On Intuition: Knowing What You Don't Know

Tue Aug 05 2025

Intuition: The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Knowing

We like to imagine intuition as a secret superpower, an inner voice that whispers the truth before our brains have time to catch up. It’s flattering. It’s comforting. And most of the time, it’s a lie.

We talk about “trusting our gut” as if there’s a secret inner compass hidden inside us, a private oracle that always points to truth. It sounds empowering. It’s tidy. It gives us the comfort of believing that somewhere deep down, we already know what’s right.

Your “gut feeling” isn’t magic. It’s not some higher self delivering wisdom through the fog. It’s your brain running an ancient shortcut: Does this match something I’ve seen before? If the answer is yes, it hands you a warm rush of certainty and calls it truth. But it’s not truth, it’s just familiarity dressed as revelation. And the more you trust it without interrogation, the more trapped you become inside your own pre‑approved, self-reinforcing beliefs.

In reality most of what we call “intuition” isn’t some mystical sixth sense. It’s something far more mundane, and far more dangerous: our brain signalling familiar territory. It’s a feedback loop: pre-assumed recognition masquerading as supernatural truth detection.

If you want to see how deep the rot goes, you need to strip intuition down to its bones.

Where “intuition” actually comes from

The word comes from the Latin intuitiō, meaning “a looking at” or “contemplation.” The root verb intueri combines in- (“toward”) and tueri (“to look at, watch over”). Originally, it meant direct seeing: an unmediated apprehension of something, without discursive reasoning.

In classical and medieval philosophy, intuition was the mind’s ability to grasp truth instantly, without needing to build a logical argument. It was seen as pure, uncorrupted seeing.

That’s a far cry from how the term gets used now, as shorthand for “I have a feeling about this,” or “my gut says so.” Somewhere along the way, direct seeing got replaced by instant feeling, and we pretended they were the same thing.

How intuition actually works in the brain

Strip away the poetry, and intuition is just rapid, unconscious pattern recognition.

Here’s the sequence:

1. Recognition: Your senses pull in data from the current moment
2. Pattern match: Your brain runs that data against the vast storehouse of experiences, memories, and associations you’ve built over your lifetime
3. Prediction: If it finds a match, it predicts likely outcomes based on what’s happened before
4. Signal: That prediction is served to you not as a verbal thought, but as a feeling: comfort, unease, certainty, hesitation

It feels instantaneous because the whole process bypasses conscious reasoning. But it’s not magic, it’s just your brain’s autopilot doing what it’s designed to do: keep you alive by recognizing patterns and acting on them quickly.

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called this System 1 thinking, the brain’s fast, automatic mode. It’s efficient, but it trades accuracy for speed, relying on shortcuts shaped by whatever information you’ve been exposed to.

The polluted lens problem

Pattern recognition is only as good as the patterns you’ve stored. If your memory library is built on false assumptions, distorted beliefs, and cultural conditioning, then your “intuition” is just those distortions running on fast-forward.

This is where it gets dangerous:

• If you’ve internalized faulty cause-and-effect relationships, your intuition will keep confirming them
• If you’ve absorbed stereotypes, fears, or trauma responses, those will color what “feels right” or “feels wrong.”
• If you’ve lived in a narrow or isolated environment, your intuition will be confident in a very small, inaccurate map of reality

If you grew up in a household where anger always preceded violence, you may read any raised voice as danger, even when it’s not.

If your culture equates poverty with laziness, you’ll feel an unjustified “this doesn’t sit right” response when meeting someone unemployed, even if they’re between jobs.

If you’ve only seen relationships modeled through jealousy and control, genuine independence in a partner might trigger suspicion rather than trust.

In trauma contexts, what’s often labelled “intuition” can actually be hypervigilance, the survival circuitry constantly scanning for danger. It can be deadly accurate in one environment and disastrously misleading in another, because it treats every raised eyebrow or unfamiliar tone as a threat.

Because intuition feels direct, you don’t see the contamination. There’s no intermediate reasoning to inspect and challenge, just a raw sensation of “I know.” That sensation creates a false sense of security and counterfeit clarity.

The trust trap

“Trust yourself” is the kind of advice that sounds empowering until you realize you might be the last person you should trust.

When people say “trust your gut,” they mean “listen to the feeling that pops up without thinking too much about it.” The assumption is that this feeling comes from some wise, primal part of you that’s always been right.

But here’s the truth: That “primal” part is just your implicit memory system, decades of patterns and behaviours and experiences. It doesn’t care about truth; it cares about familiarity, predictability and recognition. Familiarity feels safe, and the brain rewards safety with a hit of confidence and self-assuredness

That’s why people can feel utterly certain about something and be dead wrong. The system doesn’t distinguish between ‘this matches my past experience’ and ‘this is factually correct’.

Earning the right to trust yourself

If you ever think about trusting your intuition, treat it like an unproven witness, not because doing so will somehow purify it, but because most of the time the interrogation will expose how little foundation there really is.

It needs to earn credibility through consistent, verifiable self-correction.

That means interrogating the source: Is this “knowing” coming from lived, reality-tested experience or from a belief I inherited without examination?

Spotting comfort as a red flag: If a conclusion feels right because it’s comfortable, you should be suspicious

Catching yourself mid-flow: Don’t just reflect later, interrupt your own certainty in real time and ask: What’s this really built on?

Logging and testing outcomes: Keep track of when your gut was right and when it wasn’t. Look for patterns in the failures

You can’t shortcut this. You have to be willing to be wrong repeatedly, publicly, and without excuse.

Of course, constant doubt can paralyze as surely as blind trust can mislead; the point isn’t to freeze every decision in analysis, but to strip away the false certainty you’ve mistaken for truth.

The horizon illusion

Most people never realize that the “horizon” their intuition points to is just the far wall of their own conditioning. It looks expansive because they’ve never gone beyond it.

When you’ve lived inside a certain worldview for long enough, anything outside it feels “off” or “wrong,” and anything inside it feels “right”, regardless of accuracy. That’s why entire communities can share the same “gut instincts” and still be collectively wrong.

Jonestown, anyone?

In Jonestown, collective intuition told people their leader was benevolent, that outsiders were the enemy, that self-sacrifice was noble. These weren’t analytical conclusions, they were felt truths, reinforced by every sermon, every group ritual, every shared hardship. That’s how hundreds of people walked willingly into their own deaths, certain they were doing the right thing.

This isn’t to say all collective intuition is harmful. In domains like music improvisation or elite team sports, shared pattern recognition can produce seamless, almost pre-conscious coordination. But even in those cases, what’s firing is still the same conditioning loop; the only difference is that it’s been deliberately trained toward a useful outcome.

It’s not that they all share a mystical connection to truth. They just share the same pre-loaded map, the same language, the same philosophies, the same convictions.

Recovering real seeing

If there’s such a thing as clean intuition, it only shows up when you’ve dismantled enough of your interpretive lens that the pattern recognition is no longer running on corrupt data.

The work looks like this.

Brutal honesty: Admit that you can’t trust yourself by default, question everything in your head.

Active disruption: Put yourself in situations that challenge your expectations and force recalibration - this is not comfortable, this fucking sucks

Reality over comfort: Value being correct over feeling right

Loop breaking: When your gut says something, deliberately search for disconfirming evidence before acting, try to prove yourself wrong, and try really hard

Comfort feels like sinking into a warm chair, you stop scanning, you stop questioning. Clarity feels like standing on a windswept ridge, you see further, but the air is cold and you’re exposed.

Comfort says “you’re fine.” Clarity says “this is what’s real, whether you like it or not.”

You may find that what you thought was intuition was just habit, and that’s the point. Once the habits are burned off, what’s left is faster, cleaner, and far less ego-protective.

Final Thought

This doesn’t mean intuition is useless. In high-skill domains, years of deliberate, feedback-rich experience create pattern recognition that’s both fast and accurate. A firefighter feeling “this floor is about to give” or a therapist sensing hidden hostility isn’t magic, it’s the product of thousands of verified repetitions. The difference is, their “gut” has been trained and tested, not left to feed on unchallenged assumptions.

Real intuition, if it exists, doesn’t pat you on the back. It doesn’t feel like comfort. It feels like clarity, and clarity is often uncomfortable, like a splash of cold water to the face.

Psychologists like Gary Klein and Gerd Gigerenzer have shown that in some domains, intuition can be “fast and frugal” but only when built on thousands of real, feedback‑tested repetitions.

If you’re serious about “trusting your gut,” make sure it’s your actual gut speaking, not the echo chamber of your past whispering reassurances.

People like to believe there’s a form of intuition that leaps past bias into pure insight. Maybe there is but until you can prove it isn’t just your conditioning wearing a clever disguise, you’re better off assuming it’s the latter.