You Already Know: The Science of Mastering Your Intuition

Huang (Edge), a professor of management at Northeastern University, challenges conventional thinking about intuition in this insightful guide. She frames intuition as a process in which a present-day “prompt” interacts with past knowledge and experience, spurring one of three types of “gut feeling”—“Eureka” moments, where one recognizes the connection between a prompt and prior experience; “Spidey Sense” moments, where prompts and prior experience don’t align; and “Jolts,” where a prompt “dislodges our priors, and we realize something we always thought we knew is wrong.” By becoming more aware of the emotional, cognitive, and physical signals that accompany each gut feeling (one might feel an ache in their shoulder during a Jolt, for example), readers can more quickly identify them and assess their reliability. Drawing on interviews with investors, organization leaders, Olympic athletes, and Nobel Prize winners who followed their instincts, Huang elucidates the science of intuition while being clear about its limitations (using intuition to parse “analytically solvable” problems, or those that require specific expertise to navigate, doesn’t tend to work out). The result is a cogent and well-informed case for listening to one’s gut. (July)