your gut is smarter than your brain

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]We believe that our wisdom and our pattern recognition get pushed deeper and deeper into the brain, into the spinal cord, and even into our gut neurons.

[00:00:09]And that's why intuition is sometimes called gut instinct. So basically, the lessons that you've picked up in life, the wisdom that you've learned through repeated patterns, that could be as deeply held in your neurons as like deep down in your gut. So you're not conscious of it, but it still guides the the decisions that you make. What I've found over the last 10 years or so, particularly the 10 years I've been teaching at MIT Sloan, which is business leaders, is that people would really rely on their logic and say things like, well, you know, I'm not going to make a really important decision like hire or fire on intuition because, you know, that's not is it even a thing?

[00:00:48]As we've been able to scan brains and learn more about how these neurons connect up and store information, I really see particularly the older generation of leaders saying, that is absolutely the main way that I will make my most important decisions. And I'm I'm like that, you know, I will make my most important life decisions based on intuition. And the way that I have helped myself to understand how much that is the right thing for me is through journaling.

[00:01:15]So if I journal and I I'm writing like, you know, what should I do in this situation? My gut's telling me this, but logic tells me that, or my emotions tell me something else, I basically plot out how things pan out depending on which modality I use to make my decision.