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Singing chanting drumming, humming all of those sorts of things can also increase connectivity in your brain.
That gives you more access to your intuition.
Hey everyone, it's Rosie here.
Welcome back to Radio Headspace.
I have a question for you.
Do you trust your gut?
Or perhaps the better question is, should you trust your gut?
Well, according to Dr. Tara Swart, the answer is yes.
Tara is a neuroscientist, senior lecturer at MIT and the author of The Source The Secrets of the Universe, The Science of the Brain.
Today we'll dive into the science behind intuition, where it comes from, how it connects to our emotions and past experiences, and why creativity can sharpen our inner wisdom.
I really hope you enjoy this conversation.
I'm really excited.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
We have Dr. Tara Swart.
How would you like to be addressed?
You can just call me Tara.
I almost feel like, when people go through the process of getting that doctorate degree, that I feel like, don't you just want to use it all the time?
But then, Rosie, you'd have to call me Dr. Dr. Tara because I've got an MD and a PhD.
So I think not.
Dr. Dr. I mean, I love it.
I mean, I love it.
I think it's great.
As I said earlier, I'm totally fangirling because I...
I love your work.
I love what you talk about.
I really loved The Source when it came out.
That was your book.
And it's called The Source, The Secrets of the Universe, The Science of the Brain.
I think first just to take it back a little bit if you wouldn't mind sharing.
You know the sort of definition of intuition from the way that you see it and its relationship to creativity.
So I described six ways of thinking in the source, which are logical emotional intuitive physical, motivational and creative.
And I kind of say that intuition lies between logic and emotion, because We learn a lot of things from formal learning or direct instruction as children.
But throughout life, we also pick up a lot of life lessons.
But we can't remember everything that we've experienced in our life.
So this gets stored as kind of pattern recognition.
Like I said about creativity, as you know, wisdom and judgment, that becomes a bit more reflex.
And that's why it's sometimes also called gut instinct.
As in it's instinctual.
You can't necessarily rationalize why you make a certain decision, but you just feel that it's right.
And the reason that it's gut instinct is that we keep our working memory sort of front of mind.
You know prefrontal cortex, frontal cortex in the brain.
And then our intuition is deeper in the brain, because it's patterns and habits and behaviors that have been there for a long time.
And then, deeper still, the life lessons that we've picked up that we don't actually actively recall.
That's stored deeper in the spinal cord and all the way down to the gut neurons.
So that's why, when you say, like I just felt it in my gut, that could be a literal saying, not just a metaphorical one.
And it's so interesting too to hear people say it, because in my experience, whenever I've had those moments where I've said oh, it was just a gut feeling, or it was a gut decision, that just felt right.
I feel like so many of us can stifle those feelings down, right?
In our modern day society, we're so bombarded with external information, social media, news cycles.
We're constantly being fed so much information that I feel like sometimes that listening, that deep, intuitive sense can get a little stifled.
Do you find that that's true?
There's so many things I want to talk to you about.
I feel so blessed that you are leading me down a rabbit hole of the things that I'm super interested in right now.
So two major topics, which I'll say now so we don't forget. to get back to the second one.
So how creativity feeds into intuition.
And then secondly, something that I'm researching now for my next book is about beyond intuition.
And so What you described as a like a strong sense of just knowing is if it's in your mind, then it's clear cognizance.
And if it's a felt sense in your body, then it's clear sentience.
And there are extrapolations of clear audience and clairvoyance, which means that you hear things or you see things that you couldn't possibly know based on life experience and rational thinking.
But there's another field of study I love, called neuro aesthetics, which is about the effect of beauty and creativity on your health, your mental health and your longevity.
So both making and beholding creative activities.
So drawing a picture or looking at art, singing or going to listen to music, etc.
And so.
Creative activities also help you tap into your intuition.
So if you think about the sort of spectrum of things that you can do to hone your intuition which I'm sure is something that will be of interest to listeners then I've always said since the source that journaling how you make your decisions and whether you go with your gut or whether you go with you know, and then kind of tracking how that decision pans out and starting to take some more risks with going with the intuitive version rather than the logical version.
Obviously, if they align, that's perfect, but if they don't, then start teaching yourself to trust your gut by seeing what happens you know, in a low risk environment at first, if you go with your intuition.
But just to finish that off um Singing chanting drumming humming, all of those sorts of things can also increase connectivity in your brain.
That gives you more activity, more access to your intuition.
So it sounds like we need to create the space for the creativity or for the intuition to arise.
Yeah.
And creativity or you know other neuro aesthetic activities, like being in nature, can definitely create that space.
Because when you're fully in logic or you're kind of like not in flow and you're very kind of black and white thinking, basically under stress, then your brain operates more from the control mode, which is the task focused mode.
But when you're in nature, or you're just going for a walk and letting your mind wander, or you're doing any creative activity or even just experiencing creativity, like watching a dance show or something, then your brain is at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is called default mode.
And that's where you can get access to ideas that are shut down when your brain is like keeping its resources in low power mode just to help you survive.
Yeah.
Yeah, that totally makes sense.
Is there ever a case where people might not know how to identify intuition.
It's just like maybe they're just not used to it.
They might not know how to identify it.
Completely.
And also there are people who like, wish to shut it down because they don't believe that it's a valid modality of thinking or decision making.
I mean, I've been teaching at MIT Sloan for 10 years now and I've definitely seen a change, you know, even in those more rational kind of executive people.
But Sort of seven, eight years ago, I remember being in the classroom teaching about intuition and a young leader standing up and saying OK, you know, it's not that I'm not open to this at all, like maybe for my personal life, but I'm obviously not going to make a really serious decision like hire or fire based on intuition.
And immediately a couple of the older guys said no.
That's exactly how I would make those decisions.
The most important decisions are the ones that I would use my wisdom and my judgment and my life lessons and my ability to read people.
So that was kind of nice to hear from the audience.
Valued you when you made your choices, then that could could lead to having self-doubt and not trusting your gut.
So, like I said, I think this this most basic way of trying to access it. is journaling.
And there are different ways to describe it.
You know, it's listening to your inner voice.
It's like you said, that sense of knowing.
It probably comes up.
When you feel a conflict like this is the right thing to do, but I don't feel like it's for me, or you know.
Yeah.
Yeah, that totally makes sense.
I'm curious.
The efficacy of having to listen to that intuition and the efficacy of following your intuition and then the results not turning out the way that you wanted them to.
You know, if i have an idea for a podcast and i'm really excited about it and it just came to me in the middle of the night which really does most of the time 3 am i wake up in the middle of the night and then i get this idea, you know, and and I follow that thread and I do it, and I create it, and then it doesn't work right.
What happens then to that sense of connection to that deeper wisdom?
I know for me, it starts to feel a little bit like maybe I need to question it more.
Where is this coming from?
But that's just, again, my thinking mind going into that.
So what happens when people have that sense of of following their intuition and it doesn't work out the way that they planned?
Yeah, another great question.
So i mean, the first thing i would question, let's say, if i was coaching you, was whether that intention actually came from your intuition or not, because that's the first thing we have to, because otherwise we're misleading ourselves.
You know right, You said it yourself.
If it came from the egoic mind and the response to it was important, then it may not actually have been your intuition.
But let's say it was, you know, let's say it was.
No one modality of thinking is correct all the time.
And really what we should be doing is self-checking what we think are our intuition, intuitive decisions, by running it through our own logic.
The next best thing to do is to ask, like your best friend or your sister or you know, somebody that you're close to, who knows how you think, who you know will have a really strong sense of what they feel would work well for you or wouldn't.
So it may be that just that you're missing a couple of steps, like you're waking up with a brilliant idea but you're maybe not setting it up for the best success.
But equally, if you really felt it was your intuition and it didn't work out, then the takeaway from that is you know what was I meant to learn about?
The reason that this wasn't right for me?
So I grew up having lack mentality.
Like, you know, it's just kind of part of it.
Like I said, immigrant parents, like we didn't grow up in a great neighborhood and it was always like there was just a lot of lack.
So then you grow up having this idea that there is not enough.
There is not enough and you have to work really hard for things to work.
Because if you're not working hard, then at the end of the day, it's not worth it.
So I'm curious how that plays into our ability to create the life that we want.
In either manifestation that you've talked about before, or even in this, this topic of intuition, how do we take away the survival aspect of what is it?
It would be the limbic system, right?
Because it's like we're in that fight or flight, right?
Because we're in fear of us not having means to live.
How do I find that balance if I am in that state?
Yeah.
I think there's at least two parts to this question.
So one of them is about fear and scarcity versus abundance and love and trust.
And the other one is about whether you're doing something because you need to make money or whether you're following your passion and your purpose.
Now, it's easy to say this in retrospect.
But I fully believe from all of my life's experiences that if you follow your passion and your purpose, you will absolutely be successful.
If you do something either to like, just because you want to make lots of money or, you know, just to pay the bills, then there is more room for failure because you will be operating much more from that scarcity and lack mindset.
That means that you're not fully able to be creative.
You're not able to take healthy risks and trust your intuition.
And you know it's absolutely fine to pitch content because you think it's going to be popular, if that's your living.
But if it's going against your passion and your purpose, then you know that might be worth digging into.
So you know you've given and you know I've had the same thing.
An obvious example of having grown up, you know, without many resources and feeling like there isn't enough out there for everyone.
It's a natural wiring in our brain for survival to try to avoid threat or scarcity more than we would try to go for like reward and believe in abundance.
And it comes from our evolution where basically, we had to be more aware of running away from a predator than we were of looking for berries in a bush where you don't have great visibility.
But that wiring hasn't changed very much.
We've changed in so many ways.
The world has changed so much.
But that particular wiring is so integral to our survival that it really hasn't adapted very well to the modern day.
And again I just want to qualify that we are talking about people privileged enough to have enough food to eat and who are worrying more about psychological safety of keeping their job or their freelance practice going well enough that they can maintain their lifestyle.
Fear and love are opposite ends of the spectrum of the basic human emotions.
We have five survival emotions fear anger disgust, shame and sadness and two attachment spectrums joy, excitement and love trust.
And then in between, we have surprise.
So you can already see that we're more weighted to survival emotions and attachment emotions, and that the brain is more geared to avoid scarcity than it is to believe in abundance.
So we really have to override that natural wiring in our brains.
And I think the best way of doing that is gratitude.
But there are other things or the obviously mindfulness, meditation, yoga, journaling.
So because fear and love can't coexist, because those emotions are kind of like on a seesaw.
So when you're in the fear state and you've got high levels of cortisol, then your oxytocin levels are relatively low, and vice versa.
So you want to push yourself into an oxytocin state as much as you can.
And that mostly comes from physical contact.
So like hugs and kisses and sex, but if you're on your own, then like a warm bath rather than a shower self-massage, or you know, if you can go for a massage, then that human touch, it also comes from eye contact and it also comes from humor and shared humor, so that's.
But it also comes from gratitude.
So at my lowest points it took me a while to train myself to get to this quickly enough but at my lowest points I'll say okay, 10 things I'm grateful for, And you know I'll just make myself go through that list.
And what I felt really was a game changer for me in my journaling practice was when I changed that from being all about external things because I was regularly writing my friends, my family, my ability to travel.
And it just got repetitive.
So I thought, OK, what else could I say?
And as soon as I changed it to things like my resilience, my creativity, my vulnerability, I was daily reminding myself of the toolkit that I have in me to deal with those disappointments, to go with the flow of being self-employed and stuff like that.
So, yeah.
Like.
I love that so much because when you're explaining it in that way, it sort of gives us the power back.
It puts us back into a position of being able to be in the present moment, right?
And I love how this relates to mindfulness and our ability to be in that present moment awareness.
I mean, for me, it's gratitude practice is It's almost like an obvious, right?
This is a really great way to change my frequency, right?
If I get some bad news, or if I get an email that triggers me from someone, or if I see, you know, a comment that might irk me.
I find that sometimes, going into those emotions like the disgust, the anger, those feelings, it's easy for me to feel that.
And it's easy for my brain to perpetuate that cycle, unless I very consciously put myself back into the present moment awareness, and you know what are, or go outside.
I love being out in nature and it's like, okay, what can I see?
What can I smell?
What can I touch?
You know, just put myself in, in connecting with the senses and it helps me sort of redirect that.
But for people that you know are wanting to, you know, have this experience of retraining the mind.
Can you go into that a little bit more with regard to neuroplasticity?
Maybe even tell us what neuroplasticity is, so that our listeners can really grasp this idea and also feel hopeful that they can absolutely change it.
Mm-hmm.
You really are one of the best interviewers that I've had.
And you're like a mind reader as well, because I was thinking the whole time.
I need to say what neuroplasticity is.
I don't think I've said that yet.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to grow and change.
And so this is very clear when we go from age zero to two, you start off completely vulnerable and helpless, and then you can walk, you can talk, you know children can learn up to five languages simultaneously.
But the ability to learn, the ability to pick up five languages simultaneously, whether you keep them or not, is like huge neuroplasticity.
And then in teenage, there's a lot of pruning of the brain to make it sophisticated for adult life.
So you know languages that you haven't used for a long time or skills that you no longer require.
As you enter adulthood, are might get pruned away and you become more emotionally intelligent and more like understanding of social and sexual behavior.
And that's a very active process till we're about 25.
But from 25 onwards, if you don't stimulate your brain, then it will tend to plateau.
So if you're doing a job that's quite repetitive, if you see the same people all the time, If you don't read that much or, like you know, do new learning, then you know you could have a perfectly fine life, but you won't be harnessing neuroplasticity.
And I loved that you said for people to be hopeful because I literally say neuroplasticity is hope.
And it's the hope that you can change.
It's the hope that you can think differently, behave differently, learn new things, embrace novelty, which is just things you haven't experienced before.
So I take on a big neuroplasticity practice each year, but I count things like eating a food I've never eaten before as part of my neuroplasticity practice.
Talking to someone who's Had a very different upbringing or life to me.
I consider that to be like contributing to my neuroplasticity.
But in terms of hope for people, there's a very simple process that underlies behavior change, which is the process that I've laid out in the source for using neuroplasticity to bring a big change into your life.
And the first part is raised awareness.
And that is 50% of the battle.
So for me, you know, I can convince myself that something's a fact when you know if I'm challenged.
Because I live in a very neuroplastic way.
I respond very quickly to a challenge to an entrenched behavior that I have.
It won't be necessarily that quick for everyone, but the awareness is 50%.
Because if you're just operating, you know we were talking before we came online about operating systems being upgraded.
If you're running on the old software, if you've been running on that software your entire life, then sometimes it does take someone to say you do know you could approach this differently.
That might be enough to push you into thinking, OK, what can I do about it?
Once you've had awareness about something that you want to change or a new thing you want to bring into your life, the next step is focused attention.
So I don't advise that people immediately try to make changes.
I ask them to gather data for about a month of where the old behavior shows up, what it leads to that they no longer desire, what some potential alternatives are and how that could improve their life.
And then the next stage is deliberate practice.
So that's when you use the new desired behavior and you try it out in real life.
So you try it on friends and family.
Then you try it on colleagues.
Then you try it on, you know, maybe someone that you've got a more challenging relationship with.
And you keep repeating the new behavior until it literally overwrites the old behavior.
So you can't in neurology, you can't undo wiring that's already in your brain.
You can't unlearn a language.
Right.
But you can overwrite it with a new language that you're using more or a new behavior that you wish to use more.
I'm sorry that the fourth element is accountability.
So if you say, yes, Tara, you know, I really want to stop making my decisions from scarcity.
And then, you know, you and I say goodbye at the end of today and you try to make those changes.
You may or may not be successful.
If you know that we're going to record another podcast in six months time and I'm going to ask you what you've done, how you've changed.
You know how it's changed your life.
You're much more likely to actually keep going with that process, even if it feels like very difficult.
But also it doesn't always click for people that psychological work is a physical work.
You are changing pathways in your brain.
You are growing new neurons.
You are connecting them up together.
It can make you tired.
It can make you hungry.
It can make you irritable.
And for a long time, it will take time for the new pathway to be stronger than the old pathway.
So it feels like you're putting in all this hard work and nothing's happening.
But then there's a tipping point where there's a critical mass of new neurons.
And the brain finds it easier to go down that pathway than the old one.
And then it suddenly feels like things changed overnight.
Wow.
This is so it's so wild.
And I love how that possibility.
You're right.
It is hopeful because the process of overriding software that's existent, I think is enough for some people to maybe want to create that change.
And I love what you said too, about there's an accountability piece the minute that you said in six months, when I check in with you, all of a sudden there was this energetic shift.
Even I felt it physiologically.
I was like, oh, I better do it.
And I think that this part is where having external support really helps us create those shifts and to really see that change that I think a lot of people want to see.
I wonder if Having ritual is the same, has that same effect.
Well, I don't want to say ritual, actually.
Maybe I'll position the question like this.
I grew up in a lot of chaos.
So for me, there was always, I grew up in that uncertainty, right?
Like there was maybe a drive-by shooting or there was, you know like, constant uncertainty, constant chaos.
That was the norm.
And so as I got older and I became an adult, I wanted certainty.
I didn't like moving around a lot.
I mean, I've been with my partner for 21 years.
I just really love routine.
I really enjoy it.
But part of me really does feel that stagnation come in when I'm doing the same things over and over.
So I wonder if you could speak to that a.
I think having routine is helpful, but I could see, with what you're saying, how that could hinder the growth.
I mean, you're talking about trying new foods and even practicing different languages.
When you travel, I could see how important those things can be for our internal growth.
So can you speak to that a little bit?
There's so, so many things I could say, but I'm really into olfactory enrichment at the moment.
So Yeah, smelling as many different things as you can during a day helps with your cognition and memory as you age.
But, you know, it doesn't even have to be something pleasant.
Like in mental health therapy, sometimes we would like pour vinegar onto a tissue and say to people smell this.
And then what memories does it bring back for you?
And this is very British, but people would say like Fish and chips by the beach wrapped in newspaper kind of thing.
So it's just about evoking the emotions and memories that come with smell.
That's very good for your brain.
And like I said, talking to people who have a very different background to you.
So I always say make sure you've got friends who are 20 years older and 20 years younger.
Travel is a great way to induce your neuroplasticity.
Basically, the brain doesn't really love new things because it sees anything that it doesn't know as a threat.
But it's you being brave and putting yourself out there and kind of embracing new things.
Tara, I am so, so grateful for this conversation.
I have to say I've learned so much as usual.
You know every and any conversation I've heard you have, whether it's on podcasts or You know you talking about your book or reading the source.
It really creates this, this deep sense of understanding and and hope.
I think that that's really the biggest takeaway that that I've had from this conversation.
You know, it really makes me hopeful to know that there are ways that I can change my way of thinking and my way of being.
And there's so much beautiful science behind.
You know all these different practices, whether it's vision board or gratitude practice or going in nature, and you know all the different things we talked about.
Well, I'm very touched that you said that you've come away from this conversation with hope, because that's a really beautiful piece of feedback for me.
I'm also going to say that I bet you didn't expect to have the conversation that we've had when you knew that a neuroscientist was coming on the show.
So thank you all so much for being here.
And thank you again, Dr. Tara Swart.
I feel like we're already just I want to just talk to you all the time.
What could a new besties?
And again, I said this at the beginning, but I am such a fan of what you're doing and such a fan of your work.
I really am so excited to see what the next book is gonna is gonna do.
And yeah, I'm so excited to stay connected.
Yeah, me too.
I'll definitely come back on the podcast when the next book is out, because you're going to love it.
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