... -A.Rebeihi: Hello, A.Moukheiber. You have a doctorate in neuroscience, are a clinical psychologist, and author of the book "Neuromania: The Truth About Your Brain," published by Allary. You're going to help us decipher the mysteries of intuition. First question: how does intuition work and what is its purpose? -A.Moukheiber: Intuition is a kind of decision-making where we don't have access to the reason that led us to that decision. -A.Lecaron: We don't know the path. -A.Moukheiber: In fact, a large part of our reasoning works automatically for many reasons. Some decisions just come to us out of the blue, and we don't really know how to explain why. So we take refuge in a feeling, an intuition, that kind of explanation. -A.Lecaron: To keep the discussion on track, Christophe, can you explain the difference between instinct and intuition? -C. André: I can try. Albert will add to that. Instinct is an automatic and fairly universal phenomenon. Intuition is also an automatic phenomenon, but it's more individual, personal, linked to certain situations. Instinct, for example, is everything that's inherited in the brain of a species... -A. Lecaron: What's archaic. -C. André: And which serves survival. Take some ducklings that have just hatched. You pass the silhouette of a bird of prey over their heads and they'll instantly freeze. They never learned it by watching their parents, but their instinct is that "bird of prey equals danger" and that they mustn't move. In children, instinctively, there's a fear of the dark or of heights. All children are afraid of the dark and of heights. Little by little, they'll learn to overcome these fears. Instinct is biological. This is common to all members of the same species. Intuition involves similar mechanisms; it's instinct, but based on personal experience. When we talk about intuition, we're generally referring to more complex situations. For example, the intuition that someone is lying to us, or relying on one's intuition to make important life decisions. The main difference with intuition, it seems to me— and I'd like to hear Albert's opinion on this—is that ultimately, it's based on experience. That's essentially the difference we could draw between instinct, which is universal and general, and intuition, which is more personal and based on the experience of a given situation. -A. Moukheiber: Absolutely. Instinct is primarily physiological, in a way, much less cognitive. When a child is afraid of the dark, they're not really thinking about it. His heart races, his muscles tense. Intuition is something acquired. There's no real magical property to intuition. "What are we intuitively trying to figure out?" If I'm a saxophone player with 20 years of experience, if I'm asked to play a solo, I'll do it intuitively. If you take out the saxophone and tell me to trust my intuition, I'll give you a hard time. -A.Rebeihi: It's often said that the first intuition is the right one. Should we really trust it? Basically, is intuition sometimes more relevant than a well-thought-out argument or a work meeting that drags on? -A.Moukheiber: It depends. A researcher, G. Gigerenzer, conducted these studies and showed that when one is intuitively making rapid decisions, particularly in a business or commercial situation, experienced people's intuition is faster, more efficient, and even better than when doing Highly specific calculations are needed to determine which clients to target. But on the other hand, if people intuitively like me , and each time I develop a romantic relationship with them, and they turn out to be bad people, at some point, perhaps I should consider that I might be terrible at intuitively recognizing the people I like. There's no kind of magical primacy that makes intuition infallible. It all depends on what I'm intuitively intuiting, based on what, and in what situations. -A.Lecaron: You have to follow your intuition when it concerns your areas of expertise. If there's one man who had intuition in business, it's the founder of the famous Apple brand, Steve Jobs. Here's what he said about it to the students at Stanford University . -A.Rebeihi: Steve Jobs attributed his success to his intuition. He even said it was more important than his intellect, and that his sixth sense had allowed him to come up with the idea for the touchscreen phone or the popularization of the mouse, with the invention of his first computer. Do some people, like the greatest entrepreneurs, such as Steve Jobs, have more intuition than average? -A. Moukheiber: I might invoke survivorship bias, which you mentioned earlier. It's always easier to focus on those who succeeded, but how many Steve Jobs followed their intuition and ended up broke? We don't know. When Steve Jobs gave that speech, he had already been fired from Apple and had come back. He went through many phases. It's always easier when we rewrite our life story in retrospect. It's really contextual. It's a kind of extremely important characteristic. It allows us to go faster, to not take all the factors into account. We tend to believe that deliberate reasoning always yields better results. That if I take my time, if I do all the calculations, if I'm hyper- precise, I'll get better results, but that's not true. G. Gigerenzer's work really demonstrated this. The question is when to use what. When do I tell myself, "Right now, I don't really have good reasons to follow my intuition," and when do I tell myself, "I have enough experience"? Knowing that this experience isn't necessarily formal. There are people who have good intuition in interpersonal relationships, who have acquired this experience implicitly . They can't say, "I went to school that trained me on how to trust or not." Sometimes it's the vagaries of life that lead some people to have better intuition on certain subjects. Ironically, they can't know how they acquired this experience. More often than not, it's when your intuition has played tricks on you. Well, all the better. If you've followed your intuition a lot and failed miserably, it might be a good idea to stop. -A.Lecaron: Can we talk about women's intuition? They say women have a sixth sense that men don't. Calm down! -E.Wolinski: Why do you say "meh"? -A.Rebeihi: I'm waiting for the answer... -A.Lecaron: Tell us if it's a myth or a reality. -C.André: We've tried to evaluate this, particularly in the area of ​​relationships. It's true that the arguments tend to favor women who, culturally, are more used to listening, observing, who are closer to their bodies... -A.Lecaron: More empathetic. -C.André: Yes. In theory, culturally, they should therefore be more intuitive. The few studies that exist, at least those I know of, show that it's not as straightforward as all that. For example, a study by Wiseman, the specialist in luck and chance, wanted to explore this. He gathered a representative sample of men and women and asked them beforehand if they thought they were intuitive people. 80% of the women said they were quite intuitive. Only 60% of the men. Already, a slight bias in how we perceive our intuition. And then, he gave them a little test, which is worth what it's worth. He asked them to look at two photos of the same person. In one of these photos, for example, Agathe, you were asked to smile sincerely, joyfully... In the other, you were asked to give a fake smile. The volunteers were asked to distinguish between the real and the fake smile. -A.Lecaron: That seems obvious to me. -C. André: Indeed, what we saw was that men and women had the same result. If we consider that it's intuition that... -A. Lecaron: So, Ali is right? -C. André: Ali is pretty much right. -A. Lecaron: As usual! -A. Rebeihi: Regardless of gender, intuition governs us in many areas of daily life. For example, I can tell at first glance whether I get a good feeling about someone or not. -A. Lecaron: That's true. It's crazy. -A. Rebeihi: It happens very quickly. Researcher A. Todorov, from Princeton University in the United States, discovered that it only takes a tenth of a second to form a good or bad impression of someone you meet. How can this be explained? What cognitive biases might be at play in this specific case? -A. Moukheiber: Trust is central to how we function. We are social animals. The majority of our decisions are made in groups. It's extremely important to be able to know if someone is trustworthy or not. It's not that surprising. Is the judgment sound or not? We're going back to what we were saying earlier. Just because we decide in a tenth of a second whether to trust someone or not doesn't mean we're right to trust them or not. It's not some kind of generalized skill. We form this opinion very quickly. There's even a saying: "I am not responsible for that first intuition, but I am responsible for what I do with it." Do I believe it? Do I try to validate it? Do I update it, based on the experience I have with that person over time? -A. Rebeihi: Can our emotions bias our intuitions? -A. Moukheiber: A well-known bias is called the halo effect. If I have a positive opinion of C. André and you're on the same team as him, I'm going to have a pretty good intuition about you, because I've known Christophe for a while... Not personally. My thesis supervisor and Christophe often write books together. So it's going to rub off on everyone. It's an emotional factor. The fact that I have a positive opinion of someone creates a halo effect on others. The halo effect can also affect the person themselves. I have a good opinion of C. André as a psychiatrist. He recommends a restaurant to me and I'll think it's great, when in fact, we might not have the same tastes at all , and it would be a very bad recommendation. -A.Lecaron: A catastrophe... -A.Moukheiber: Obviously, emotions condition and have a kind of very intricate relationship with our thoughts and intuitions. It's a triptych that constantly influences each other, involving the body and the environment. -A.Rebeihi: The halo effect is being next to the sublime Agathe and seeming more beautiful. Whereas without you... -A.Lecaron: What's going on, Ali? What's happening to you? -A.Rebeihi: This is to wrap up the show. -A.Lecaron: He told me he loved my little top! I think it's creating a halo effect. -A.Rebeihi: Thank you very much, A.Moukheiber, for coming. All these neuromyths to debunk are the subject of your new book: "Neuromania, the truth about your brain," published by Allary. See you soon.