We often think of a gut feeling as for or against, but let's be honest, our guts often tell us two or more things at once. We think A is a great idea (our gut is saying so), but our gut has doubts and thinks maybe B is better and A is a big mistake.

Whichever way we go (assume there are only two), we can say "I knew this was a good idea!" if it works well and "I could feel in my gut that it wasn't right" if it doesn't.

There's a bit of an optical illusion.

The illusion comes from superstitition - from the idea that our gut, or our instincts, or our intuition, or what have you, knows the right answer ahead of time, and we just have to read the tea leaves of the soul correctly to know.

That ain't how it works.

Listen, we don't actually know ahead of time.

We're gadgets with multiple sensory inputs and multiple processing centers in competition for attention and access to the controls.

ANYTHING we decide, some of us had other ideas.

ANY TIME we are right, some of us had doubts, though those areas may have been asleep.

When we got things wrong, some of us could have told us so, but they might not actually have understood any better.