When Should You Follow Your Sixth Sense?

Discerning Friend From Foe

We must never ignore clues that something is wrong.

By Joe Navarro

For most of human history, we have been very good observers because we had to be. We used all of our senses—touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight—to detect and discern. The sudden vocalization of animals or the scampering of birds alerted us that someone was approaching. Even the sweat of a sojourner let our ancestors know who was in the area and what they had eaten. At a distance, by examining posture, gait, arm swing, clothing, and accouterments (weapons, water vessels) our ancestors could discern friend from foe.

As generations evolved and eventually moved to cities, close proximity changed how we viewed and assessed each other. Because everyone was so close, we had less time to observe. Close quarters and circumstances dictated we interact on first meeting rather than later. This was the opposite of what we had done for thousands of years, which was to assess first at a distance and then interact. Close proximity also made us more sensitive to being observed, which is why we are uncomfortable when others stare at us.

Have we allowed ourselves to become careless when it comes to our own safety and that of our loved ones? I see people distracted while driving (applying makeup or texting). Or someone knocks at the front door and we open it without first seeing who is there and asking what they want. Perhaps, in an attempt to be polite, we have abrogated our responsibility to ourselves, and each other, to be good observers.

I saw a young person pushing a shopping cart and talking on her phone without staying alert. As she reached her car and opened the door, she found herself trapped by someone begging for money, so close that her expression showed surprise and fear. Fortunately, the man just wanted a handout, but he could have been a sexual predator or a thief. Had she been observing her environment, she could have better anticipated this event.

We should all look around and listen to our inner voice, which is in fact the limbic brain telling us to be careful that something is wrong, as security specialist Gavin de Becker pointed out in The Gift of Fear. So often, after an encounter or a relationship turns problematic, one hears, “You know I had a feeling, in the beginning, that something wasn’t right.”

Failure to observe, if we are honest, leads to avoidable circumstances as well as accidents. How we feel about something often completes the picture so that we can fully understand it. While doing research for my book Dangerous Personalities I talked to hundreds of victims and invariably they said: “I should have listened to my gut. I knew something wasn’t right about that guy. I just could not point to any one thing.”

Personally, I am alive today because, as both a police officer and an FBI agent, I encountered many situations where something spoke to me, from the gut, that said, “Don’t go in the building, not now, wait for backup.” And had I gone in the building on my own, I would have been shot by a wanted fugitive. You just never know. I can’t explain it. But we evolved to have immediate reactions to the smallest of sensory inputs. Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard at developing my observation skills, but I have been humble enough to listen to my gut or the hairs on my neck that predicted danger.

It is never too late to start observing. Observation is not about being judgmental, it is not about good or bad. It is about seeing the world around you, having situational awareness, and interpreting what it is that others are communicating both verbally and nonverbally. To observe is to see but also to understand, and that requires listening to how you feel.

Good observation skills give us the opportunity to test and validate what others think, feel, or intend for us. Are they kind, unselfish, and empathetic? Or are they selfish, cruel, indifferent, and apathetic? When we discover who they are early enough, we have spared ourselves or, some might even say, saved ourselves. Being observant does not mean being obnoxious or intrusive. In fact, a good observer knows that intrusive observations affect what is observed; subtlety, as well as purpose, is required.

Two Things We Look For

Finally, what do we in fact assess for? There are many things, but if you get these two right, you will be spared a lot of headaches. Assess for danger and comfort.

Ask yourself, “How does this situation or this individual make me feel?” For example, you are walking to your car at night and you see someone out of the corner of your eye walking briskly and you sense that you will cross paths. Your limbic brain senses this for you and lets you know something is not right. That discomfort is your brain saying “Warning, possible danger!” If you are to heed that inner voice, you become more alert, look for a well-lit area, and wisely change your pace or return to safety.

Once, while working in Yuma, Arizona, I was given the address of a woman who might know the suspect in a state trooper shooting. She was agreeable enough when she answered the door, but something just didn’t feel right. Every time I asked if Alex, the suspect, could be using her apartment to sleep while she was at work, she would place her fingers at the base of her neck. She did that enough times during our conversation, and only when I mentioned Alex using her apartment, that it made me want to ask more questions. Finally, I asked her if I could do a quick search of the house; sure enough, Alex was hiding in the closet with a gun in his hand. I just remember my gut talking to me way before I made a conscious observation, and I am glad that it did.

Assessing for comfort can open your eyes to subtleties about the person with whom you are dealing. When you are with someone new, ask yourself, “Does this person make me feel comfortable at all times?” If not, then why? We must never ignore clues that say something is wrong, no matter how badly we want a friendship to work. Your subconscious is always working to protect you. It exists for a reason, but you have to be prepared to observe and recognize what you sense.

Observation is no less important today than it was 10,000 years ago. The only difference is that now we have to do it more quickly and more efficiently because we may run into 50 strangers in a day, whereas our ancestors saw but a few. We can improve this skill, and we can even teach it to our children, but like everything else, it takes effort.

Joe Navarro is a former FBI counterintelligence agent and the author of What Every Body Is Saying.

Steve Taylor

For Steve Taylor, 56, the idea that humans are able to sense and understand everything in the world around them is weirder than the idea that there are forces and faculties we can’t normally perceive. “It’s completely illogical,” says Taylor. “We’re just animals. A sheep has its own version of reality, and an insect has one, too. Why should we be the end product with a perfect understanding of reality beyond which nothing else exists?” He has thought and written about end-of-life experiences. His father, at 79, was weak and confused but didn’t seem seriously ill. He told a friend, “I’ve found out when I’m going to die, it will be a week, next Thursday. And I’ve seen the book with all the dates people will die. I can find out the date of your death if you like.” His friend said not to worry and that he would rather not know. A couple of days later, Taylor’s dad’s health took a turn for the worse. He was diagnosed with pneumonia and died on Thursday, just as he had predicted.

How Do You Know if You’re Really Sick?

Why humans may be able to sense their own life-threatening illness.

By Dustin W. Ballard, M.D.

In my hospital emergency department, life-threatening illness is often spotted as easily as pornography and poor fashion sense—we know it when we see it. But for most people, in most situations, sorting out true illness can be difficult. Many healthy folks seek care for nothing because they are anxious, while some very ill people stick it out at home, in full-on denial or stoically convinced that they can will themselves well.

What’s the difference between a mind that causes illness and one that can detect sickness early? This seems like an important question, not only for the field of medicine but also for every single living and thinking “patient” in the world.

What are auras and premonitions? And do humans have a muted and under-recognized sense when they themselves are sick? With better recognition skills, could people serve as their own triage nurses? Call centers that give advice are great, but it would be nice if people had a reliable sense of sickness, like an epiphany of medical impairment.

The Accurate and Reliable Aura

The aura that “precedes the headache of migraine is mysterious. There is a process of intense activity, which seems to spread, like the ripples in a pond into which a stone is thrown,” wrote British neurologist Sir William Gowers in 1906, “the most frequent among the many forms is that of a small star near the fixing point; it enlarges towards one side, its rays expanding into zigzags.”

Auras, as we know, are common in people with migraines and epilepsy and come in a variety of forms—a kaleidoscope of lights, the smell of burnt toast—and may occur seconds to hours before the onset of a headache or seizure. For a migraineur or a patient with epilepsy, the aura is an extremely reliable indicator of impending symptoms, far more accurate than routinely available clinical evaluation or testing. Absent fancy tests like continuous functional MRI or EEG monitoring, most would consider auras the gold standard of disease prediction in these cases.

Yet we don’t really understand where auras come from. We assume, of course, that they are associated with the excitation or injury of specific cortical areas preceding the onset of more generalized processes, but we have not been able to capture the pathology and neural circuitry of this process.

Is it possible then that auras are a prominent manifestation of an innate mental ability to detect illness that represents a more global function: a synthesis of inputs that triggers a sense and premonition of impending illness or death?

Premonitions of Death

Consider other health-related premonitions. A colleague tells a story of an aunt who suffered for months from headaches and dizziness, of unknown etiology. After many visits to her doctor and failed treatments, she became convinced that she was going to die. So convinced that she began preparing and freezing dozens of meals so that her husband would eat well after she passed. Ultimately, her cerebral aneurysm was diagnosed shortly prior to its rupture. She did not die but was right about being on the verge of it.

While not a rich topic in the literature, there is some evidence supporting a premonition of death as a real entity. For example, it is not uncommon for pregnant women who miscarry or otherwise lose their pregnancy to report experiencing a premonition beforehand. In a survey of women who suffered a stillbirth in the second trimester or later, 64 percent reported sensing that their child was not well.

And there are some case reports of other kinds of premonitions sprinkled throughout the literature. Joseph Ngeh, in a letter to the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, describes one such premonition in the death of an elderly patient in the hospital.

“The patient’s family had arrived by then. Although distraught, they showed no surprise at hearing about the patient’s sudden death. During our conversation, I sensed that they had expected this to happen. Remarkably, the daughter-in-law volunteered that, when they visited the patient at 9 p.m., earlier that night, six hours before the patient’s first cardiopulmonary arrest, the patient had held her hand and mentioned that he would ‘die tonight.’”

Premonitions of death are also common in trauma patients. In a survey that appeared in the journal American Surgeon, of the 302 members of the Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, 95 percent of respondents reported encountering patients who expressed such a premonition, and 50 percent agreed that patients expressing such premonitions had a higher mortality rate. And 57 percent also agreed with the belief that patient willpower affects outcome while 44 percent were on board with the notion that patients have an innate ability to sense their ultimate outcome after injury.

Such evidence must be considered in light of its limitations. Recall bias is an obvious limitation—there are surely many pregnant women and trauma patients who thrive or recover despite premonitions to the contrary. We must also distinguish the premonition of death from the ancient Chinese phenomenon of hui guang fan zhao, or “the final radiance of the setting sun,” also called the Lazarus premonition. This refers to a scenario that screenwriters have used liberally for decades—the transient revival of the dying person before death. This situation is clearly different, as it is not so much a premonition as it is the recognition of a process, like a song in its last chorus, that is nearly complete.

And, of course, absent a biological explanation, it’s impossible to prove that humans have an innate sense of being sick. However, we should not be overly skeptical. We accept that animals may intuit when they or others are ill. Remember Oscar, the cat who appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine after correctly foretelling the demise of over 50 patients in a nursing home—curling up with them within hours of their death? We also accept that certain animals, including my dear departed black lab, will instinctively put themselves out to pasture near the time of their death (in the case of my lab, ineffectively, as my wife kept retrieving her from the bushes).

It seems biologically and intuitively plausible that humans have an innate aurascope that can sense true illness. And if it exists, there may be ways to cultivate and enhance it.

Dustin W. Ballard, M.D., is an emergency physician, clinical researcher, Fulbright scholar, and author.

Jaclyn Johnston

It came to her in a dream. When Jaclyn Johnston, 40, woke up one morning in March 2014, she had dreamt that Bruce Springsteen pulled her up onstage and sang “Dancing in the Dark.” She was set to see Springsteen in concert a month later in Dallas, but she put the dream away and went on with her day. The following month, she and her friends lined up early for the event to make sure they would be in the front. It was gray, cold and raining, but Johnston stood through the opening acts to make sure she was front and center for The Boss. He came on, and it happened. During “Dancing in the Dark,” Springsteen pulled Johnston (and others) up onstage for a group performance. He did, in fact, pass her the mic for her to sing out to the crowd. Johnston does not believe this was a coincidence, “I think your intuition is partly your subconscious, sending you messages.”

The Science of Love at First Sight

How personality and hormones converge to tell you: This is The One.

By Helen Fisher, Ph.D.

I sing of romantic love—a basic mating drive that is deeply wired in the human brain and evolved millions of years ago to predispose our ancestors to seek a special partner, have babies, and send their DNA into tomorrow. And like fear, anger, and other basic emotions, the brain circuitry for romantic love can be triggered instantly—what has come to be called love at first sight.

People experience it regularly. I say this because I do an annual study known as Singles in America. Every year, since 2012, we have surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 5,000 singles, based on the U.S. census. And not only do 63 percent of men and 53 percent of women believe in love at first sight, but 41 percent of men and 29 percent of women have experienced it.

A far more complex issue, however, is why this brain system is triggered immediately when you meet one person rather than another. Why him? Why her? Here’s where one’s cultural experiences weigh in. People are regularly drawn to those of the same ethnic and socio-economic background, with the same degree of good looks, intelligence, and education, and with the same social values, and economic and reproductive goals.

But a host of more hidden forces are also likely to contribute to this instant attraction.

For example, these Singles In America studies have shown that the first three things we notice in a potential partner are their teeth (reported by 76 percent of respondents), their grammar (83 percent), and their self-confidence (78 percent). Each is informative. Your teeth signal your health and general age; your grammar indicates your background and education level; and your self-confidence displays your psychological stability. These and myriad other physical, psychological, and cultural traits most likely play a role in instant attraction.

The Chemistry of Spontaneous Attraction

Basic personality is clearly involved as well. Using fMRI brain scans and a deep dive into the medical literature, I’ve found that humanity has evolved four foundational styles of thinking and behaving—linked with four basic brain systems. And by looking at a sample of 28,128 singles on one dating site, we can see who was spontaneously attracted to whom.

People who are particularly curious, creative, energetic, and risk-taking, traits linked with the brain’s dopamine system, are disproportionately and instantly drawn to people like themselves. Those who are more traditional, cautious, and detail-oriented, traits linked with serotonin, are also rapidly attracted to people with similar traits.

But women and men who are particularly analytical, skeptical, tough-minded, and spatially adept, traits linked with testosterone, are initially drawn to their opposites instead—people who are empathetic, socially skilled, and holistic long-term thinkers, all traits linked with estrogen. And men and women with these estrogen-linked traits are also attracted to their opposites, those particularly expressive of the traits linked with testosterone. We all have some traits in all four of these basic forms of natural temperament, but we express some more than others—making each of us unique. Indeed, I have never met two people who I thought were exactly alike, and I’m an identical twin.

Nevertheless, there are four foundational patterns to personality. And when you are ready to find a mate, each can instantly draw you to one person rather than another and ignite the powerful and primordial human drive to love, contributing to that seemingly magical experience, love at first sight.

Helen Fisher, Ph.D., is a biological anthropologist and a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, as well as the chief science advisor to the internet dating site Match.com. She has written six books on mating.

Rula Abirafeh

Rula Abirafeh, 42, does not think of intuition as a one-off flash of insight. To her, intuition is unspoken data that steadily provides another source of information. She credits her conception of intuition to her Druze heritage. The Druze people, mostly found in Syria and Lebanon, have a mystical faith that combines Islam with other ancient teachings. Abirafeh believes that she can sense meaning beyond words and understand outcomes beyond simple cause and effect, in part due to this wisdom and tradition. “Intuition isn’t supposed to lead you down a road where you’ll never make mistakes,” she says. Take her marriage: She met a boy in sixth grade. She retained a photograph of the two of them as children through several moves in her adult life. She never forgot a memory of his waiting on her table at a mall restaurant when she was a teenager. Even the memory of Christmas cookies he’d brought to a party they both attended one year stayed with her. “People who say, ‘Don’t trust your intuition, trust the evidence,’ don’t understand what intuition is. It’s a different kind of evidence, and it takes time, reflection, and a connection with yourself to be a useful tool.” There was no force telling her she would marry this man, but when she found herself reunited with him years later, she recognized the cosmic breadcrumbs life had given her.

Gut Instincts Are Useful Shortcuts

But they can also be misleading.

By Carlos Alós-Ferrer, Ph.D.

The power of intuition is undeniable. Most of the time, what feels right, or what makes you think that you are following your gut, comes down to a few simple strategies—for example, reinforced or repeated behavior that worked more or less in the past. Others include going with the familiar instead of the unfamiliar, imitating people who look successful, or simply trying to fit a pattern. These are heuristics, the mental shortcuts we take to make decisions and judgments quickly and with little cognitive effort.

Intuition is a catch-all for a series of associations that your brain executes, often automatically. Those intuitions served us well for survival in the savanna, and they served us well when we were children learning the basics of the world. Familiarity, reinforcement, or imitation will work well if we face exactly the same decision again and again. However, they are often wrong in our modern, complex, fast-changing society, and they can be dangerous if we apply them in the wrong situation.

Intuition and Simple Patterns

Intuition makes you feel good when your brain spots a pattern. Consider the following riddle. If it takes five machines five minutes to make five bricks, how many minutes will it take 100 machines to make 100 bricks? This is one of a number of standard questions used in the cognitive reflection test, which gives a rough measure of how reliant on intuition people are. A very large percentage of people answer 100. Because, you know, five and five yields five, so 100 and 100 must yield 100. Wrong. The 100 machines are 20 groups of five machines. Each of those 20 groups of five machines will make five bricks in five minutes, so the 100 machines together will make 20 x 5 = 100 bricks in five minutes. They all run in parallel. The correct answer is five. The interesting observation is not that people make mistakes but that most people who make a mistake say 100. Not seven, not 93. They give the intuitive answer and stop thinking because a satisfying pattern has been found.

This pattern-seeking intuition became embarrassing for a newscaster and a newspaper journalist in 2020. At that time, the businessman Mike Bloomberg was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. President and was spending a considerable amount of money on advertising. The newscaster and the journalist read a tweet stating: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over.” The commentator and the journalist praised the tweet and used it to argue that there is too much money in politics, all the time failing to notice that $500 million divided by 327 million people is a dollar and 53 cents per person. We can laugh, but maybe we shouldn’t be so harsh. All they did was intuitively trust a pattern. If five and five yields five, a million and a million must yield a million. It feels good to trust your intuition.

Many examples of successful intuitive behavior are due to expertise. If you are a highly trained professional—say, an expert on detecting forgeries in classical art—your brain has been exposed to a lot of relevant information and has internalized a series of subtle associations to the point that they are not even conscious anymore. The result might be described as “intuition,” but it is really expertise. If you are not an expert in a field, your intuition is untrained and will serve you poorly. It is best to stop, think, and gather data.

The Decisions You Don’t Make

Suppose your car breaks down. There are many things you could try to fix the problem. But, unless the problem is obvious or you happen to be a car mechanic, you probably will not start tinkering with the engine. Also, you are apt to come up empty when trying to list the pros and cons of possible options, and it is unlikely that past experience will help you. In the end, you will call a mechanic.

You probably do not think about this as a decision, even though it is. The mechanic will examine your problem and make a decision. It is not a decision you would comfortably make yourself, because your intuition is not trained in this field, and you do not have the knowledge to weigh the pros and cons. At which point do you consider a problem to be a decision that you can make yourself?

Consider the really important decisions in your life—choosing a career, a partner, or a new house. Is deciding whether to leave your current job and pursue a more fulfilling activity more or less important than finding out whether you have a cold or the flu? If you do not dare decide how to fix your car on your own, why do you agonize over your career choice instead of seeking help?

The first step in approaching an important decision is to ask: “Am I qualified to make this decision?” “Do I have enough information?” Too often, we brood over important decisions when we should be gathering new information or looking for help. To make better decisions, be more conscious, and also more cautious, about what a decision is. The boundary between problems and decisions is a subjective one. If you are facing an important decision and are having doubts, it might be time to stop, get more information, and consider whether you can get help.

Carlos Alós-Ferrer, Ph.D., is a mathematician and currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Economic Psychology.

How to Make Better Decisions

A large body of research reminds us that we’re not well-wired to make good choices for important decisions that have long-term consequences.
To gauge your decision-making style, consider three important decisions that you have made in your personal or professional life, ones that didn’t need to be made in a hurry—perhaps, buying an expensive appliance, making a change in a personal relationship, choosing an apartment, applying for a new job, or hiring an employee.

Which of the following best describes your decision-making process?

a) I trusted my gut.
b) I carefully considered the pros and cons of the different options and tried to weigh all factors together.
c) I thought back to past similar situations and tried to do whatever had worked previously.

If you picked:
a) You are in good company—many people follow their intuition. The bad news: Intuition is often wrong, and sometimes catastrophically so.
b) You probably pride yourself on being as rational as possible. The bad news: Weighing pros and cons is often too simple a method, leading to unsatisfactory choices.
c) You might be data-oriented and view decision-making as a learning process, which is good. The bad news: Just comparing a situation with past examples might cause you to miss important information and can easily lead you astray. —Carlos Alós-Ferrer, Ph.D

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