Gut hunches

In theory, intuitive decisions are made immediately, without conscious, reasoned thought. They are experienced as decisions based on hunches that cannot be explicitly described but, nevertheless, guide subsequent action. Investigating the underlying neural mechanisms, previous research has found the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to be crucial to intuitive processes, but its specific role has remained unclear. On the basis of a two-stage conceptualization of intuition suggested by Bowers, Regehr, Balthazard, and Parker Cognitive Psychology, 22, 72-110 (1990), we attempt to clarify the OFC's role in intuitive processing...

Intuition is widely used in clinical decision making yet its use is underestimated compared to scientific decision-making methods. Information processing is used within scientific decision making and is methodical and analytical, whereas intuition relies more on a practitioner's perception. Intuition is an unconscious process and may be referred to as a 'sixth sense', 'hunch' or 'gut feeling'. It is not underpinned by valid and reliable measures. Expert health professionals use a rapid, automatic process to recognise familiar problems instantly...

Rapid intuitive hunches or gut feelings may be a compelling source of evidence for paranoid ideas. Conversely, a failure to apply effortful analytic thinking may contribute to the persistence of such thoughts. Our main aim was to examine for the first time the associations of persecutory thinking with experiential and rational thinking styles. Five hundred individuals recruited from the general population completed self-report assessments of current persecutory ideation, general reasoning styles and personality traits...

1. The majority of rats (Mus norvegicus), because of accessory cortical tissue, will survive double adrenalectomy indefinitely under optimum conditions. 2. Resistance to morphine is greatly diminished in healthy adrenalectomized rats tested before hypertrophy of the accessories occurs. 3. This greater sensitiveness seems to be due to some fundamental alteration in metabolism dependent on a partial adrenal insufficiency. Protocol 1.-Rat 13; brown and white, male. Sept. 15, 1922. In stock. Sept. 18. Active, vigorous, and very vicious...

OBJECTIVE: Investigate whether the gut feelings of one person, as measured with an electrogastrogram (EGG), respond to the emotions of a distant person. DESIGN: In a double blind protocol, EGG activity was recorded in an individual relaxing in a heavily shielded chamber while, at a distance, a second person periodically viewed the live video image of the first person along with stimuli designed to evoke positive, negative, calming, or neutral emotions. SUBJECTS: Twenty-six (26) pairs of healthy adult volunteers...

Research suggests that when people are fear conditioned to masked spiders and snakes (electric shocks are contingent on only spiders or snakes), they acquire a conditional skin conductance response and can predict the occurrence of shocks even though they are unable to identify the masked spiders and snakes. Because in prior studies trial order was not completely random, it is unclear if findings were due to the contingencies from differential conditioning or a restricted trial order or both. When participants were assigned to four groups to disentangle effects of trial order and differential conditioning to masked pictures in acquisition, effects were obtained only for trial order...

When people are presented with backward-masked images of fear-relevant stimuli and only some of these images are paired consistently with electric shocks, they can predict the occurrence of shocks even though they do not consciously know which images they have seen. We postulated that they may use the perception of visceral cues from the conditional fear response to facilitate the prediction of shocks. In this study, ability to detect heartbeats was used to index sensitivity to visceral cues. The results showed that subjects who could detect their heartbeats performed better than chance in predicting whether or not they would receive a shock during the conditioning task...

Many top executives say they routinely make big decisions without relying on any logical analysis. Instead, they call upon their "intuition," "gut instinct," "hunches," or "inner voice"--but they can't describe the process much more than that. What exactly is gut instinct? In this article, author Alden Hayashi interviews top executives from companies such as America Online and Johnson and Johnson to find out how they make decisions. Hayashi also presents the research of leading scientists who suggest that our emotions and feelings might not only be important in our intuitive ability to make good decisions but may actually be essential...

Expression of CD134 (OX40) on activated CD4(+) T cells has been observed in acute graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) after human and rat allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT). We investigated the role of interaction between CD134 and CD134 ligand (CD134L) in a murine model of acute GVHD by using a newly established monoclonal antibody (mAb) against murine CD134L. Acute GVHD was induced by transfer of bone marrow cells and spleen cells into lethally irradiated recipients in a parent (C57BL/6) to first filial generation (C57BL/6 crossed with DBA/2) BMT...