This feature was first published in September 2024 in My Mensa Weekly, our exclusive newsletter for Mensa members. Find out more about becoming a Mensa member here.
Words: Joanna Cummings
Our brains have a hidden alarm system for detecting and responding to threats, but how does it work and how can it protect us?
Have you ever walked into a room and suddenly felt uneasy, even though nothing seems amiss? This silent, subconscious alert is your brain’s forewarning system kicking in, designed to protect you before your conscious mind even registers the threat. It gives us the power to act before disaster strikes, whether on a personal level – being able to tell that another person is lying to us, for example – or on a much bigger scale, allowing societies to detect early signals of economic crashes, security breaches or environmental disasters.
The concept of forewarning is often conflated with ‘intuition’, or a ‘gut feeling’, and is essentially our ability to understand or know something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning. Our ability to detect potential danger is largely governed by the amygdala, a part of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly fear and threat detection.
It uses two pathways: the ‘low road’, where sensory information is sent directly from the ear to the thalamus to the amygdala, enabling instant reactions to danger in around a fiftieth of a second. The ‘high road’ takes a longer route (a fifth of a second) via the cortex, providing more detailed information about the ‘threat’ and allowing us to assess it consciously. If you’ve ever been convinced there’s an intruder in your hallway only to feel stupid when you discover it’s an overcoat on the coat rack – that’s the conscious mind catching up with the subconscious.
The hippocampus also has a part to play; stored memories of past dangers trigger these warning signals, helping the brain to recognise similar patterns in new situations and informing how we behave. The hypothalamus then regulates the body’s stress response and prepares us to respond physically to a perceived threat by controlling the release of stress hormones like cortisol. This is when we would experience the well-known ‘fight, flight, freeze or fawn’.
It is not always to be trusted, however. Neuroscientist Joel Pearson is keen to distinguish between true intuition – the “learned, positive use of unconscious information for better decisions or actions” – and what he calls ‘misintuition’, informed by cognitive bias, paranoia and our inability to accurately judge probability. He has devised an acronym for the five rules of understanding and trusting our instincts: SMILE.
S stands for self-awareness, recognising how our sense of forewarning can be compromised by our emotions. M is for mastery, or learning to use your intuition. I stands for impulses, which tend to be more reactive to immediate external stimuli – such as lashing out in an argument. L is for low probability; we might fear shark attacks when, in fact, we’re more likely to be killed by a champagne cork. Finally, E is for environment. Pearson says our intuition can only really be trusted in familiar contexts; he uses the example of Steve Jobs, who relied on his ‘gut’ when pitching new Apple products, but who ignored his intuition when needing cancer treatment.
Of course, the importance of paying attention to early signals is not restricted to our personal experiences – forewarning plays a crucial role in addressing global issues, such as cybersecurity, crime or the economy. Perhaps one of the most famous examples is the ‘Y2K bug’, where experts warned that computer systems could malfunction when year digits changed from 1999 to 2000. Thankfully, governments took the warnings seriously and prevented a catastrophe by spending months upgrading software and computer systems.
Forewarning also plays a role in military conflicts, through reconnaissance, intercepted communications or satellite imagery. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, US intelligence discovered that Soviet missile sites were being constructed in Cuba, allowing President Kennedy to impose a naval blockade and allow time for diplomatic efforts – averting a nuclear conflict. In the daily fight against crime, intelligence gathering such as surveillance or community reports can help the police to anticipate threats and mitigate risks, sometimes allowing them to prevent crime before it escalates.
Artificial Intelligence has taken ‘forewarning’ to an even more effective level. With its ability to analyse huge amounts of data and detect anomalies or patterns that the human brain simply cannot, AI has made a vast difference to early warning systems in many areas, from finance to healthcare to disaster management. Of course, while AI provides powerful tools for enhancing our predictive capabilities, its effectiveness is contingent upon the quality of data and the interpretative skills of its users – in other words, it is only by combining AI tools with human insight and experience that we can become truly effective at protecting ourselves from danger.
Discover more about Joel Pearson’s research and some surprising insights about the power of the subconscious mind.
