When to trust your gut instinct, and when to ignore it

Sana Qadar: Okay, so this story is wild. It's 2008. Isla Lucas is 23 years old and she's been travelling through Nepal and India with a friend.

Isla Lucas: I love the chaos of it and it was just sensory overload. Loved it.

Sana Qadar: Now they're in Mumbai, their last stop on the trip on their final morning in the city. Her friend wants to go to this one particular cafe.

Isla Lucas: Yes, I try to stay away from a lot of the real touristy hotspots. So my friend had obviously read in Lonely Planet. She's like, well, Leopold's Cafe is the place to go. I was like, oh, it's super touristy, I don't really... Okay, let's go. Anyway, it's a beautiful cafe. I can understand why it's a tourist hotspot. Beautiful Raj era decorations, tiled walls. But we went to this cafe and I just was restless. It wasn't like a sudden feeling. It was like, I don't want to be here. I was unsettled and I was constantly looking around. I didn't feel comfortable. I was sitting bolt upright, arms like flat on the table. Yeah, I wasn't relaxed and I couldn't figure out why. Like my mind was like, just chill, Isla, what's going on? But my body was very much like, I've got to go, I've got to go.

Sana Qadar: Her reaction is extra weird because the atmosphere in the cafe is totally normal. Everyone's relaxed.

Isla Lucas: Everyone yeah.

Sana Qadar: But there is one detail Isla clocks.

Isla Lucas: I didn't notice shady people, but I did notice because it was the first time in our trip that I had noticed a high concentration of tourists. I was like, there's no Indian people here. Everyone's speaking English. Everyone's British, American, Irish, Canadian.

Sana Qadar: Isla and her friend have a quick snack and a coffee and then they leave.

Isla Lucas: We probably would have stayed a lot longer if I had not been so jittery and keen to get out of there.

Sana Qadar: They walked the ten minutes back to their hotel, pack up and get in a cab to the airport not long after.

Isla Lucas: It wasn't until we were in the taxi and my taxi driver turned the radio up and it was all in Hindi or Urdu, and he was starting to get quite panicked. And then he was telling us in broken English, there's been a terrorist attack, there's been gunfire, there's been shootings.

News anchor: Gunman was searching out people with American and British passports.

Isla Lucas: And it wasn't till we got to the airport, maybe half an hour later, that we saw that the cafe that we had been in had been attacked and gunmen had entered and started shooting indiscriminately.

Sana Qadar: In fact, that day was the beginning of a four day siege on the city, a terrorist attack that would eventually leave more than 170 people dead, including two Australians.

News anchor: ...Armed with grenades and guns they targeted some of Mumbai's best known landmarks.

Sana Qadar: And Cafe Leopold was one of the first sites targeted.

Isla Lucas: Then we look back on photos, the timestamps. We would have missed it by 25, 30 minutes.

Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. What the heck was Isla sensing in that cafe? Looking back now, what do you put that decision or desire to leave that cafe down to like, do you think of it as intuition or gut instinct or luck or what?

Isla Lucas: Yeah. No, I think there's an element of intuition. We all have those times. I think everyone has had it where they've just known something without knowing it. And I think that that was one of those times.

Sana Qadar: So that is what we're going to explore today. Those moments of intuition, those gut feelings that tell us something. Because pretty much everyone I've spoken to over the course of putting together this episode has a story like this. Maybe not in such high stakes situations, but gut feelings nonetheless. So we're going to get to the bottom of what it is like. What was Isla picking up on that no one else seemed to.

Valerie van Mulukom: Like Spidey sense, you know, from Spider-Man where I'm like, yeah, I'm not. I'm not risking this. Like it doesn't feel right.

Joel Pearson: So a lot of people define as something spiritual or magical or tapping into the blueprint of the universe.

Sana Qadar: Today. Spidey sense tingles, gut feeling, what intuition is, where it comes from, and whether we should always trust it.

Sana Qadar: My God, when you saw that, what did. What went through your mind?

Isla Lucas: Oh my God, we were so close. And it was my friend. She was really upset, like how close we were. But I was like, that was such a near miss.

Sana Qadar: And because you had left the area, there was some I understand there was some confusion about your whereabouts initially. Is that right?

Isla Lucas: Yes. So this is like back in 2008. So I didn't have an iPhone yet. And because you have to buy credit and it's a rigmarole back then. In the meantime, I'd gotten on a plane and when I finally got into like some sort of internet, I had all these missed calls from friends, family like 35 missed calls and people random, like my old boss.

Sana Qadar: When Isla thinks back to what she was feeling at Cafe Leopold that morning, she's at a loss to explain her behaviour apart from pure gut instinct.

Isla Lucas: Yeah, I've never been able to pinpoint why I couldn't wait to get out of there, but my body was reacting.

Sana Qadar: And do you have any sense of, like, what do you think intuition or gut instinct is? Do you know?

Isla Lucas: Oh my goodness, I wouldn't know where to begin. No, I don't I don't know if it's our subconscious, I don't I don't know. Our brains are so complex and I suppose we're only just starting to scratch the surface of what they're capable of.

Sana Qadar: And so I'm going to be speaking to a couple of researchers who look into this kind of stuff. I'm curious if what what questions do you have about gut instinct or intuition, like what still piques your curiosity?

Isla Lucas: What are we capable of? Like what's the brain capable of? I find it quite intimidating thinking if my brain could have picked up that, if it was that that was setting me off, what was it? What was it? Was it frequencies? Was it. Oh, just I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sana Qadar: I have to say, I was just as curious to know as Isla because I have my own story of intuition that's kind of like hers. More on that later. But in the meantime, I consulted two researchers. Valerie van Mulukom -

Valerie van Mulukom: I'm a senior lecturer in psychology at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom.

Sana Qadar: She researches the psychology of intuition, and I also spoke to Joel Pearson.

Joel Pearson: I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales.

Sana Qadar: He's also the author of the Intuition Toolkit The New Science of Knowing What Without Knowing Why. So my first question what is intuition like? How can we know things without knowing them?

Valerie van Mulukom: So what we generally think of is that we've got normal cognition. And then intuition just happens. Sometimes it's like the odd thing out, right? But what I'm actually thinking is that, well, a lot of our thinking that we're doing is actually that non-conscious processing that we see in intuitive insights. It just so happens that sometimes this sort of processing comes to conscious awareness with some kind of shock, right?

Sana Qadar: Like often, Valerie says, that's in situations that have a kind of salience or importance to them.

Valerie van Mulukom: So having a gut feeling about not going down a dark alley or having a gut feeling of making like a really important financial decision, these are situations where we have to pay attention, right? The salience tells us like, okay, okay, we need some extra information. This is important.

Sana Qadar: Another factor, Joel says can influence when we might get a gut feeling is what we've learned in our past experiences. The first, he's keen to clear up what he means when he's talking about intuition.

Joel Pearson: So a lot of people will define as something spiritual or magical. That's not how I define it, surprise, surprise, being a neuroscientist. So I define it as a learnt, productive use of unconscious information for better decisions or actions of a mouthful. But a lot of some key words there. So I think the best way to think about it would be you walk into a restaurant or a cafe, and as you walk in, your sensory, your brain is processing a thousand different things and you're not necessarily aware of each and every one of those might be the music, the tablecloths, the fashion. So all your brain's processing all of that and through many visits to cafes before you've built or you've learned associations between positive or negative outcomes, you know, this kind of music, this kind of style - good coffee. This kind of temperature, this kind of smell, bad food - food poisoning. Right?

Sana Qadar: Right.

Joel Pearson: So as you walk in there, it's triggering. These learning is triggering associations and you're feeling it in your body. It's something called interoception, which is a fancy word for just saying internal perception. So we know that unconscious things can trigger emotional responses that we're not aware of. But our body, if you like, is, or it responds, so your heart rate will go up. You'll start sweating a little bit more. And that's what's happening. So people are feeling it in this gut response in their chest. Sometimes some people talk about it in their fingertips. People have learned to use that as a way, if you like, of tapping into this unconscious information.

Sana Qadar: So is it like, yeah, basically pattern recognition, like unconscious pattern recognition that's going on in the brain?

Joel Pearson: Yes, to a certain degree, but it's based on that prior learning, right? If you walk into a cafe and you've never seen a cafe or a restaurant before, your intuition is not really going to be that useful because you haven't built those associations.

Sana Qadar: That all makes sense. But how does that explain Isla's intuition? At that Mumbai cafe, what she noticed about it was that it was beautiful.

Isla Lucas: Beautiful Raj era decorations, tiled walls.

Sana Qadar: Everyone seemed relaxed.

Isla Lucas: Everyone, Yeah.

Sana Qadar: She noticed it was a tourist hotspot.

Isla Lucas: I didn't notice shady people, but I did notice the high concentration of tourists.

Sana Qadar: But it's not like she'd been in a terrorist attack before, which might have given her prior learning about that kind of situation. So I told both Valerie and Joel her story.

Valerie van Mulukom: Wow, that's that's some story.

Sana Qadar: Because interestingly, they both made the same points.

Valerie van Mulukom: I can think of two. Maybe a partial explanation for this. One is that she said she didn't. It was just tourist and she didn't pick up on anything. She didn't pick up anything consciously. So it's possible that she did see someone behaving in a nervous way or something like that.

Joel Pearson: I think people aren't necessarily aware of the cues they're picking up on. So for one, so it may have been that the flow of people going in and out of there, maybe there were the people there that that somehow were triggering these sort of red flags for her intuition. Right. Whatever it was, I don't know. And I don't think she would know either. So this is sort of the interesting part of this that you're not really you can't tap in to these things very well. Sometimes you can, but not always.

Valerie van Mulukom: The other one is like the survivor bias, right? Which has a double meaning here. I guess the fact that this has happened confirms the intuition retrospectively, but it might also have been, you know, I can imagine that I've gone to a place in the past, during my travels that I couldn't settle, and then I left, and then nothing happened afterwards. And so I forgot about my uncomfortable feeling at that particular time.

Joel Pearson: I normally make this point with dreams and premonitions and plane crashes, so most people will dream many, many times a night and when their emotional dreams or more likely to remember them. So if we're dreaming about a plane crash, we're more likely to remember those. So if you run the numbers of how many. Say it's five dreams per night, and you multiply that by the number of people living in Australia. You get quite a large number. And what you find out is that every time there's a plane crash, you would absolutely expect multiple people to have dreamed about a plane crash the night before. Right? So when that happens, it shouldn't be surprising. Okay. But it is surprising. So in other words, we get probabilities wrong a lot of the time when we can't help it see patterns in things where there are no patterns. In other words, for the cafe example, it could have been, in other words, a coincidence.

Valerie van Mulukom: But yeah, I wouldn't want to, uh, judge which one it is there. I'm glad she was able to get away.

Sana Qadar: Well, a coincidence. That one's a bit of an unsatisfying explanation, but yes, very plausible. But let's just stick with option one for a moment, because that's a fun one. So if she was picking up on cues in the environment without knowing it, my question is why would she have been picking up on them when no one else around her seemed to be?

Valerie van Mulukom: Yeah, I think there might be two reasons for that. So one is that some people are better tuned to their intuition for several reasons. For that, I've done some research which suggests that people who practice mindfulness more often seem to be better at picking up intuitive cues, or at least self-report that they are better at this. The other one might be that much like creativity. She might have been more in the in the zone, so sometimes you're just not in the right state to listen, right? Sometimes you're too focused on whatever you're thinking about. So I think those two things combined would make some people attend to a situation that might be there and others not.

Joel Pearson: There is huge individual differences. So what we know from the research we've done and other people that some people report making everyday decisions very intuitively, they feel it more. Other people, not so much. Now there are differences in cultures. When you give surveys to men or women, women tend to report making more intuitive decisions, making more, having more magical beliefs, except when it comes to sports and gambling. And then it flips and men become really superstitious. And so you see those kind of trends in more Asian cultures, things like intuition seem to be on a sort of higher pedestal, and they sort of tend to be more respected. But again, this kind of research has been done with questionnaires and interviews and things like that. We haven't had a chance yet to use our objective measures to try and sort of answer these, these cultural or gender or sex differences.

Sana Qadar: I wanted to know what Isla had to say about Joel and Valerie's thoughts, especially their theories about why she might have been having a reaction in that cafe in Mumbai that maybe she was picking up on cues in the environment without realising it. Or maybe it was all a coincidence. So I sent her the audio. Here's what she had to say.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, what did you make of those two theories?

Isla Lucas: Um, I thought they were interesting. Like the survivor's guilt was interesting. I was like, because the amount of times you do have these little feelings. Yeah, and then nothing happens. So it's like, well, am I just thinking about it because I had that gut feeling? Then something did happen. But I was thinking also like, oh, I'm quite a nervous. I wasn't back then, but I'm quite a nervous flyer. And that day we had a flight, so I don't know if I was nervous about that.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, I wondered about that, whether that played into your jitteriness at all.

Isla Lucas: Yeah, I can be on one of these people that gets the airport four hours early.

Sana Qadar: Do you actually remember feeling anxious about the flight, or is that just something you're thinking now, maybe looking back?

Isla Lucas: No, no, I think I'm just thinking that now in retrospect, um, could be many things. Or multifactorial, for sure.

Sana Qadar: Does it make you doubt your actual intuition at all, like in terms of knowing something spooky that others didn't know?

Isla Lucas: Uh, no, I think oh, I'm not very in tune with it anyway. But I do get these feelings all the time and nothing happens.

Sana Qadar: So there may well be a much more prosaic answer to why Isla was having a gut feeling a Cafe Leopold. Hard to say, but there is something about intuition and safety that hits a nerve, especially with women. Okay, this is pretty anecdotal, but most women I know have had a gut feeling relating to a person or place that made them feel unsafe at some point in time. Valerie earlier gave the example of a dark alley-

Valerie van Mulukom: So having a gut feeling about not going down a dark alley.

Sana Qadar: And that is as good a segue as any into my story about intuition.

Sana Qadar: I laugh when you say dark alley, because that's exactly my story of gut instinct, which I'll tell you, uh, it was many, many years ago now. I was backpacking Europe, and I had landed back in London late at night, like at 2 a.m. or something. And the bus that was going to take me towards my, uh, hostel only got so close and I was kind of actually stranded at a bus stop 30 minutes away from my hostel on the side of a highway. And so I was tossing up, what the heck do I do? There's no one around. I'm stranded. And so if I've got a walk, I would have to walk via this underpass that went under the highway. So initially I was like, okay, I guess, well, that's what I've got to do. And so I started making my way towards the underpass. And as I got closer and closer, my it was like my body lit on fire or something. I don't know, every sense was like just pinging and saying, don't go in there. My brain was screaming, don't, don't do it. And initially I was like, this is weird. And I kept sort of inching towards the underpass. And as I got closer, the feelings got more intense until I was actually just started crying, like sobbing the closer I got. And at that point I was like, okay, I think I need to, whatever this is, listen to it and not go in this underpass. And I hope my mother and father never hear this story, because it's like every parent's nightmare of a 20 year old backpacking Europe. Anyways, I didn't go in, so I have no way of knowing whether my gut instinct was correct and saved me from something. You know, there's no way to prove that, but that is like, what do you make of that? Because like, that was such a bizarre experience to me that I remember it all these years later.

Valerie van Mulukom: Yeah. I think thank you for sharing that story. Really interesting. I, I think it highlights, actually the embodied side of cognition. We think about what does the brain do and where does this and that happen in the brain. And you know, what do I think? But actually more and more research is showing us that cognition is really embodied, right. What I think might have happened in your situation is that your unconscious processing picked up on several cues that then alerted you to the body's assessment of the situation, which then might have felt as a as a gut feeling.

Joel Pearson: I would add that, you know, where you particularly tired. What do you say? It was 2 a.m.

Sana Qadar: It was a 2 a.m.. Yeah. I would have been so tired for sure.

Joel Pearson: When we're very tired or low blood sugar, our emotions can flare up in different ways. We have less emotional control if you want to say it like that. So it could be that you're in a more emotional state, okay. But I don't want to sort of undermine either. Maybe you're picking up on the signs and you and your brain was saying, you know, you'd associate it with walking underpasses, with being vulnerable through things you'd lived through yourself, but also other media you consumed. So, yeah, it may have been legitimate and it may have saved you, but we'll never know by the sound of it. Yeah.

Sana Qadar: But that isn't the whole story of what happened that night. There's a part two that gets potentially even more dangerous. So after I didn't go into that underpass, a few minutes later, a car pulled up. Two guys got out to like, change a tire or something, and they noticed I was kind of alone and stranded. My phone at this time wasn't working either, which is. Yeah, terrible. Um, and they kind of said, do you want a lift somewhere? And initially I was like, no, it's okay. And then as I kept, you know, doing whatever they were doing with their car, I was like, well, I kind of have zero options here. I can't walk to where I want to go because I'm terrified of that underpass. They seem okay. And so in the end, again, Mom and Dad, I'm so sorry. I got in the car with them and it almost felt like my analytical brain was like, this is a very dangerous situation. Like, objectively, this is a crazy thing to be doing. But my gut instinct part, my intuition, felt like I didn't feel in danger. I had a sense that I'd be okay with them, and I was. I made it to my hostel ten minutes later. All was fine. Yeah.

Valerie van Mulukom: You know, it's it's tricky.

Joel Pearson: What was the time gap? Was it like half an hour later or a long time later?

Sana Qadar: Oh my God, it's been like 15 years.

Joel Pearson: Because it sounds like maybe your system calmed down, your emotional response, your physiology would have sort of dropped down a few states. I mean, you're probably analysing all the different body language, eye contact, clothes.

Valerie van Mulukom: I wonder whether that was what you picked up on some kind of trust, whether it was misplaced or not. Right. It could have, I guess, gone wrong. Because the downside of intuition is it also uses mental shortcuts. So like we have all kinds of biases like familiarity bias we like better what is familiar to us and so on, and conformity bias. And so what I'm wondering is if those two men looked like people, for example, from your family or people you've seen before, then you might trust them on the basis of that gut instinct. But actually the gut instinct is based on the familiarity bias, and it's not based on whether these men are trustworthy or not. That's the issue with intuition. There's no way of knowing well without rationally analysing it. There's no way of knowing whether you are doing this really complex, holistic processing or whether your brain is actually using some kind of shortcuts. And that's tricky.

Sana Qadar: The thing is, those guys didn't look like anyone in my family. They were white and they actually spoke Polish to each other the whole car ride. So I had no idea what they were saying, which again, not exactly the safest situation. So if we go back to the beginning of this whole underpass saga, maybe I was unconsciously picking up on cues that stop me from going in there. Maybe it was all a fluke. And maybe actually, probably I was just damn lucky nothing went wrong. That night, I made a series of dumb decisions that landed me on the side of a highway at 2 a.m., and I was just lucky I got out okay. But Valerie raises an interesting point about bias. If you're not careful, gut feelings can be sullied by bias.

Joel Pearson: Intuition can develop bias just like an AI can. So if you train your intuition in a biased environment, or you watch a lot of old movies that are particularly sexist or biased racially in one way or another, you can pick up on that. So it is worth also pointing out that there can be a bias built into learning.

Sana Qadar: That's interesting. So yeah, for people listening, how can they assess when their intuition is crossing over into cognitive bias, what should they look out for.

Joel Pearson: Yeah. So there's different. Depends on what we mean by cognitive bias. There's cognitive bias in all kinds of things. So everything from vision there's visual illusions optical illusions which are a type of bias. There's memory illusions. It's kind of everywhere. It's the way the brain is wired and they're not intuition I want to point out, even though the system one, system two Kahneman sort of ideas tends to bunch all that together under one, everything that we do without logical, conscious thinking gets put into the system one idea. I'm not a fan of that at all. I think that general system one, system two is very, very general. It's it's too general to be helpful on an individual decision level, really.

Sana Qadar: I think that brings us back to the question of how can you know when to trust your gut feelings and when to disregard them?

Valerie van Mulukom: Yeah, this is $1 million question, right? Like, so what I would suggest is that you follow your intuition in the areas that you have a lot of experience or expertise in. For example, when a doctor might have a gut feeling about, you know, when they see a patient, that might be a combination of what they've learned, as well as having seen patients over the years presenting with similar symptoms or something.

Joel Pearson: I have this acronym, SMILE. So SMILE before you use your intuition. And that's sort of the letters signify these five rules for when it's safe to trust intuition. So S is really self-awareness. And that is be aware of your emotional state. And if you're feeling emotional, if you're anxious, if you're depressed, maybe you just won the lottery. Any strong emotion. Don't trust your intuition for a couple of reasons. One is that we are likely to misattribute the subtle feelings of intuition for these other stronger feelings.

Sana Qadar: I'm going to pause there, because the one caveat to this might be in the context of personal safety. Following your intuition is probably okay, even if you're in an emotional state in that kind of situation. Because like, there was no great cost to not going into the underpass for me or simply choosing to leave the cafe for Isla. But on the other hand, you also wouldn't want to get in the habit of cancelling flights. For example, every time you're anxious or stressed because you have a feeling you shouldn't fly. So there's nuance around this. In general, though, being aware of your emotional state, as Joel says, is definitely helpful.

Joel Pearson: And then there's M for mastery. We kind of mentioned that earlier, that don't use intuition for something you haven't had experience with, how much experience it's different for everyone. But for example, if you've never played tennis before, you don't want to just run in there and start trying to be a, you know, a wacky, intuitive tennis player.

Sana Qadar: So that's the S and M in smile. I stands for instincts and addiction.

Joel Pearson: So this is an interesting one. And so the sort of primary thing here is not to confuse intuition or a feeling of intuition for anything which is addictive. Right. So whether that be food, drugs, alcohol, social media, gambling I want to check my phone, I want to just want a cigarette or whatever it might be.

Sana Qadar: Do people conflate that as gut instinct?

Joel Pearson: Well, yeah. So the pull towards those things can feel natural and meaningful. And it can be sort of confused with intuition, but it's not intuition.

Sana Qadar: Next is L and that stands for low probability.

Joel Pearson: So we mentioned probabilities before. But anything around numbers and probabilities were just really bad at. So my grandmother smoked until she was 90 Therefore I don't believe any of this, like these kind of things. It's very misleading.

Sana Qadar: Finally, the E in smile stands for environmental context.

Joel Pearson: So interestingly, we mentioned learning and mastery of the M. So the kind of associative learning is context specific. So what you would learn in the office won't transfer well to in the house at home. And so the example I give of this often is, is Steve Jobs who

Sana Qadar: That's of course the co-founder of Apple. He died in 2011 at the age of 56 from pancreatic cancer.

Joel Pearson: He loved intuition. He used it for product design, for the general direction of Apple, made some amazing calls. Then when it came to his home life and his health in particular, towards the end of his life, he made some very poor decisions, you know, not not getting surgery, you know, trying to solve things with diet. So his intuition, which he was a master of in the workplace, didn't transfer well to his home life and his health.

Sana Qadar: It's that kind of example that leads to a lot of conflicting feelings about intuition, both among researchers and the public.

Joel Pearson: Yeah, part of the confusion has been what what it is, because people think of it as this, as a magical, mystical thing. And so they don't want to be associated with that. Some people love being associated with that, of course. So so there's a difference there. And it also inside psychology, it's been very mixed as well. So there's been psychologists sort of arguing that intuition is bad. There's bias there. We should stay away from it. It's dark. Other people say no, we should trust it and I. Don't think it's black and white. It's neither one or the other. Like I said before, if you have mastery, if you have learning for something, that's a tick, you can start to trust it there.

Sana Qadar: And given the fact that both my story and Isla's both had to do with safety, you could argue one area women learn to become experts just by virtue of being women in the world is safety.

Valerie van Mulukom: I think you're right. Like, it just so happens that women might come across situations with threats, more walking on the street at night or whatever. And so personally, I pay attention to my intuition in highly salient situations. So for example, ones that have potential danger to them or ones that I have a lot of knowledge or expertise in, because then I know that this intuitive processing that's happening below my conscious awareness is, is taking this database of knowledge and experience that I have. So the intuition that comes out of it is more likely to be trustworthy than other intuitions that I might have.

Sana Qadar: And so the Mumbai experience such a close brush with death, how has that experience changed you? or has it?

Isla Lucas: Yeah. It has. Uh, not really. I still travel extensively. Um, it just be a bit more aware of my surroundings, especially travelling alone. I do find myself avoiding tourist hot spots. If I'm going to go, I go early in the morning when it's not so crowded. And, uh, yeah, it hasn't stopped me. Like, I would love to go to India again.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, I was going to say, have you been back?

Isla Lucas: I haven't been back, no, but then that was 2008. And I just wonder if my as you get older, I suppose your tolerance gets less. Um. But I would love to go back. I would love to go back because I did love India.

Sana Qadar: And so if there was one piece of advice you could leave people with based on your experience, what would that be?

Isla Lucas: Um, trust your gut. register with Smart Traveller people. If you go into a country that's it can be questionable at times. Please register with Smart Traveller.

Sana Qadar: Good advice.

Isla Lucas: Your embassy does care.

Sana Qadar: That is avid traveller Isla Lucas. You also heard from Joel Pearson, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of New South Wales and author of the Intuition Toolkit, as well as Valerie van Mulukom, senior lecturer in psychology at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. This episode of All in the Mind was produced by Fiona Pepper and Rose Kerr. It was written, edited and presented by me, Sana Qadar, and it was mixed by sound engineer Russell Stapleton. And that's it for the show this week. Thank you for listening. I've got a gut feeling I will catch you next time.