Tap Into Your “Lower Intelligence”

TL; DR: Many people have the ability to read minds, avoid danger, or even make winning stock trades based on their sixth sense. This is a skill you can develop through interoception, using practices like the Body Scan which you’re about to learn.

Have you ever had a strong, gut-level feeling about something? No matter how irrational it seemed, without any logical evidence, did you simply know you were right?

When I was a few months away from my 28^th birthday, I had this sudden urge to go live in Italy.

This sudden interest in Italy came out of nowhere. I’m not Italian and don’t have any Italian ancestry in my DNA. I didn’t speak Italian when this impulse hit me, and I knew nothing about the country.

If you had asked me where Milan was, I would have answered, “Umm… Spain?”

But less than a year later, I was in Italy, living in a small room in a house on Mt. Vesuvius, teaching English to a lively group of 12-year-olds.

I spent more than three years in Italy, and this move brought me lasting friendships, wild adventures, and a career as a freelance writer. Ultimately my time in Italy set up a chain of events that led me to meet the woman who is now my wife.

All of this happened because I listened to that strong but inexplicable drive. You, too,  have a powerful internal guide that can tell you things which you couldn’t possibly know.

I’ll show you how you can tap into this sixth sense and make it stronger.

Your Sixth Sense

When Dr. John Coates was a trader at Goldman Sachs, he noticed something odd. Even with his Cambridge education and rigorous research, he couldn’t make nearly as much money as a colleague who followed their gut.

And it wasn’t just him. Coates saw this phenomenon repeat itself among dozens of traders.

He became fascinated with this sixth sense for making money. Eventually he left the financial world to study applied physiology, which he writes about in his book, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.

It turns out people in every profession rely on this sixth sense. Soldiers, police officers, and firefighters have used this ability to avoid danger and protect others. Gamblers use it to win at the poker table.

This superpower is often a game changer for successful sales professionals, business and political leaders, and anyone who has to persuade others for a living.

What is this marvelous ability, and where does it come from?

For centuries, Western culture has glorified the power of the rational mind. And it’s true the mind has led to breakthroughs in every field, from curing diseases to space travel.

But we’ve largely cut ourselves off from the body. We’ve lost sight of our “lower intelligence.”

Your lower intelligence comes straight from the body. It’s a way you can make sense of all the information you’re constantly taking in from the environment.

Your rational mind can’t process all this input at once, but your unconscious can.

The unconscious gives you insights that you can feel in your body once you learn how to listen to it.

Dr. Annie Murphy Paul writes about this bodily intelligence in her book, The Extended Mind. She calls it interoception, or the ability to perceive what is happening inside your own body.

How to Cultivate Interoception

In my program, Changing the WIND, I have my students do a gut check after almost every lesson.

You create a short, written statement about the insight you just had. Then you read the statement out loud and see how it feels.

Your body will tell you whether you've discovered the right path to take. Listening to this message can mean life or death, or at least several years of frustration, depending on the adventure you've chosen.

So how do you cultivate this skill and make it more reliable?

The first step is to practice what's known as the Body Scan.

Tool of the Week: Body Scan

1. Get into a comfortable position, ideally with your back straight, either sitting up or lying down.

   Take some deep breaths and feel awareness of your body. Notice your chest rising and falling with each breath. Feel your heartbeat and the pressure of your limbs resting on the chair.

2. Focus all your attention on your scalp. Feel the warmth of circulation in your scalp. Feel the muscles in your scalp go loose, soft, and relaxed.

   As you breathe in and out, imagine your breath is coming in and out through your scalp.

3. Repeat this sequence with your forehead. Feel the skin and muscles relax and then feel the same relaxation, the same warmth going through your forehead.

4. Continue on in the same way with the front of your face, your cheeks, your jaw, your neck, your shoulders your arms, your hands, your fingers. your chest, your back…

5. Do the body scan by releasing all tension through every part of your body and being aware of any sensations you feel.

   Maybe you notice a little bit of soreness from where you overdid some physical activity. You might feel your stomach digesting your last meal.

If you practice the Body Scan at least once a day, you'll become more aware of messages that your unconscious is sending you through your body.  You’ll get each message in the form of a hunch or a gut-level feeling.

Studies have found that people who do the body scan regularly perform better in competitions that involve guessing or reading another person’s intentions. (1)

The body scan alone will help you build this superpower, but we’re going to take it to the next level.

The Interoceptive Language

To become even more aware of the messages your bodily intelligence is sending you, create a list of terms for the sensations you feel in your body.

For example, instead of saying or thinking, “I’m nervous,” say to yourself, “I feel my heart beating faster,” or “I feel my fingers tingling and my stomach muscles clenching.”

According to a UCLA study, the more prolific you are in coming up with specific terms for what you feel, the more aware you’ll become of what's going on inside your body. Developing your own interoceptive language gives you more access to hunches and gut level feelings. (2)

Use Your Powers for Good

You weren't born into this world just to do tedious work for someone else.

Your family, your dreams, and your own growth in every aspect of life are far more important than anything that doesn’t resonate in the core of your being.

Tools like the body scan will open and increase your capacity to have rewarding adventures.

The adventures you choose will refine you and empower you to help more people and improve the world in your own, unique way.

And ultimately that's what we're here for, isn't it? 

That wraps it up for this week.

If you’re enjoying these rants, lessons, and tools, I would love to hear from you.

If you’re not, I would like to hear from you even more.

Reply to this email and tell me what you think, what you’d like to see in the future, or just to drop me a line about your cat.

I don’t always have the time to reply to your message, but I read every one of them.

Jacob

Notes

1) Poppa, Tasha and Bechara, Antoine, “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis: Revisiting the Role of the ‘Body-Loop in Decision-Making,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences (February 2018). see also Damasio, Antonio R. Descarte’s Error (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994

2) Matthew D. Lieberman et al., “Subjective Responses to Emotional Stimuli During Labeling, Reappraisal, and Distraction,” Emotion 11 (June 2011 and Todd B. Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Patrick E. McKnight, “Unpacking Emotion Differentiation: Transforming Unpleasant Experience by Perceiving Distinctions in Negativity,”  Current Directions in Psychological Science 24 (February 2015)

See also Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (New York: Bantam Books, 2013)

Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021)