How much do you pay attention to your gut instinct? How much do you let your first reactions influence you? When your gut is saying something that you have know way of 'knowing' to be fact, do you dismiss the instinctive reaction, or do you accept it as truth without the ability to verify it?
And then further, I wonder where it comes from too. There are little things we pick up on about people, places, events. Things that we must process subconsciously without being aware even of the exact details, and yet they form a broad picture that leads to our drawing specific conclusions. What a complex thing the human mind is, and what an amazing 'super-computer' to draw snap judgments without even cognitively processing the facts. Occasionally, my brain will do math without me thinking through the actual process consciously. The first time that happened, it freaked me out. I knew the answer to a mathematical problem, albeit a simple one, without consciously adding and subtracting to arrive at the answer. That was a weird moment. So maybe that's how our brains process what we term 'gut instinct.' Our brains add and subtract different factors to arrive at a conclusion, and they do it so quickly, we don't even consciously enter into the process. Something to puzzle out later when I'm a little more awake...
