Signs From the Body You Should Never Ignore - Dr Tara Swart

What do you mean when you talk about trusting our instincts?

I think it's, it's, uh, a return to something quite primal and physical. So I think in, in this modern world, we've, we, we overthink everything, we try to rationalize everything, we prize logic above anything else, and I'm, I'm sort of talking about using intuition as well as logic.

Why do you think it is that we are laying at the feet... Or why, why is it that we're dispensing with sort of the wisdom that comes from instinct? If it's something that is sort of more ingrained, why is that being pushed to a side?

So I think it, it goes back to when the outer cortex of our brain grew from being a sliver around the limbic system, which is the size of, uh, your clenched fist, and that's when we could articulate speech and we could, like, plan better for the future. And so then we sort of prized those things more than the primal instincts that we had relied on before. And then if you fast-forward to much more recently, until about 30 years ago, we didn't have sophisticated scanning technology that could actually show us things like how emotions and intuition work in the brain. So it just, I think, felt safer to rely on something like logic that makes more sense, and then if you also add in the rise of technology, um, it feels like it's counterintuitive but I actually think this is where intuition and emotion and, and creativity and vulnerability are going to become superpowers, whereas, you know, they've sort of been put lower down than logic and rationality.

Why would you say superpowers?

Because I think they're things that technology and AI won't be able to emulate or, you know, actually use in the same way that we can.

Right. Well, I, I always think about this. It's kind of interesting that we had the scientific revolution and, you know, I, I remember when it was early 2000s and I was starting to listen to Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or d- d- Sam Harris or whatever, and it was very seductive to dispense with wishy-washy mythology and archetype and, uh, you wanted something that felt more rigorous and that you could prove, and, you know, we had this amazing boom in loads of areas of psychology, and, and then 20 years later, the replication crisis has come along and decapitated tons of the studies that we all thought were part of the physics of the human system. And now how many people refer to themselves as an agnostic because they're terrified of calling themselves an atheist? Because it's, it feels sterile. We kind of had this weird sense that we were going to be able to prove the world to us.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And, uh, you know, physics has kind of stalled for the last, like, 60 years or so. It hasn't really developed anything that's been that new. And I think people have got this sense that even if stuff can be literally unproven, it can be functionally useful in the same way as, "Ha, well, maybe my gut instinct, I can't give you on a spreadsheet or I, I can't fully dissect why I felt that thing-"