Life Decisions by Listening to Your Intuitions
Gut feelings can play a major role in decision-making
When our decision is biased by our emotions we call it gut feeling. And this happens to us all the time. I think many of us try to make a rational decision but deep down, they too are emotion-driven.
The argument that I am going to make is that there is no such thing as a purely rational decision when it comes to real-life decisions. Emotions are always there to guide us.
Let’s take an example, suppose someone asks you, “How was your day?” what do you do? Do you start analyzing your day from breakfast up to now and then take an average and tell the result or do you say something like, “It was good” or “Actually, not too great”? Processing your whole day would itself take another day and you don’t want another person to wait such long. Do you?
That’s it, that was the simplest example of how our gut reactions help us make life decisions quickly. You see, pure logic takes a long time to make decisions, and hence gut reaction can help us take a shortcut. It all depends on how well you train your gut reactions. And, in the psychology world, they call these gut reactions as ‘Somatic Markers’.
This has been a really amazing finding in emotion psychology. Most of the scientists who have been studying the human brain believe that these Somatic Markers are stored in the part of the brain called the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex.
Why should we know these scientific terms? Because in this article we are going to see a research project on how does decision-making change when the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex is either healthy or damaged.
In this research, the scientists set up an experiment where participants were made to sit down before four piles of cards and all they’re needed to do was to select a pile and pick a card at the top of that pile.
The catch is, whenever they drew a card, they either win some money or either lose some by paying some money. So far so good, yes? Now, what the participants didn’t know is that the piles are arranged in such a manner that some of them will help them make money, and some will make them lose money.
The normal participants i.e who didn’t have a damaged Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex after about 50 drawings concluded that two of them are designed to make them more money and two are designed to make them lose money and moreover, they figured out the two piles and started drawing from those piles.
Whereas, the ones with damaged Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex continued to draw cards randomly or equally from each pile and ended up losing money.
Throughout the experiment, scientists were measuring how sweaty the palms of the participant are getting while picking a card because skin sweat is related to anxiety and they hypothesized that maybe our body would know which deck is the good deck and which one is bad before our brain can catch it.
And it turns out that they were right, the normal participants just after some draws started getting more sweat in their palms before drawing from the bad deck i.e they were having anticipatory anxiety before drawing from those bad decks.
What’s more important is that they did not know consciously at that time that they were the bad decks. So, we can say that the body knew before the brain caught up that some decks are good and some decks are bad.
You see, this is really amazing evidence that our body is constantly trying to help us make important life decisions and we must let our body to hone this skill so that it can help us make important life decisions in less time.
Thanks for reading!!
If you liked what you read, you can join Medium with my referral link and enjoy unlimited stories for just $5 a month. The deal is, you get to read unlimited stories on Medium by various amazing writers and in return, I’ll get a commission when you join using my referral link. Thanks for your time!!