Should I Trust My Gut Instinct?
When facing a dilemma, we sometimes feel “drawn” a particular way. But whether or not we should heed our intuition comes down to hard science.
Trusting your gut feelings is often seen as a mark of the brave, successful, and gifted. These impulses don’t arise from your gut, of course, but are prelearned responses driven by the emotion center, the amygdala, in your brain.
Emotional memories completely bypass your analytical frontal lobes, which is why they seem to “come out of nowhere.” Your emotional amygdala constantly chatters with the hippocampus—the orchestrator of memories—to provide you with the best guess on what’s about to happen, based on your past experiences. This is why you ...
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