The Human Behavior Podcast

When Instinct Meets Intuition

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This week we are unpacking the mysterious forces of instinct and intuition and explaining how these twin navigators steer our survival strategies as well as our everyday choices. During the episode we reveal how primal behaviors and nuanced judgments not only coexist but often compete for the driver's seat in high-stakes scenarios.

In order to explain how this complex interaction between instinct and intuition, we share some compelling stories of heroism and survival that highlight the variability of human reactions under extreme stress. From the courage of soldiers to the quick thinking of emergency responders, we illustrate how training and intuition intertwine, impacting decisions that can mean the difference between life and death. Get ready to explore the profound interplay of the instinctual and the intellectual within us all.

Thank you so much for tuning in, we hope you enjoy the episode and please check out our Patreon channel where we have a lot more content, as well as subscriber only episodes of the show. If you enjoy the podcast, I would kindly ask that you leave us a review and more importantly, please share it with a friend. Thank you for your time and don’t forget that Training Changes Behavior!

Cold Case Western Australia
Brian Marren:

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the Human Behavior Podcast. This week, we are unpacking the mysterious forces of instinct and intuition and explaining how these twin navigators steer our survival strategies as well as our everyday choices. During the episode, we reveal how primal behaviors and nuanced judgments not only coexist, but often compete for the driver's seat in high-stakes scenarios. In order to explain how this complex interaction between instinct and intuition, we share some compelling stories of heroism and survival that highlight the variability of human reactions under extreme stress, from the courage of soldiers to the quick thinking of emergency responders. We illustrate how training and intuition intertwine, impacting decisions that can mean the difference between life and death. Get ready to explore the profound interplay of the instinctual and the intellectual within us all. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the episode and please check out our Patreon channel, where we have a lot more content as well as subscriber only episodes of the show. If you enjoyed the podcast, I would kindly ask that you leave this review and, more importantly, please share it with a friend. Thank you for your time and don't forget that training changes behavior. All right, greg, we're recording, so we're going to go ahead and jump into things today. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Just a reminder for those folks who haven't heard before we do have the Patreon site that you can check out even more and we have subscriber only episodes.

Brian Marren:

But today we are talking about instincts and intuition. Sort of there's a difference between those and how they affect us when it comes to decision making and it comes to perception and it comes to a whole bunch of other things. But it, you know, it's kind of spurred by a couple of different conversations that we've had before in the past or different social media posts, and you know where people are trying to take some sort of understanding of either instincts or intuition or something about that's unique to the human condition, and maybe using it incorrectly Not really their intent sometimes, but it turns into one of those. What was it from the Anchorman, where he's 60% of the time it works every time, kind of stats where people look at stuff. But I'm going to throw you in a second, greg. But I do want to kind of define, you know, intuition versus instinct, because we see these things kind of. We see these terms used quite a bit and interchangeably sometimes, even though they mean something different, and it's important to understand this and we're going to get to the so what of that in a little bit. But I just want everyone to kind of be clear that intuition and instinct may seem like the same concept, but they're very different in a number of important ways.

Brian Marren:

And so an instinct is something primal, it's an innate behavioral tendency, shaped by evolution, to promote survival and reproductive success, mostly in the present moment, so mostly like right now. Right, our instinctive behaviors are triggered in response to some sort of environmental stimuli and they're the oldest psychological mechanisms controlled by the most ancient parts of our brain. So you know you're talking. Instinct is you know your fight or flight, your breathing flinching, you know certain atomic actions, right, like, oh, that's hot and I dropped the pan, right, those are instinctual behaviors. You know another good one you take a bite of some food that's like you know rotten or something like that. You instinctively spit it out. You know, before you even really have a conscious thought of it, you're spitting that out. So that's the idea. Is something that involves instincts, is does not require any sort of thinking, right, they're basically just automatic behaviors, designed, I would say, promoting survival and reproductive success. Right, that's basically about it.

Brian Marren:

But now, intuition is that when you get that feeling of like, oh, I know something right, without thinking about it, man, I knew something was up right. So you have an intuition about something. It's a judgment or evaluation, and you can't really pinpoint how you came to the judgment. It just it feels right, like I felt like this is what's going on. So those intuitions seem like they sort of just pop out of the blue, but it's really a result of a whole bunch of thought processes that are too quick for your conscious minded note, and that intuition is basically a shortcut. Right, in a sense sort of helps us make quick decisions based on very minimal information and it relies heavily on experience. Right, it's the ability to sort of what we do right Detect patterns quickly and without having to think about it. Right, where we teach people how to do that so that they become better at it and then they can do it right, you know, without thinking about it.

Brian Marren:

But that's what intuition is really, when you get into, like, high level subject matter expertise and they can just make a decision quickly without even really being able to articulate why they made that decision. But it's based on a whole bunch of different factors and that's where you know people get that oh, I kind of had this, this gut feeling, or you know something, something didn't seem right or I noticed this about that. So that's where you know there were this person. I didn't like their vibes man. You know, whatever it is, that's some sort of intuition. But now we talk about that and how that can go wrong. We can get corrupt file folders and you know, I'm relying on something, maybe something from my past that wasn't right or wasn't typical, and now I'm basing everything off of that. But I just wanted to hit those up for the sort of definition of those two different terms so that we can talk about it, greg and I'm sure you have other stuff to add to that before we go on.

Greg Williams:

God? I hope so, or I don't know why I would be here if I didn't. But yeah, so what Brian did is he defined instincts and we're born with biologically determined, innate patterns of behavior that are designed to help us survive. Those we name instincts. So the difference in my mind between instinct and intuition is that instincts are primitive. For example, we have the primitive instinct to survive, the primitive instinct to carry out in a species where primitive means something from an early stage in evolutionary development that we can point to, development that we can point to Now, I would say evolutionary and historical development, because there was primitive means of doing something, a tool that we adapted over time.

Greg Williams:

And then we conflate certain terms. So some people say primal or primordial, that's all primitive, that all is from earliest stages. The primal, the primitive instincts of humans, for example, are to hunt and gather. Now we've evolved, right, but we never lose those factors. We might lose the vestigial tail, but we never lose the part of our spine that used to be that tail. You see what I'm saying. And so the tail is gone, but we can point to that and say this is where our tail was Go ahead and you're talking about those changes.

Brian Marren:

These changes you're talking about are over hundreds of thousands, millions of years. Millions of years Not millions, really, if you're talking about a tail. I just want to note that.

Greg Williams:

Yeah, and the reason I'm talking about it is historic. Development is something we always have to go back to Sociological, psychological, physiological and then we always talk what's the historical perspective of this? What did this do? Why is it memorable? Or why isn't it memorable? Why was it forgotten? And we've all heard of the term survival of the fittest, and that means our survival instincts are typified by self-preservation, survival instinct, therefore the ability to know what to do, when to do it, in order to stay alive. So Brian and I had a brief discussion, a hallway discussion, about the survival of the fittest, and Brian rightly said most people get that wrong and Brian, you're right when they hear the term fittest, and and Brian rightly said, most people get that wrong.

Brian Marren:

And and Brian, you're right when, when they hear the term fittest, right, they, they, yeah, they think like, oh, the strongest will survive, or the strong and, and, and what it really means is the most adaptable in that environment.

Brian Marren:

So yes maybe being the physical biggest and strongest will help, but but you, you can also be the smartest and most cunning and survive, or so you know there's there's different ways that are different mechanisms, that that will occur when we talk about that. But that was a you know what, even what darwin was getting at. It was about this adaptability was really what it was it was. It was to change or, excuse me, adapt over time, based on the conditions of that you were put into, based on the other environmental things, based on whatever's happening in that area, that you can adapt and continue to survive, but it's always one tied back to survival. And then you know it's, it's, it's the, just the adaptation part of it. But you know, and that's an important distinction, and that's an important distinction, and you know the reason why the. I want to just make sure we're clear, sort of right up front at the beginning.

Brian Marren:

The reason why we're talking about that is that part. Those, those instincts, anything primal, anything, what we would call you know the term hardwired in a sense in our dna is something that we cannot change. It's still there, even though society is, is the way it is today. We still have all of those things. Like you said, we're still wired, in a sense, to go out and hunt and gather and continue to procreate the species for survival and we in our lifetimes will not evolve past that. Maybe a million years from now or half a million years, things will change, but the idea is we're still that way and so anything primal, right that you're getting at, anything in there will, will sort of always take precedent, especially in certain situations. Right, it's always going to be there and it will always win, right. When people talk about like it'll fight until it wins.

Brian Marren:

I agree, it's well, it's kind of like a discussion between like nature versus nurture, and it's like well, look, I, yes, there's all these things that influence who you are as a person and your behavior and your decisions, and all those things. But but that, that, what, what's encoded in you, those primal instincts, right, are, are the most powerful and and now it's depending on how and why they're expressed. But what you're getting into is that's going to win, right? Yeah, I have to, but we need to know why. That's important, you're right on. So I want to go. Why?

Greg Williams:

Yeah, Sorry, no, no, you're spot on. I think instincts fall to the bottom on the cutting room floor when we start thinking that intuition is powerful. That's wrong. We have to switch those things. Humans, at birth, have the natural instinct to survive. So medically there's a term fail to thrive for kids, for kids that are too short, for kids that don't weigh enough, for kids that don't have that natural instinct to survive. But none of that has anything to do with intuition. Intuition is a cue, it's a prompt, it's something that later in life, as you experience things more, you'll start saying wow, this feels like an earlier experience. Well, when I can compare things, that's not instinct, because our instinct is a hardwired decision, and I'll give you an example of that.

Greg Williams:

Okay, training changes behavior. Our tagline has been forever and we really, really understand and mean it. What do I mean? So let's flip the coin and go. How can we tell if we're doing training wrong? Well, I'll give you an example.

Greg Williams:

You give a person an aluminum flashlight because it's a defensive impact tool. That means an aluminum tube on the flashlight can stop somebody swinging an aluminum bat or a piece of rebar at you and hurting you by using it in a defensive manner to block. That's what it's intent for. Now, if you use it to strike, you strike certain parts, nerve, motor points on the body, rather than a knee or an elbow or a head. But what happens to every single person that's handed a club and they're in a fight for their life? They do the overhand swing, they go what we used to call on the street headhunting, and I've done thousands of those investigations and those people were trained. They were trained to do the common peroneal strike. They were trained to do the common perennial strike. They were trained to do a different manner of thing. But when you hold those two things next to each other and you see the instinct.

Greg Williams:

The instinct is to survive, which means you will do anything that your brain tells you is within the realm of the possible to survive. And that's where the overhand chop comes from. Give you another one. You run up on a car. Uh, you're pulling on the door, handle the person's locked, he's trying to put it in gear. The very first thing you have in your weapon, your hand, is your weapon, and you're holding your police-issued sidearm at the person saying open the door. And they don't, and you start banging it against the glass. Thousands and thousands of films that you can look up. People doing that. Now, brian, where is the overhand chop with a aluminum flashlight taught? Nowhere. Where is bashing your firearm against the window to get inside that car taught Nowhere.

Greg Williams:

So how could we come up with it on our own? It's impossible that, of all the choices that are out there, that we would choose to do that. It just happened to go that way. No, what happens is our instinct drives our reproduction. Our instinct says we have to be alive to reproduce, and this is one of those moments where we're going to cut out the middleman and we're going to go straight to the source, and that means that we're going to do whatever it takes in that moment. And that's where our training falls short. Because those aren't physical skills, brian, those are mental skills. This is where Maslow got it right. We can change certain instinctual behavior with training.

Brian Marren:

Well, and this is sort of like the situations you just gave examples on, are predicated on what I've now gone past the point of being able to really understand the environment and the situations. So therefore, my brain instinctively and will always go primal. It doesn't go. You know what? Everything's probably going to be okay, right. If our brain went to that, one human of race probably wouldn't have survived this long To there would be no such thing as is like anxiety, right.

Brian Marren:

If people talk about anxiety and it's like, well, yeah, that you're good, like you're primed to stay alive, like that's where that comes from, yeah, right, anxiety is that fear of the unknown in the future, right. Whereas fear is sort of like right here, now, in the present. Anxiety is like what's going to happen? Do we have enough food to make it through winter? You know what I mean? That's an innate instinct in humans, so anxiety is something I don't look at it as oh man, I've got to figure out my anxiety. It's like, well, okay, why is it being triggered for the situations? Is what you need to figure out that? That's the corrupt file folder. But, but having it is the best thing ever, because it's that's what allows you to continue to do your job well and be a good human and contribute to society and stay alive.

Brian Marren:

But but what you, what you? What I just want to be clear is kind of you. You brought up a couple situations there to use as examples of where, where you've gone past, there're not using intuition, you're not using anything, you've gone primal at that point because you've, you've the, the psychological arousal right has gotten to the point where your brain is relying on instinct and once you do that, it's probably going. It's it's you, you said it it's. You're in a fight for your life, even if you're not, even if the situation in the pure light of day after the fact is going well, that's not what was going on.

Brian Marren:

It was an accident. This old man was getting a cane out of the bed of his pickup truck, not a shotgun to shoot you, but you saw a shotgun or a rifle because you went close enough and your brain went from intuitive processes and thinking to this very instinctual way of looking at it. And then it becomes very binary. It becomes it's, it's, it's either a threat or it's not. And it's a threat for my life. Right, I am going to die here if I don't kill this person first or I don't do whatever action my brain has computed.

Brian Marren:

It's often why you see people run out and try to grab a vehicle or jump in front of a vehicle. When someone's fleeing, it's like no, no, no. Everything in the world would tell you that's the dumbest thing in the face of the earth. But instinctually at that time, your brain is so primitive it doesn't understand that this car is going to kill you if you go in front of it. It can't, right, it can't see that. And if I haven't trained for that sort of event, right, I'm not going to. And I become overwhelmed and my decision making has become so clouded that I'm just thinking with instinct. And that's never.

Brian Marren:

And this is why we hit this, this, the neuroscience and the limbic system, so powerfully and why we hit the limitations of cognitive performance over and over and over again, because it's something you cannot increase, it's something you can't change. You can, you can become a better intuitive thinker and you can get better at thinking critically, so that you do not become psychologically overwhelmed. Right, you don't become, you don't reach that. That level of of instinct kicks in and it's primal right, you can get better there. But it doesn't matter who you are, what level of training or experience you have. If you do get to that point, it's going to become a very simple I either kill them or, or they're going to kill or I'm going to die, right, and and it's it becomes very binary. So this, this instinct is, is obviously to keep you alive and, and you can, you, there's nothing you can do to prevent those. There's nothing you can do, um, basically to control those mechanisms once they've kicked in.

Brian Marren:

Right, that's right, that's the idea between anger and rage, like once I get to that point, it's, it's on board, it's there, it's happening and I can't do anything about it. I can do everything before it gets to that, I can focus on that, but not once it gets to that level. Does that kind of make sense.

Greg Williams:

It makes a lot of sense and you said a lot of great stuff, so let's unpack it. First of all, there's certain types of survival engineering that we have. For example, the nose being above the mouth. That's not accidental. The nose makes sure that it passes the smell test before it gets into the mouth. So you're not going to accidentally eat fetid food which would inhibit your ability to survive. You may die from that. So, absolutely everything the ears being panoramic, our eyes being forward-looking. If we go down through all of those things, brian, that's survival engineering. None of it's accidental, okay. Second part of that we have risk-reward circuitry, which by itself means that we were trying to get up and get out of the cave. So you said arousal Arousal is a huge word.

Greg Williams:

Folks Seeking arousal outside our cave as early. Man and woman. Fear, anger, anxiety, pleasure, all instincts. None of them are intuition, all of them are hardwired instinct. Now, much later, okay, you can say that, hey, I found that most fish are found in a stream, not on land. Okay, well, there's your intuition kicking in. You see what I'm trying to say. One is very much more important than others.

Greg Williams:

So, look, there's certain stuff we cannot override. For example, if we take a look at all of the world. Hibernation in animals is an instinct. It can't be overridden. And when an animal does fight hibernation, it ends up starving or dying or being killed by other predators. Migration okay, you don't migrate, you freeze in place and you die. So those are the type of things that we see repeated over and over. I'll give you an example. On I-70 outside of Small City Eagle in Colorado, there's corridors where the animals have gone south to north for better feeding grounds for so many years that they had to put up fences with gates and underpasses to allow the elk population to continue to migrate or they would all die in the freeway. There's a place up in northern Colorado called the Leather Highway that so many car and animal accidents.

Brian Marren:

They've done that. They've done even in other places. They've built highway overpasses that are just for animals, right, exactly. They built it between two areas because they know they're going to cross. And now the animals learned oh, we can just go right up over here and we're not going to cross the freeway.

Greg Williams:

Exactly so we compare that. In humans it's stuff like eating and drinking and sleeping, and they're examples of our instinctual behavior, and so hardwired are they that when you take a look at circadian rhythms, for example, they're specifically to set up to make sure that we have that brain rest cycle and that we come off being on switched on all day. They're driven by our need to survive An example of a primal instinct. Another one is hunting, another one is gathering. Those were so essential to early survival and we still do that today. That's why there's a drive-through at a restaurant, because we've figured out that how will people get it? Hell, if you can deliver it to their house, they'll even pay extra for it.

Greg Williams:

Look at what's happened, even since COVID, which helped us understand that humans that are best adapted to the environment are going to continue to survive. So that failed to thrive in our nature. We have to pass on our characteristics, our biases, our behaviors to future generations for them to have a chance. So those things that are instinctual stick around because they're hardwired and they're hard to break that habit. Those things that are intuition-based are those things that we've learned over time that now, all of a sudden, like a female intuition, that's a great one.

Greg Williams:

I rarely use the term intuition, but I often use the term female intuition when I'm describing it. Why? Because females have been predated like horses in the environment. You take a look at the evolution of a horse, the evolution of a female, and I'm not trying to say anything by that. That's negative. I'm trying to say that because they were predated, because they were thought of as less person, they didn't get the right to vote, all these other things. They naturally, with their instinct, adapted a intuition that I might get raped, I might get attacked in some way, I might have a problem. Those two things went together.

Brian Marren:

That goes back to the adaptation, and that still goes back to the adaptation, right. So men are born with more muscle mass, greater bone density, higher levels of strength, just across the board on average, than women are right, and different hormones that allow for that. So what did women have to do to survive? Well, women have a greater functional field of view than men, right, they can see more of their environment. They can do this. So that's the part of the adaptation, instinctual adaptation process where you have to go well, I have to be able to survive in this world.

Brian Marren:

So, as a species, this is what happened, uh, to me, right, this is what. These are, the, these are the, the extra things I have that you don't have, greg. Greg, you might be bigger and stronger than me, but maybe I'm faster and smarter. So it doesn't matter what it is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's you know. But what we're you know, you're, you're kind of getting to on all of this is that onboard system, is that is the most powerful thing, and those instincts will, will push and influence our behavior, but it's it's towards very specific rewards. It is the reward, you know, it's procreation of the species, it's for food, it's for survival, and then intuitively, like I actually want to go back to that.

Brian Marren:

I like your, your fish example. It's like, okay, I found out, I'm picture me coming out of the cave and I'm still look, you know, like I could could fit in with that. That tribe, uh, today, that tribe today with the beard and hair that I've got. But the idea is I find out that, wow, I went down to the river and I came across this fish and I ate it and it tasted good and I can survive off of this stuff. Way to capture those.

Brian Marren:

That instinct drove me to develop these specific intuitive skill sets. So now, where I can teach my grandkids the hey, we come over here on the stream, this is the spot where they all like to tuck in. It's easier to catch them here than it is over there. So it's not not instinctive process, it's an intuitive process that I can exactly I can pass that down. I can pass those intuitive experiences down to the next generation, like you said, just like I passed on my DNA to the next generation. So the idea is that that's how they sort of interplay together. And then you tied it back to sort of training and how we look at things and those things I consistently see, sort of they cross the streams and then Ghostbusters are not supposed to cross the streams, right?

Greg Williams:

Exactly. They start to say Star Wars or yeah, or or people.

Brian Marren:

People get it wrong in the sense that some of the science behind it is right. It's just not being applied. It's not being applied correctly, which you actually just gave a shout out to Maslow, too, a couple of minutes ago, which is something which I never do but let's, let's go one more uh uh layer with your the direction that you're going in, because I think that everybody's catching on now.

Greg Williams:

But let's talk about the color red. So you came out and you talked about fishing outside of the cave. So now we come out and we're foraging, okay, so? So we're not hunting, we're foraging in our environment, gathering they called it back in the day and we find out that these red berries, I took a mouthful and I immediately started vomiting. So I caught on, okay, because the hardwired system on my body taught my mouth and my esophagus and my stomach that this is not good food. These are poisonous to vomit. Now it also gave me a couple of very strong instinctual clues, because Mukhtar and Oogluk that were hunting with me, they died because they ate too many of the berries and got sick and swelled up.

Greg Williams:

Now what happens is from seeing that, driven by instinct to stay away, I've created an intuition that things that are red are not good to put into my mouth. How long did that last? What was the tomato called? We thought they were poison apples. We take a look at radishes and because they were red and they were hot to the touch, we said, oh my God, those are poison too. That's the intuition side of it, brian. That's what happens when we develop a brain and we start thinking about those things and we put them into a category, but the instinct never changed. The instinct was continue to sample your environment because sooner or later you will find that perfect food that is going to sustain you through the winter food that is going to sustain you through the winter, and you, you, that's.

Brian Marren:

That's an example too of how those, um, sort of intuitive processes don't always apply in every situation. So, the instinct, I spit out the red berries, cause those are poisonous. Now I go oh man, I can't eat anything that's the color red. It's like, well, yeah, you can't, you just can't eat those things that are red. Um, you know, and you, you know, you, you get into to, you know, smell and all that too. That was what was actually what I thought the craziest thing about COVID, with people losing their their sense of smell during it. I mean, if that had imagined, if that had happened a few hundred thousand years ago, I mean, maybe a significant portion of the race wouldn't have survived.

Greg Williams:

That's actually exactly correct, right, because that's an environmental clue, right? So look, folks, we get environmental clues and internal clues. I'll give you an example of that. An environmental cue a food source is drying up, the water source is tainted. I don't have the right amount of berry to animal thing, you know ratio, to stay alive. There's too many dangerous animals in this vicinity. Those would all be environmental cues that are screaming at me. That would force an instinctual change. You get it. So the other one what about an internal signal? Well, that vomiting was an internal signal. What about your biological clock ticking? A female that thinks hey, listen, I'd love to have a baby before I get too old, because, okay, you think that that's something you came up with, no, that's something your body and your hormones and your chemicals are screaming at you to make it an imperative.

Brian Marren:

It's not societal pressure.

Greg Williams:

It's biological In some households, it could contribute right.

Brian Marren:

That's so true, right, no, no, no. But those are contributing factors versus but again, right, that's so right, no, no. But well, those are those are contributing factors.

Greg Williams:

Versus, yeah, versus. But again, intuition contributing factor, uh uh, instinct, actuality it's the power cable. That's right, like, like, think of it this everybody sees those commercials for generac. I want to get one of those generators because we live off the grid, out here in the middle of nowhere and we're very highly susceptible, as brian knows, to our cable going down, our internet going down all these other things. So what a Generac standby does and it's not a commercial for Generac folks, but any generator company- I was going to say are we?

Brian Marren:

being, I'm getting paid for this, Are we being sponsored. So what happens is we set it outside. Use discount code Right exactly Alpha 7.

Greg Williams:

And if you call right now you get two for the price of what? No, but it's outside your house and what happens is, if you've got energy hardwired into your house, what they do is they create a loop through the generator. So when the generator senses the power is no longer coming from that tube, it takes over. So what you've got is the instinct is that power from the line that comes into your house and and your intuition is that Generac generator that says hey, something's wrong, we have to step in now.

Greg Williams:

So if you modify your training to understand the instinct and you add intuition, brian, it's as simple as the training that we do with pushing off of that car. It's as simple as telling somebody during that class on firearms because it doesn't matter where you intervene, as long as telling somebody during that class on firearms because it doesn't matter where you intervene, as long as you do intervene saying hey, one day you're going to get in a trick bag and run up alongside of a car and, in addition to wanting to grab that guy and get drugged next to the car, you're going to want to take out your pistol and shoot him and then you're going to have the. Should I stay or should I go and start beating on the windshield with it. These are choices that are instinctual, that you're likely to make, so let's work together to overcome them. Do you get how easy it could be if we compare the cognitive?

Brian Marren:

with the physical, the physiological.

Brian Marren:

A good one, for that is you know, look, instinctually you start getting shot at. You're going to want to dive or get behind some sort of cover. Like you're, you're instinctually your, your brain's going to want to keep you alive and it's going to want to get behind something. Here's a problem this thing right here doesn't stop bullets. Uh, this thing over here does stop bullets. So you need to look for things like this, because that that that stops bullets. This one doesn't, you know, because instinctually you'll. If I can't see the threat, it can't see me. Well, they can still penetrate it with, with, with rounds coming through there. So I, that's a.

Brian Marren:

That's a good example of that's a really good instinct, between uh and intuition in your intuitive thinking and instinctual thinking sort of uh together. I wouldn't even call instinctual thinking, it's's just instinct, it's not thinking. The intuition part is thinking, but that's how you can kind of interplay those and that's why you know, when it comes to setting up, you know, when you're talking about training or even just developing, you know, with my family coming up with what are some likely things to consider. Well, if I understand better what instinctively you know, the insurgent, she's 11, has no formal training in a lot of stuff what is she instinctually going to do when these things happen? Okay, so if I use that as sort of the, the left and right lateral limit, or I use that as the roadway, as the, as the street, where do I want her to go to? What? What do I want to? How do I want to build on top of that? Because you're you're instinctively going to do these three, these three things maybe in this situation. So what can I teach her in those moments so, intuitively, she can make better decisions at that or have a better response, like you know, instinctually, you know she's going to freak out, you know, or be very scared if you know the baby starts choking.

Brian Marren:

Okay, so what can I teach her? All right, can I show her, can I make her hold max and do this? Well, yeah, I did. I was like this is how you do it. This is how you actually do it. Put your finger in his mouth right now, see how it's tough, and he doesn't want it in there.

Brian Marren:

Okay, well, that's what it's going to feel like in a real situation, right? So having a little taste of that it will help in that situation, right? But if I don't start with what are you instinctively going to do? I'm sort of I'm already setting her up for failure, right? If I don't take those factors into account when I'm coming up with that course of action that I want her to do and train her on, then it's going to fall apart in a real event. I mean, that's the thing is that instinctive, primal instinct is going to take over and it's going to override anything that they've taught, and you see that time and time again, and so that's the biggest issue I see when it comes to how people set these things up, and it's like we're forgetting this primal instinct in us or we're rushing into that, saying this is going to happen. You're going to become overwhelmed by events You're going to have, it's like.

Greg Williams:

Well, you don't have to if I back this up a little bit, but if that's the only path you're used to following, then that's what's most likely to occur in your prefrontal cortex. Remember, we're talking primitive brain versus neocortex, which means that there's always a struggle in your mind. Your mind is always struggling, looking at the rest of the world as survival-based. So, for example, the people that develop, run hide fight. They got all of those from primitive human instinct because those are all instinctual. But the science behind putting them in that order, I haven't seen that yet, okay, and I don't know if we can agree with that in all humans. So training to that standard might be the right thing for your agency, as long as the training teaches you options and you understand early. When you pull that weapon out and you're about to hit that window, you go holy crap, that's exactly what we were talking about. Oh man, look, I'm going instinctual, I'm going primitive. If you can pull yourself out of that overhand bat swing, brian, then you've got a chance, and that's what you were talking about with your daughter. So I'll give you this a run hide fight. I'm not damning you, I'm saying that the science is there. You just got to make sure that the training fits the science Okay, and you have to make that choice for yourself, because I'm not a proponent of that. I think you can think your way out of situations and then decide what the options are. Now you're saying time, yeah, I get the temporal element.

Greg Williams:

The bathroom. Bathroom is the smallest room in your house other than a closet. Your brain doesn't think of a closet as a room because it has linen or pantry Okay. Room because it has linen or pantry Okay. When you go to hide, more people hide in the bathroom than any other place, because there's a number of things in the bathroom. There's hard things like the tub that I can jump into, and a lot of firefighters have found kids hiding in the tub and dying under their bed. Why? Because what happens? That fire overrides all of their training and all of their intuition and it goes instinctual. I have to hide from the fire. The fire is bad and therefore they're in the tub or in the bed and that's a bad thing, okay. So we have to train them to overcome that. We also have to train them that the fireman that's coming to pull them out from under the bed is going to be dressed like Darth Vader the actual thing that we tell them that they're going to be scared shitless of. There again we have environmental cues and internal cues that are going to come and fight between our primitive survival brain and our neocortex.

Greg Williams:

So your training and again, I don't care what your training is, but your training has to have components of each and it has to be repetitive enough and you have to change, like a rheostat, the amount of external arousal. And external arousal doesn't always have to be fear or anxiety-based, it doesn't always have to be a gun. It can be competing arousal because the brain now, over a million years of evolution or more, now we see survival and what? What do we always equate survival with Opportunity? Hey, here's an opportunity. Hey, take a look If I step in there right now, if I do these. So now we have an additional competing factor because it's not as dangerous as it once was. And everybody goes oh, it's so dangerous now. But the survival rate and the age that you lived to you know 200 years ago. Take a look at that and compare it to today. You got a splinter and you weren't on the way to the emergency room, you were on the way to the morgue.

Greg Williams:

Those things change how we think about the future, so we have to understand like, for example, applying the tourniquet. And now people start carrying a tourniquet, but that's not good enough. How do you carry your tourniquet? Is it ready for use? What if you get shot in your gun hand? How are you going to shoot with your offhand? That's the great type of survival thinking that.

Greg Williams:

I see that's going on with trainers, but that's not enough. It's not enough to flip the tire or shoot the target. We have to think through these things. And the first part of thinking through those things is anticipation. What might I encounter today? What might I see when I turn the engine, my car, and it does the slow, wrong, wrong, wrong crank and it's not cold outside. Hey, it might be time to check that battery or my starter might be there. Brian, we do that when we're talking about our car. We don't do that when we're talking about our car. We don't do that when we're talking about our kids.

Greg Williams:

So the education, then training, then rehearsal for the real event process is critical, and you can do that in a number of ways. No, no, no, no. In-person training will ever stop because virtual training is so good. That'll never happen because humans have to be face-to-face. Maybe in a million years that'll change. But virtual is a great step when you can't afford the other because it costs a lot of money to get actors and ranges and bullets and all that stuff. So you see what I'm talking about. As long as we're moving the dial forward and giving our brain options and seeing what could happen, then our brain gets it from there. We teach the brain how to go. Hey, there's Waldo and it loves that. And now we're back to that reward circuitry that we've already got instinctually. That was born with us. Uh, so I know that was a long move.

Brian Marren:

Brian. But I think even your, your example of um, you know someone running to hide in the bathroom, right, that that's, that's you know. Know, instinct is telling me I need to go to a I'm, I'm in fear, right, for my life. I instinct takes over and says I need to find a safe, something that's safe. Well, we've gone, well, why would it then go to the bathroom? Because, well, you're, you're in a very vulnerable spot when you're sitting on the toilet and you've done that so many times in your bathroom, in your house, that you've now this is now, to your brain, a safe place. Because no one's ever, yeah, I mean, think about it.

Brian Marren:

It's like even why, uh, um, dogs, especially even when they're puppies, if you're, you're, you're potty, training them to, that's a very um, you know it's, it's a very vulnerable time when they're, when they're pooping, so they literally get kind of weirded out and they still look back at their owner and they'll look around and it's like, because anyone can come attack them, because they're trying to figure out their, their bowels. You know what I'm saying. So it's, it's, it's a, it's a very, it becomes, you know this, this place where you're safe. So, therefore, when that fear kicks in and I become overwhelmed by the situation and I go to instinct and I'm not thinking through, I will run to those places. That's why, you see, in those emergency situations, people do crazy stuff or something weird or something that's literally counterintuitive because your thinking brain would never do that, but instinctually it makes a lot of sense. Oh, now I know why they go there.

Brian Marren:

You even brought up we talked about it on another podcast before but when someone's and this is probably more true for a little bit older vehicles, but still just as true today in some sense is when someone's being pursued and they're not wearing a seatbelt and they go to take that left-hand high-speed turn and they almost lose it and they almost come sliding out of the driver's seat, but then when they take a right-hand turn, they can pin against the door and they're fine and not going anywhere. So now, instinctively their brain goes got it. I now know that I have a better chance. I can take a turn at a higher rate of speed going right than I can left. So will it start to choose more right-hand turns? Well, yeah, that's how your brain works. It learns, and it learns very quickly and it's driven by that instinct. So that's that underlying operating system. That's always, always on. And the more extreme the situation, right the more it's going to take over, right the higher the stakes, the higher the arousal right.

Brian Marren:

the more of a survival situation it is, the more instinctual you will become, and so it's.

Brian Marren:

You know, it's an important distinction between instinct and intuition, and it's important to understand it. When, like you, talked about setting up sort of a training scenario or figuring out what's likely to happen next, and this is why we go to the primal stuff when we're doing predictive analysis, when the pressure's on with someone, they're going to fall back. And that's what people mean when they say we don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. It's like, well, and then you're going to fall to the level of our training. It's like, well, you're, and then you're going to fall to the level of your instincts after that. So so if you don't have that training, if you don't, or your training was a presumed capability, not an actual capability, all that shit's going to go out the window and you're going to do the most basic, rudimentary stuff. And then now what we do, unfortunately, is everyone posts videos of it and points and laughs at people and says, oh, look at these idiots when you know that's you in that situation, right there.

Greg Williams:

Clearly, science is that if we videotape or tape or record gosh, all of those terms are outdated now. Yeah, I mean, think about that for a minute, okay, Because there are no tapes or anything. But if we record a situation and we point to it immediately, what we're saying is we're not going to use the scientific method, we're going to use this one example and it's going to prove everything to you. That's non-science, okay, that's unscience. So what do I mean by that? Let's talk again about the intuition versus instinct. All of a sudden, you're on the freeway and you see a police car pull up behind you. You're on the freeway and you see a police car pull up behind you. Your immediate intuition, your intuitive sense is holy shit, I'm going to get pulled over. So you go to 10 and 2 with your hands. You start adjusting everything on your seatbelt, Make sure you're looking good, and then the guy burns by you because he's headed for the Waffle House and you go whew, okay, that's all intuition. That has nothing to do with instinct. But that bag of weed or meth or fentanyl that you've got hiding in your car, the fact that you hid it instinctually tells me that you knew possession of that item was wrong and therefore you made extra effort to hide it. You know what you didn't hide. You didn't hide your lunchbox. You know what you didn't hide. You didn't hide your hat or your gloves or your umbrella. Those things were all where you could reach them.

Greg Williams:

So you can make an argument for when you go to search that home SWAT teams where likely will your suspect be? I guarantee it's not likely the living room. Okay, you can make sure that you understand that intent has been established. If the person makes a furtive gesture to hide something, why would they go through the motion on a traffic stop to conceal something, from your view, unless they had the mens rea, the guilty knowledge that there was something wrong with that? So the same thing.

Greg Williams:

When you come in and you ask your kid how was your day at school? Fine, Okay, you can say now, Brian, that would be intuition based on all of the other times that your daughter walked in the house. You know something that's wrong but instinctively you have to go after that and pull that thread to find out what it is. So there's a constant balance in humans and survival is at the end of that balance. So, therefore, when you see a statistic where somebody just casually throws it out there and says well, you know, this has to do with your, you know, choosing a bad job or having a bad boss or being in a bad relationship, None of that shit matters to your survival brain. Those are all things that you acquiesce, You've attributed that.

Brian Marren:

Yeah, you've attributed that value to it. Yeah.

Greg Williams:

So don't think that those things are going to be in the way of your survival. When it comes down to you, you will save you before you save any other member of your family, and that's why it's so remarkable and we give the Congressional Medal of Honor to a soldier that saw that the situation went sideways and now there's a grenade, and put themselves on top of that grenade to save everybody else. Because it's not normal, brian. It is not clinically normal.

Brian Marren:

And that's another point of how you can sort of those specific cases where you can override your natural instinct through training or through that. I mean, that takes a long time and it can take. You know, you're you, you you're putting in that situation, you're putting, you're sacrificing your life, so you're overriding your limbic system in a sense for the for the almost unheard of thing else for something, but, but it's for.

Brian Marren:

but if you think about it, it's not really overriding your instincts because it goes back to survival of the species, right? So you're saying I'm sacrificing myself for the good of the rest of the people in this? Group so that's why you're actually able to do that is, you can say I can do that because I, this group of people, will continue, uh, the fight and I will be gone. This fight is worth, it will survive, exactly, exactly. And, brian, let me, let me, let me ask you that those are rare, those are very rare.

Greg Williams:

It's so rare that it's remarkable and that's why we give awards for it. Brian, you went through the same thing that all soldiers sailors, marines, airmen, national Guard, coast Guard. You went through an induction station, then you went to basic training, went to basic training, then you went to advanced individual training, then you went to even more specialized training, then you did a workup before you went to combat, then you went to combat and then you learned in combat. You came back, you went through a routine again to build up for the next. Okay.

Greg Williams:

So everybody out there that hears my voice, that's a cycle. So as you went through that cycle, you encountered other people that were great stateside man. They could throw the grenade, they could do the bayonet drill. They knew all the men on the range with the saw. They were just cutting down targets. Did you ever see somebody that was really, really good stateside, but now you're in a combat zone and they had no idea what to do and you had to grab them by the chin strap and pull them out of danger? Has that ever happened to you?

Brian Marren:

Of course, Of course, of course, yeah, and vice versa as well.

Greg Williams:

Yes, of course it is. Of course it is. You had people that sucked in training, that were the hero out on the battle space. Why does that happen? Because we still haven't been able to tap into the difference between our survival instincts and our neocortex. We continue to try to outthink the problem, but we don't understand that even though training is really really good, the real event will change us dramatically and in some people they just won't function well. Some people will grab the gun instead of the taser, some people will hang onto the steering wheel and it'll kill them.

Greg Williams:

And you know what, brian? I hate to say it, but that again is going back to the survival of the fittest. If you make the wrong choice in those circumstances, you may still have heroic mindset in your prefrontal cortex, but I'll tell you that your instinctive brain is screaming at you let go run, hide, save up your energy for another day. So we have to crack the code as humans. And we still have it. Look, we've cracked the codes on some stuff Like OSHA. What a brilliant thing. Okay, because it's likely that you're going to get in an industrial accident. If you don't have these safeguards, it's likely you're not going to survive getting hit in the head with a hammer dropped off the roof from the roofer that it slipped out of his belt. Those are brilliant things.

Greg Williams:

What do we got with the national aerospace? The people that investigate plane accidents? Okay, I love the way they do it. What do they do, brian NTSB? They go back in and they take a whole hanger and they recreate everything. They put the belt buckle back where it was. They want to understand everything about it. Okay, you know what we haven't done that to. We haven't done that to HR courts, corrections, prisons. Those are the places that we need this type of intervention to understand the difference between instinct and intuition and training. And we haven't cracked it. Are we on the way yet? But guess what? There's a lot of people dying. There's a lot of people pointing to things that don't matter and saying those things are specifically the cause.

Brian Marren:

That that's. That's the issue. Is we conflate, um, some of those, we, we conflate the issues, we conflate contributing factors with proximate cause. We, we don't fully understand why these things occur. So therefore, you know, without a understanding of what really the problem is, or what to address, then you're never going to address it correctly. So we come up with ways that are seemingly good, or certainly well-intentioned, but seemingly good things to have, and it ends up not working.

Brian Marren:

That's where you know, you sort of get that presumed capability, but and that's why we're discussing this instinct versus intuition, because you know there's certain factors at play, and we, because we even get into it, people like why do you guys talk about physics? Sometimes it's like look like, if you're walking along a hill or a sloped, you know ground, you're naturally going to start to go downhill and even if you're not thinking about it, even if you're just going about focusing on what you're doing, meaning there's certain elements that are at play here that you cannot, if you're not aware of, you're going to attribute your problems to something that, like you just said, doesn't matter or is inconsequential, or wouldn't have mattered had you known that. And this is why we're always trying to get people to wind the tape back on a lot of different issues. It's like, well, hang on, there's a whole world, but but everyone focuses on whatever that flashpoint was. It would be like, you know, you know your example of the, the plane crash and the ntsb going like, well, it was, you know, pilot error. It's like, okay, well, what, what was the error? It's not just exactly pilot error, it's it's what was it? Because, then, what they do is they go well, see, we're training these people incorrectly. They didn't. They made this choice in that manner because they truly believe that was the right thing to do. However, that was the wrong thing to do. But you know what? That's exactly what they were we trained them to do.

Brian Marren:

So we actually have to go back here when they're first learning to fly and fix that portion of it, so that this doesn't happen again. Not fix the plane, not fix the the B. Have it be able to to, you know, handle higher level G's in a dive. No, no, it's, it's, it's this. Back here. Those things have to do with physics. Here's where the human went wrong and that's what we can correct.

Brian Marren:

And if we we understand the interplay between these two, I think it gets us better at making it well, at least at seeing and identifying what the potential problems are, and now getting to address them becomes just as complicated as getting to know what they are, because we consistently do that incorrectly sometimes, sometimes. So it's it's the these, these things playing back and forth, the reason why we we get into the. It's not really a semantic argument, it's a, it's an under. I have to understand these situations. It's not about well, don't use that word, use this word, cause the problem is those go, those arguments are usually on something where it doesn't matter where, where this one is really important, like I, don you know it's an internal thing.

Brian Marren:

You want to make a name for yourself by coining a phrase right, come on yeah and and and a lot of that isn't as important as what people think is is. And this is again kind of answering a lot of the questions we get about why we get so heavily into how the brain works and why we keep reiterating certain things about, like you know, even when it comes to like functional field of view and orientation, why certain body language doesn't matter because there's there's other factors at play. It's like, look, if I, if I get these parts right, everything after that will become much easier and I don't need to spend as much time on that stuff. If I focus on what is instinctually every human being likely to do in this given situation. And so when I keep it vanilla like that and say any person in this situation, it allows me to see it a little bit clearer. Right, instinctually, you even brought up someone getting nervous when they get pulled over. It's like, well, that could be for a number of different reasons.

Brian Marren:

If I'm running late for work and I've been late like three times in the last month and now those reds and blues come on, I'm not just thinking about yeah, look, I've got nothing wrong in the car. I was maybe doing a few miles an hour over the speed limit. This isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but instinctually that kicks in and now I'm going. I Yep, but instinctually that kicks in, and now I'm going. I'm going to lose my job or I'm going to be late. I'm going to lose my job, then I'm going to lose my house and I'm going to lose my family Then. So now it's a fight for survival at that point.

Brian Marren:

That's where I'm at in my head, it's that instinct is starting to kick in. So those two things influence each other, right? The intuition and the instinct. It's two. One can drive one, one can drive the other, and so but we always like to start with that what's the lowest common denominator? The lowest common denominator is always biology, physiology and neuroscience. That's it. It's your subjective experience in life, and your training is ancillary to these mechanisms and these cognitive processes that are at play. And that's the most important thing to focus on, because I think there's the least amount of understanding, because we want to attribute our actions to something. One. When I get something right, well, it was because of me, it was my decisions.

Greg Williams:

I made.

Brian Marren:

And if I get something wrong, it was someone else's fault or it was this, it was the issue it was raining out. You know, I mean like and and that's that's part of the interplay, but that's that's who we are as human beings, I think. So that's kind of like. My big, big takeaways and points on this was, was, was just that is that I have to know where that sort of line is between instinct and intuition. I have to know how they interplay with one another, because I think it just gives a better understanding of anything that's going on, whatever the situation is. I mean, I'm dealing with some family stuff right now and and you know I get all kinds of range of responses from people and what they say and do and even I, even though I know these situations and have experience, I have to sit down not, not, not get pissed off when someone says something, because they're all right, they're processing it in this way and this is where they're at in their headspace and they're thinking about this instinctually and it's manifesting itself in this manner.

Brian Marren:

They don't really mean it is in the way because I have a larger sort of you know, more experience to draw from and a better understanding of the situation than some of the people involved. So I really know how these things work, where they're just sort of instinctively responding to something that's a nonstandard observation for them. And then so I have to sit there and even though you know, I know all of those things, it's still horribly frustrating and I get pissed off because I'm going like that's not how this works, it's not what this is, it's not this, but that's instinctually how they are. So, um, I don't know, gary, this is kind of we, we, we. We covered a lot in here, so I want to kind of throw to you for sort of last sort of final thoughts.

Greg Williams:

If you're a trainer, if you're a leader, if you're a boss, if you're a coach, a mentor or a friend, what you need to do is understand how the anxiety can build up in a human For example, brian's example of the traffic stop. So if we know that, if I go up there, I can de-escalate the situation and de-escalation has been around a long time. I'm not answering this local shit, if I can say hey, the reason I stopped you, your taillights are out in the back. This will only take a minute. How are you today? I can completely change what's going on in your head from holy shit, I'm going to be late for work and all that. There's a million different ways to do that. But when's the last time you rehearsed that with a mentor? When's the last time you, as an FTO, had a number of people sit in that role and go? What would you say? Can we rehearse that? And that's the same thing about testifying. That's the same thing about knocking on the door and asking somebody for permission to do something HR, that's the same way that you're going to get to the real nut of the issue, rather than all the peripherals that are going on.

Greg Williams:

And, brian, we don't train to that. If we're a chief of police, I should be watching my people from an unmarked car how they drive during non-stress situations to understand how well they understand their community. Are they running stop signs? Are they going too fast for the speed limit? Are they setting a good example? All of those things, brian. That's where instinct meets intuition and that's how we're going to give ourselves a report card. Because if we don't, if we don't modify training to include the cognitive elements, if we don't understand the emotions that go along with the instinctive imperatives that we have, what we're going to do is we're going to sell ourselves short and we're going to default to putting bullets on a target or coming up with a ballistic shield. All those things.

Greg Williams:

Look at the MRAP, brian. The MRAP is a huge bank vault. Why? Because that was our answer to IEDs not finding the emplacer or going after the builder. My thing to you is science should always lead the way, and humans are simpler to figure out than you think they are. They're much more complex in some ways, right, but if we add just an element of rehearsal and training and anticipation to our daily routine on things that matter to people street contact, traffic stop. Hey listen, I know your instinct is to flee from me, don't? I only want to tell you this one thing before we get there's a million ways that you can deescalate that situation, and training is the key. Training and education go hand in hand, but training goes further, because training continues to put you in situations where you can rehearse those. So when it happens for the first time in real life, you're not scared shitless and you don't go back to your instincts and just start clubbing people like baby harp seals.

Brian Marren:

Yeah, I think, I think that's uh, the the baby, baby seals is a good, good way.

Greg Williams:

Everybody's got that image, come on.

Brian Marren:

So so, uh, yeah, I, I think you know when that, that that sort of nexus of when instinct meets intuition is is um, it's, it's an, it's a. It's a complex interplay and I like how you said there, humans are simpler than we think sometimes, even though there are a lot of complex factors and they can get crazy. But that's that's how we say. I mean, that's what I always tell people about. Even the podcast it's. We talk about the complexity and the simplicity of human behavior. I mean because that's how it is and so well, you know, if you're still listening at this point, reach out with any other questions. You know we have the Patreon site as well, that you can, and of course, we appreciate everyone listening and sharing this stuff with your friends. It's how we grow. And apparently you know, if you go to get get a generator, use discount code gunnison for an extra 10 exactly.

Greg Williams:

Make sure you tell them.

Brian Marren:

Greg sent you make sure you tell them greg sent you so I do that nowhere.

Greg Williams:

Yeah, thank you. That's a good survival instinct, brian.

Brian Marren:

Yeah, I don't Do you know Greg Williams? No, who, who.

Greg Williams:

That's not me. I got to do that in my own town, so I get it.

Brian Marren:

Yeah, oh, I know, I know, hey, you're not one of those people here with Greg, are you? Who's that? Oh, never mind.

Greg Williams:

Much safer that way, Brian.

Brian Marren:

All right. Well, we thank everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior. That's all for today, folks. Thank you so much for tuning in. We do appreciate it. If you'd like more information or deeper dive on anything that we talked about, you can always sign up at our Patreon site or reach out to us at the humanbehaviorpodcast at gmailcom.

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