Gut Reactions

As I sometimes do, I had a look at the background to ‘going with your gut’ and it’s a fascinating area of neuroscience and biology. It turns out that the gastrointestinal tract is a massively complex organism that contains a network of 500 million neurons. It is the Enteric Nervous System, sometimes called the ‘second brain’, because 90% of the signals go from this system to the brain, not the other way round. This system works behind the scenes most of the time, but occasionally we use it to bypass the usual thought processes of the brain.

Throughout your life you face hundreds of different situations on a daily basis, making conscious decisions along the way. After a while, these decisions become second nature as the brain recognises the patterns and reacts on autopilot. This covers things like getting up and getting ready for the day, washing yourself, making tea, keeping an eye on the time etc. We very seldom think about these things unless something interrupts the usual pattern. All of this is governed by the brain because it has the time to adjust where necessary.

The gut, or Enteric Nervous System, only gets involved when the brain cannot react quickly enough. It’s wrong to characterise the reaction involved as instinct. What it is, is the result of a lifetime of experience being called upon to work when the brain doesn’t have time to think through the options. So, in a situation that your nervous system recognises as a risk, for example, the instructions are relayed to the brain almost instantly and include as much information and analysis as is possible in a few milliseconds. Now, you may not have faced the exact situation before, but you will have faced hundreds of similar situations where the brain has time to react. This is the information the Enteric Nervous System passes to the brain before conscious thought becomes involved. Occasionally, the brain has time to catch up and it has the opportunity to confirm or ignore the message from the ‘gut’. When it should or should not go with the advice is what we refer to as going with your gut or ignoring it. So, are there situations where it is advisable to accept the advice and situations where it is advisable to ignore it?

If you have expertise in a particular area your gut is an excellent guide. While teaching I would often change my approach or even my whole lesson plan almost instantly based on student reaction or a sudden thought that seemed to pop into my head. 9 times out of 10 I went with it and it was almost always right. If you are detecting a shift in a particular atmosphere then it’s quite a good idea to act based on that as you can often read changes in people’s micro expressions subconsciously, and if that indicates that a situation is becoming risky in some way you need to listen to it. As someone on the Autistic Spectrum my ability to read expressions is not particularly good so I have to wait for my conscious brain to catch up, and even that doesn’t work particularly well!

You should, at least initially, ignore your gut when you are in a situation that you have never encountered before. In this case any gut reaction is simply guesswork, so if you have time you need to reflect on the information and decide whether you agree or not. You should also ignore your gut in a situation where emotional reactions are particularly prevalent. You could be affected by fear, or by bias positive or negative. If we are attracted to someone physically, for example, we tend to be less analytical and more prone to making errors. If you are in a professional situation that requires complex analysis, for example hiring a new worker, you should be very wary of going with your gut because you have a wealth of experience to work with that will outperform the gut every time. The same decision may be reached but it will be reached by much more robust processes. Obviously, if you are hiring someone and you instinctively feel that they are right or wrong you can ask questions to confirm those instincts.

So, there you have a bluffer’s guide to your gut. I hope you found it interesting. My gut is usually unreliable in terms of people and situations, so I generally ignore it. Since I met Janet I don’t need my gut outside the classroom as I have hers to rely on, and that’s never steered me wrong in nearly 39 years!