We think we know enough, but do we really?

I am beginning to learn that certainty is the death of personal evolution.

How can we be certain at any moment that we’ve acquired all that there is to know about ourselves, our obstacles, our strengths and weaknesses? We have more scientific resources available than ever before through open forums, online journals, peer-reviewed publications, libraries, and more. There are professionals in the scientific realm who strive every day to better understand the human condition and how to “crack the code” to happiness and wellbeing. Legitimized findings are made publicly available almost weekly. Anytime we seek to better know something, all we have to do is ask the experts, or do a quick Google search. It’s that easy… right?

Spoiler alert: science is not the only way of knowing something.

Often, it’s not the availability of information, or lack thereof, that inhibits us from knowing ourselves better: it’s the vessel by which we consume it. It’s hard to ingest an enormous amount of information with the wrong size spoon. Sometimes you don’t even need a spoon at all.

We have been trained to think logically and pragmatically about human health, behavior change, and psychology. We have been handed the metaphorical spoon of science and reason and told, “See, this is the way to understanding what we know.” As someone who is openly curious about learning new ideas and challenging the status quo, I have questions about why we’ve strayed so far from trusting the illogical, inner knowing we possess which has been with us since before the advent of modern science.

Specifically, I’m speaking about the impact of “gut feelings,” primal instincts and emotions that drive our beliefs, decisions and behaviors not founded in any scientific paradigm. I stumbled on a great article that briefly discusses the validity of these notions as part of the interoceptive experience:

The term “gut feelings” is a popular expression used in everyday language and refers to instinctive feelings, intuition, beliefs and decisions without rational underpinnings… In this context, “gut feelings” are related to positive outcomes as exemplified by notions such as “gut feelings are guardian angels.” The view that feelings originate in the gut may have also been fostered by the labeling of the enteric nervous system as “little brain” or “second brain” … However, feelings and other mental capacities cannot be attributed to this nervous system in the gut, which is indispensable for the neural regulation of digestion… Feelings or emotions do not originate in the gut but are generated in the brain, and the term “gut feelings” is a scientifically ill-defined and misleading expression… Notwithstanding these opposing views, the bidirectional communication network between gut and brain and the process of gastrointestinal interoception provide a neurobiological frame to explain emotions, beliefs, judgements and decisions under the influence of signals from the gut ¹

It seems clear that there is an earnest effort to understand the impact that our irrational instinctive feelings, intuitions, and beliefs have on our emotional and cognitive experiences. The article referenced focuses on the role of psycho-somatic interoceptive experiences within the gut-brain axis in response to stress and other factors, but I think it still draws on some valid points when considering the idea of how we “know” something without having some scientific framework to explain such a strong inner knowing. As the referenced quote calls out, there is no basis to claim that feelings and emotions originate in our gut, making the term “gut feelings” a sort of misnomer.

Nevertheless, I am most curious about the broader matter at hand, which is to consider how we can broaden our knowledge about ourselves that challenges what we think we already know.

In my own personal experience, I hit what most would call a “breakthrough” in understanding some of my personal struggles that I carried into the new year. I was floored that I had not come to know or comprehend this new perspective through traditional means. I do quite enough reading and researching about mental health and behavior change to the point of wondering, “How the hell did I miss this?” What brought me to these conclusions about how to better understand my struggles was by following this pervasive gut feeling (there’s that term, again) to take a step back from the traditional route of research and double down on listening to my thoughts and feedback from loved ones. The thoughts and ideas that kept occurring to me had no basis in what I already believe about myself; they were completely novel notions that I hadn’t entertained previously.

I keep coming to the conclusion that if I continued rejecting this irrational line of reasoning, I would have completely missed the opportunity to see my struggles through a different lens at the advent of 2025. Being only one week into the new year, I feel as though a whole new door of possibilities has opened up that I never knew existed before. For a long time, I have been stumbling through the dark looking for a light switch whose location was previously unknown. This is what I call my “aha” moment, which has defied all the parameters for my usual logical way of thinking.

Whether or not we choose to hold stock in instinctive feelings, intuitions, and beliefs, I feel that there is more to the realm of human understanding than we have currently come to know. I think that as we continue to pull the thread of behavioral neuroscience and interoception in relation to emotional and cognitive experience, we will get closer to bridging the gap between traditional and irrational ways of “knowing.”

Reference:

1. Holzer, P. (2022, July 5). Gut signals and Gut Feelings: Science at the interface of data and beliefs. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9296981/