Hello Professor! Hope you are well. 

Briefly, I wanted to reach out to bring up an issue that you brought up in class. Last week, you told that story of your life and mentioned that as people, we should never trust our guts because they can never be trusted. I wanted to contest the point a little, and hope you can forgive me for respectfully disagreeing. 

First I want to mention the Ted Talk we talked about yesterday. The dementia patient study revealed that even when our brains (the logical part of them at least) are essentially non-existent, we know intuitively which paintings make us happier. To me this is evidence that the ‘gut’ can increase happiness in ways that our logical mind cannot. Despite there being no knowledge or memory of the paintings, the patients knew which would make them happier. 

There is evidence of this concept in a lot of other research. Namely, a notion that Dan Gilbert himself actually studied: affective forecasting. His research (and the research of many, many other academics) has proven again and again that humans are notoriously bad at predicting what makes us happy. That means that simply ‘thinking’ and ‘logicking’ our way into happiness does not actually get us there. 

This is not to argue that the gut is inherently good or that the mind is inherently bad. It is just to argue that both the logical mind and our intuition are both good and bad, and they both need to be trained, trusted, and used to be effective. 

This, I think, is the premise of the Happiness Hypothesis. It is not to say that one system is inherently bad or need to be ‘controlled,’ it is that both are flawed, but both are valuable. Here is a quote from the man himself: “If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.” Once again, we see this theme: reasoning is not enough. 

Another argument in favor of the ‘gut’ is that time and time again, it will know better than our logical mind does. In incredibly abusive relationships, for example, individuals’ logical minds are completely taken over as if the love is a sort of addiction. Though their gut tells them to leave, their minds are consumed with thoughts like “nobody else will love me, I need to stay, etc.” Sometimes, our gut keeps us alive and safe though I know this is not always the case. 

The gut, or our intuition, is also key to creative thinking and innovation. When Newton saw an apple fall, one could argue that he felt like there was a reason why. He asked the right questions, not knowing where he was headed to, and developed some fundamental laws of modern science.

His logical mind likely told him over and over again, as so many had believed before him, that there was no special reason that the apple falls. It just did. 

I am sorry that this email is long-winded. I would be happy to discuss this with you more. But for now, I would like to add this. I believe it’s dangerous to tell college students that their gut feelings are inherently bad and wrong. For one, as I hope I have shown, this is just not the case. It’s also, I believe, (and I am no expert, forgive me) that it is a misrepresentation of the readings we’ve done for this class. But most importantly, it’s a limiting idea that will keep people from learning the value of both systems of thinking, and using both to live a truly fulfilling, rewarding, loving, and happy life. 

May you learn to listen to your gut (sometimes) 🙂

Thanks for reading, 

Mason Scurry