The Science Of Perception & Intuition
#1: The Illusion of Attention: the foundation of developing intuition you can trust
13 August, 2024
by Zoe Zambakides.
You hear people say ‘trust your gut’ but no one has told you how to tell a real instinct — one that’ll actually take you somewhere good — from fear, habit or an old pattern that will pull you back wearing a convincing new disguise.
Discernment is the real skill you need to tell if you should trust your gut feeling, or if something else is getting in the way. It’s what’s missing from every version of the advice you’ve been given, what’s widely available and discussed, and it’s what this series — The Science of Perception and Intuition — exists to help you do.
The first thing to know: the quality of how you perceive the world affects the degree to which you can trust your gut feeling.
Retraining yourself to see the bigger picture again is the first step in feeling confident about trusting your gut.
Success trains your Mind where to look — and, just as deliberately, where to stop looking. The more experienced you become, the less of the world you actually see.
Because our Mind – and whole neurobiology – has learned what it believes matters and what it expects to see. As we focus our system says, ‘We’ve seen this before. We know what to pay attention to. We know what to look for.’
This is why a gut feeling can be right about something you’d swear you never noticed. It isn’t mystical. It’s you non conscious processing picking up a cue your conscious attention had already filtered out.
Learning the discernment to really trust your instincts and intuition – knowing what’s worth listening to and what might be pulling you back – relies on understanding the science of what you might not see and re-training your perception to take in more of what’s actually happening in the moment.
The Experiment:
For the best part of two decades, especially if facilitating groups, I showed clients different versions of the same video. It’s a video of two basketball teams (wearing different colours) that asks you to count how many times one team passes to each other. It’s 2 minutes, so take a quick watch now. (You don’t need sound).
“As we use more of our limited attention, we are much less likely to notice the unexpected…”
– Chabris & Simons (2010)
In the original research by Chabris and Simons nearly 50% of people were so focussed on counting the ball passes that they didn’t notice the person dressed in a gorilla suit walk across the court. Researchers call this ‘Inattentional Blindness’
Even experts aren’t immune. In a 2013 study (Drew et al) doctors were asked to look for nodules in patient lung scans. 83% of radiologists focussed on looking for nodules in the lung did not see a little gorilla tucked away in the lungs.
So if your gut says something’s off and you can’t explain why, this can often be the mechanism: you’ve picked up a real cue, and your attention simply wasn’t pointed at it consciously. Slowing down is the only way to find out which.
Why it doesn’t matter if you talk about instinct or intuition at this point
You’ve probably read about the difference between instinct and intuition: instinct is often referred to as biological and innate, whereas intuition — according to researchers like Gary Klein, is built from pattern recognition and repeated experience. He studied firefighters and ICU nurses who sensed danger seconds before they could explain why — and found their “gut” wasn’t guessing. It was years of pattern recognition surfacing faster than conscious thought could narrate it.
But when you’re standing in it, it’s all neurobiology, there’s very little ‘thinking’. So what matters is learning to discern the difference between an instinctual feeling worth trusting and something else.
Learning to tell them apart is what I help people do at moments that matter.
Why we all need to start to see like a child again, as a foundation for trusting our gut
“When we say that children have trouble paying attention, what we really mean is that they have trouble not paying attention.”
– Dr Alison Gopnik (2021)
Developmental psychologist Dr Alison Gopnik compares a learning child’s attention to a lantern, casting light in every direction. As we grow more efficient, our attention narrows into a spotlight — useful for getting things done, at the cost of everything outside its beam.
Just think for a moment how much you’ve been rewarded for being quick-witted. Our society — especially our workplaces — rewards fast, quick-thinking, drive. She describes taking a young child grocery shopping as the opposite of that — something close to walking the aisles beside William Blake ‘going to get a quart of milk with William Blake…suddenly things that were invisible are there’ – because nothing has been filtered out yet.
The thinking more won’t help, but slowing down will.
“The very things that help us see the world, can also blind us to it…”
– Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt (2020)
We think: ‘We’ve seen this before. I know myself. We know what to pay attention to’. We run on an invisible expectation about what’s in front of us and what’s important to focus on’.
After The Invisible Gorilla concept became popular, I started the show the video I just shared with you. I’ve lost count of the amount of times people who had read the book or knew the study would knowingly smile or nod at me as I pressed play in front of the group, with a confident ‘I know this one’ glint in their eye…. and then look rather more sheepish at the end.
They thought they knew what to focus on and expect in the video…. they’d missed the curtain colour changing, the player leaving the court – ‘did that even happen?’ confident clients would ask.
So often, we don’t see what we’re not consciously looking for.
Maybe you open an email and start drafting the reply before you’ve finished reading it. Maybe you walk into a meeting already rehearsing the objection you’re sure is coming — and miss the subtle one they actually raise, or start speaking to one they haven’t raised at all. Maybe you say yes to something before you’ve checked, even briefly, whether you actually can.
As high and fast functioning adults – at work, in relationships, in our sense of self – spotlight attention shapes what we see. Focus blinds us and it makes trusting our gut harder.
This is quite possibly the mechanism behind every “I should have trusted my gut” regret you’ve had.
Learning to be present is the foundation of trusting your own intuition
Learning to really cultivate present moment awareness is the foundation of becoming someone who can genuinely trust their intuition and instincts: noticing the sensation on your skin, letting your eyes drift unfocused around the room and taking in the quality of the light, tuning in to what you can hear that you weren’t listening for a moment ago, sensing the space behind you without turning to check. These are all ways of bringing yourself into the present moment quickly.
One simple, but effective tool to do this emerged from body-based therapies working to help those with trauma. Called Orienting — widening the spotlight deliberately, so you take in more of what’s actually happening rather than only what you expect to see — it’s the foundation of everything I have now coached countless people on. You’re not going to be able to see everything, but it will bring you into sharper awareness that gives you far more foundational confidence when it comes to trusting your gut.
It’s often hard to do this on your own at the beginning. Many clients have said to me they can do it with me in a room, which is why I built PAUSE — a 30-day audio journey — to help you learn to do exactly this: the capacity to slow down and perceive more of what’s actually happening, before you decide what any of it means. You can download the first audio to try as a gift from me here.
Because you can’t discern a genuine instinct from noise if you’re not perceiving the moment fully in the first place. That’s the foundation everything else in this series builds on.
Learn more about this in PAUSE or move onto Principle #2 to read more about why we all need to learn to do this.