A snap decision that turns out right gets called instinct. The same snap decision gone wrong gets called recklessness. Neuroscience has spent three decades mapping what actually happens in the body before we say yes or no to a decision, and the mechanism is more precise than most leadership advice gives it credit for.

The Body Keeps the Score Before the Mind Does

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio ’s somatic marker hypothesis, developed in the 1990s and tested repeatedly since, states that the body encodes the outcomes of past emotional experiences into physiological signals: a tightening chest, a drop in the stomach, a flush of warmth.

These signals arrive in our consciousness ahead of any deliberate analysis our mind makes. They bias the decision before we have finished reasoning it through. That fast, pre-verbal nudge is what people call a gut feeling.

The evidence for this comes from the Iowa Gambling Task, a card game used in Damasio’s lab. Participants choose from decks of cards with different risk profiles. Some participants started generating stress responses to the risky decks before they could consciously explain why those decks were worse. Their bodies flagged the danger before their reasoning caught up.

Other participants, with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (the region that integrates those bodily signals into decision-making) kept picking from the bad decks, even after they could explain that the decks were bad.

Knowing things and feeling things turned out to be running an separate systems. And the feeling system usually gets there first.

Why Business Owners Feel This More Than Most

Business owners have to take an enormous amount of decisions with incomplete information: who to hire or fire, when to raise money, whether to trust a business partner, when to walk away from a deal .

Each of those decisions leaves a somatic trace.

Over years of running a business, that trace accumulates into a genuinely useful internal database. This is why experienced business owners often sense a bad hire in the first meeting or a bad deal in the first conversation, well before they can articulate the specific red flag.

Yet, business owners ignore their gut feeling when they make high-stakes calls. Not because their gut feelings are wrong. It’s because it can’t be defended in a boardroom. A feeling that can’t be backed by a spreadsheet gets overridden. Only to realize later that the hesitation was an accurate read.

Training the Gut Feelings Instead of Ignoring It

The takeaway from Damasio’s research is not to replace rational analysis with instinct and gut feeling. The goal is integration. Before a high-stakes call, it helps to separately name what the analysis says and what your gut says, rather than letting the loudest voice in the room (or in your head) take over completely.

When rational analysis and gut feeling disagree, that disagreement itself is information worth sitting with, rather than resolving immediately in favor of whichever felt more comfortable to admit.

It also helps to build a habit of logging decisions and outcomes. You can easily review which gut feelings paid off and which didn’t, so you can calibrate the signal over time. A track record makes clear how reliable your combined decision making process is becoming.

The decisions that quietly define your business results, like who to trust, when to move, when to wait,… rarely come with clean data. Business owners who treat their gut feeling as noise that needs to be overridden, are discarding a signal that neuroscience has spent decades researching. The decision making edge belongs to whoever learns to read both systems at once.