Dr. Tara Swart on Intuition: The Neuroscience of Trusting Your Gut

Singing, chanting, drumming, humming, all of those sorts of things (upbeat music) can also increase connectivity in your brain that gives you more access to your intuition. Hey everyone, it's Rosie here. Welcome back to "Radio Headspace." I have a question for you, do you trust your gut? Or perhaps the better question is, should you trust your gut? Well, according to Dr. Tara Swart, the answer is yes. Tara is a neuroscientist, senior lecturer at MIT, and the author of "The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain." Today, we'll dive into the science behind intuition, where it comes from, how it connects to our emotions and past experiences, and why creativity can sharpen our inner wisdom. I really hope you enjoy this conversation. I'm really excited. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have Dr. Tara Swart. How would you like to be addressed? You can just call me Tara. I almost feel like when people go through the process of getting that doctorate degree that I feel like, "Ugh, don't you just wanna use it all the time?" But then Rosie, you'd have to call me Doctor Doctor Tara. because I've got an MD and a PhD, so I think not. (laughs) Doctor Doc, I mean, I love it. I mean, I love it, I think it's great. I, as I said earlier, I'm totally fangirling because I love your work, I love what you talk about. I really loved "The Source" when it came out, that was your book, and it's called "The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain." I think first, just to take it back a little bit, if you wouldn't mind sharing, you know, the sort of definition of intuition rom the way that you see it and its relation to creativity. Mm-hmm. So I describe six ways of thinking in "The Source," which are logical, emotional, intuitive, physical, motivational, and creative. And I kind of say that intuition lies between logic and emotion, because we learn a lot of things from formal learning or direct instruction as children. But throughout life, we also pick up a lot of life lessons, but we can't remember everything that we've experienced in our life, so this gets stored as kind of pattern recognition, like I said, about creativity as wisdom and judgment that becomes a bit more reflex, and that's why it's sometimes also called gut instinct, as in it's instinctual, you can't necessarily rationalize why you make a certain decision, but you just feel that it's right. And the reason that it's gut instinct is that we keep our working memory sort of front of mind, you know, prefrontal cortex, frontal cortex in the brain, and then our intuition is deeper in the brain because it's patterns and habits and behaviors that have been there for a long time. And then deeper still, the life lessons that we've picked up that we don't actually...