Image by ==Quang Nguyen Vinh from== Pexels
Have you heard this statement before? Here’s what your body is telling you
Have you noticed a quick escalation of your heartbeat when uncovering a new topic or experience a eureka moment?
If not, it’s about time you were aware of it, because this understanding of yourself can lead to discoveries beyond your consciousness. How? That’s what I’m gonna discuss today.
Hearing your own heart beat
Only few people are so keenly aware of their innate body processes, as Annie Murphy Paul says in her book The Extended Mind:
Though we may not notice such differences, they are real, and even visible to scientists using brain-scanning technology: the size and activity level of the brain’s interoceptive hub, the insula, vary among individuals and are correlated with their awareness of interoceptive sensations.
She explains further with a real-life experience:
“How on earth would I know what my heart is doing?” the woman asked incred- ulously.
Her husband turned and stared at her, equally dumbfounded. “But of course you know,” he exclaimed. “Don’t be so stupid, everyone knows what their heartbeat is!”
The thing is, our body is more connected to our mind than we may think. But there’s a difference between accepting that we have this seemingly supernatural ability, and to actually use it.
As Tiago Forte says in his book Second Brain:
This special feeling of “resonance” — like an echo in your soul — is your intuition telling you that something is literally “note- worthy.”
You don’t need to figure out exactly why it resonates. Just look for the signs: your eyes might widen slightly, your heart may skip a beat, your throat may go slightly dry, and your sense of time might subtly slow down as the world around you fades away.
These are clues that it’s time to hit “save.”
One way to use our body signals to our advantage is to save information that resonates.
Why does this stay only in our subconscious?
As Annie Murphy Paul explains,
This trove of data remains mostly under the surface of consciousness, and that’s usually a good thing. Its submerged status preserves our limited stores of attention and working memory for other uses.
In other words, it’s our intuition working under the surface.
Image from Google
The mystery of intuition
Personally, I feel that because most people don’t understand the mind-to-body connection as well, they feel like they’re intuition is a superpower special to them.
I mean, I felt exactly this way! I wondered why in Minecraft I could find diamonds in only a second just by feeling my way around a cave (sometimes I still feel like I’m given superhero powers).
Even a fellow Medium writer said something similar about this in my following article:
The Day I Stuck with My Gut
Trusting my intuition despite social pressures
Similar to what
says, Annie states this in an experiment about this gift:
A study led by cognitive scientist Pawel Lewicki demonstrates this process in microcosm. Participants in Lewicki’s experiment were directed to watch a com- puter screen on which a cross-shaped target would appear, then disappear, then reappear in a new location; periodically they were asked to predict where the target would show up next.
Over the course of several hours of exposure to the target’s movements, the participants’ predictions grew more and more accurate. They had figured out the pattern behind the target’s peregrinations. But they could not put this knowledge into words, even when the experimenters offered them money to do so.
The subjects were not able to describe “anything even close to the real nature” of the pattern, Lewicki observes. The movements of the target operated according to a pattern too complex for the conscious mind to accommodate — but the capa- cious realm that lies below consciousness was more than roomy enough to con- tain it.
According to this, intuition still seems like a mystical power that we can’t ascertain.
Though cognitive scientist Pawel Lewicki thinks differently, he gives this the scientific name, Nonconscious Information Acquisition, sharing:
“The human cognitive system is not equipped to handle such tasks on the consciously controlled level.”
He adds, “Our conscious thinking needs to rely on notes and flowcharts and lists of ‘if-then’ statements — or on computers — to do the same job which our non-consciously operating processing algorithms can do without external help, and instantly.”
Annie states this more to-the-point:
As we navigate a new situation, we’re scrolling through our mental archive of stored patterns from the past, checking for ones that apply to our current circumstances.
No wonder Tiago Forte took inspiration from Annie Murphy Paul’s book The Extended Mind for his book Building A Second Brain. Our unconscious has so much to give us if we can only understand it better!
How can we use this ability better?
Due to our unique situations, each of us has a little stronger or weaker intuition. Yet we all have it!
When we are…
… more aware of [our] bodily sensations [we’re] better able to make use of [our] non-conscious knowledge.
So the next time you tingle at hearing a new fact, experience a situation, or something completely different, make note what your unconscious (or non-conscious) mind is telling you!
Using your intuition as a roadmap is about as good, if not even better, than thinking out what we might do.
“The heart, and not the head, leads the way. “— Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind
Author’s Note: After wondering about this innate sense for all these years, it’s nice to finally understand, even if I didn’t expect to, just by reading a book.
I hope this story has helped you better understand your intuition too!
It turns out that things may have a more practical explanation then we may realize…