ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 1, 1997 TAG: 9703030017
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SAN JOSE, CALIF.
SOURCE: DONNA ALVARADO SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
SCIENTISTS believe gut feelings exist in both sexes, and are key to our survival.
The old stereotype labeled it ``women's intuition.''
Now it turns out that a lot of people have it - men and women - and without it we'd be in serious trouble.
Scientists reporting in Friday's issue of the journal Science have even pinpointed where they think the intuition part of the brain is located - in the prefrontal cortex - right above the eyes.
In card-gambling experiments designed to simulate the stakes in real-life decisions, the scientists found that people who had brain damage in that area made consistently poor decisions even though they had rational intelligence. But undamaged patients developed a knack for winning money from the card game even before they could explain their choices.
The researchers contend this is evidence for a biological basis to ``hunches'' - and without it, we'd often be lost.
``We all have examples in our own life where we talk about hunches and gut feelings,'' said Antonio Damasio, who led the research at the University of Iowa and Salk Institute in La Jolla. ``What we were trying to do was get `underneath' a gut feeling or a hunch. This is the machinery just before the gut feeling that leads you to lean one way or another.''
The experiment was done among a group of brain-damaged patients previously shown by Damasio to score well on IQ and memory tests. But when faced with real-life decisions, they hesitate and ultimately make poor choices.
The scientists studied card-gambling behavior as a model for such real-life decisions that can rely at least partly on intuition: choice of mate, money management or career success. The six brain-damaged patients were known to have part of their gray matter missing in the ventromedial portion of the prefrontal cortex. Their responses were compared to those of 10 normal, undamaged participants.
Each was given four decks of cards from which to draw. The cards' underside contained either a reward ranging from $50 to $100, or a range of financial penalties. Unknown to the patients, two decks were ``good'' and contained more rewards, while the other two were ``bad'' and heavy with penalties.
The patients were instructed to draw 100 cards from any of the decks and play so that they could lose the least amount of money and win the most. The scientists interrupted the game-playing at several points and found:
* At card 20, none of the participants ``had a clue'' about what was going on, the researchers said. They called this the ``pre-hunch'' period.
* At card 50, all the normal participants reached the ``hunch'' period and began to say they suspected - correctly - that two decks were good and two were not. None of the brain-damaged patients did.
* By card 80, many of the normal participants said they knew why two decks were good and two were bad. The researchers called this the ``conceptual'' point, where people were conscious of a rational basis for their decisions. But even three of the 10 who never reached the conceptual point nevertheless had good hunches for avoiding the bad decks and choosing the good.
* Three of the brain-damaged patients reached the conceptual point and identified the good and bad decks. Despite that, they continued to make poor choices and lost.
The researchers said that underscored the power of intuition and how it enabled some people to make wise choices before they knew the rational basis. All too often, society dismisses this ability as unreliable and of little worth.
``It's an artifact of the hyper-rationalist modern times that we live in that we have become distrustful of intuition,'' said Damasio, a neuroscientist.
Many psychologists think that intuition may be based on memories of past emotions connected to previous choices. Damasio has suggested that the brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores information about past rewards and penalties.
When a new choice is presented, those stored memories trigger the unconscious emotional response that forms a hunch.
Damasio has also observed that the patients having brain-damage in this area, while performing well on intelligence tests, also show little emotion. That suggests that emotions aren't just a bias that distorts or works against rational choices.
``Without the help of such biases,'' Damasio wrote, ``overt knowledge may be insufficient to ensure advantageous behavior.''
LENGTH: Medium: 83 linesby CNB