^{Debbie agrees. She often tells others to pay more attention to the hairs on the back of their neck.}

https://www.forbes.com/sites/liendepau/2026/09/01/what-neuroscience-says-about-gut-feelings-and-bad-calls/

QuoteNeuroscientist 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.

It's very important to pay attention to this as part of situational awareness.

One of my most recommended/gifted books is Gavin De Becker, The Gift of Fear (1997).

One of the central premises is that our brain working in the background is often piecing together threats faster than we can rationally process the information and that a fear signal is often logical (correct conclusion based on evidence) while not being rational (a process of reasoning stepwise from data to conclusion).