Prof. Joel Pearson (Neuroscientist; AI and intuition expert) developed the first scientific test to measure intuition, dragging it out of the woo-woo realm and into a cognitive framework. He’s now written The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why to show us how and when to use this mysterious superpower in our lives (not while rock-climbing on a date, not at a casino!).

Joel is the founder and Director of Future Minds Lab which applies neuroscience findings to art, AI, media, advertising and various philosophical quandaries. He’s also a National Health and Medical Research Council fellow and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

In this chat we cover when and how to use intuition, why intuition is hijacked by anxiety and depression, whether AI will ever be able to have intuition, aphantasia and a bunch of deep, wide questions about what it means to be human, including the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Mostly, Joel is a great conversationalist, someone you’d want to sit next to at a dinner party.

SHOW NOTES

• Get Joel’s book The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why
• Follow Joel on his Future Minds Lab Substack
• You might also like to listen to my WILD chat with Sheena Iyengar, the scientist who first ran those “paradox of choice” studies
• And with George Paxinos, regarded as the world’s leading brain expert on whether our brains are “good” enough to save the planet
• I mention the book Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

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