Artificial Intuition is “Computational Gut Feeling” – an Emergency Decision System

Gut feeling — also known as intuition, a hunch, or an instinct — is a sudden, often strong, conviction or sense about something without conscious reasoning or clear evidence. It’s a subconscious form of intelligence that draws on past experiences, patterns, emotions, and environmental cues your brain has registered but not fully processed at a conscious level.

Gut feeling is fast and automatic. It arises quickly, often before you have time to think logically. It often comes with a physical sensation — a “knot in your stomach,” a sense of dread, or a feeling of lightness/excitement. Gut feeling is your brain’s way of giving you a rapid, synthesized read based on everything it knows but hasn’t put into words. It’s a powerful tool when balanced with reason, especially in complex, time-sensitive, or human-centered situations.

How do you cast this in the language of mathematics? How can you “compute gut feeling”? The key is complexity. Gut feeling often arises in response to perceived complexity, especially when that complexity overwhelms conscious reasoning. The relationship is dynamic:

High complexity → More reliance on intuition
When a situation has too many variables, unknowns, or moving parts for your analytical mind to process, your brain defaults to pattern-recognition shortcuts (intuition) to make a decision.
Gut feeling as a compression algorithm
It’s your brain’s way of saying: “I can’t consciously analyze all this, but my subconscious detects a pattern — here’s the output: proceed with caution / go for it.”

Rapidly rising complexity is one of the key triggers which make one switch to intuition. Working memory can only hold ~7±2 items at once. Beyond that, complexity spills over — your mind switches to heuristic processing, which feels like intuition. Complexity often means interconnected patterns (cause-effect chains, social dynamics, system behaviors). Your subconscious integrates these patterns faster than logic can untangle them — the “gut feeling” is the integrated signal.

The perception of rising complexity is the key. It’s not just complexity, but the rate of change in complexity that heightens intuition’s role. Increasing complexity often means novel situations with no real precedent. When complexity ramps up suddenly you hit the The “Too-Much-Too-Fast” phenomenon: Information overload leads to analytical paralysis and gut feeling becomes the emergency decision system. This explains why people in crises (ER doctors, soldiers, traders during crashes) rely heavily on intuition — complexity outpaces analysis. Increasing complexity doesn’t just trigger gut feeling — it transforms it from a background whisper to a primary guidance system. The sensation of “too much going on” is literally your cognitive limits being reached, forcing a shift from conscious analysis to subconscious integration.

This is precisely what QCM (Quantitative Complexity Management) technology does. It powers our Artificial Intuition to provide two fundamental pieces of information:

It monitors constantly the complexity of your critical assets and warns of rapid rate changes in complexity. In essence, it is an early-warning system.
It identifies the sources of rapid complexity rate change, indicating where to prioritize in order to better face the situation.

When facing novel, unprecedented, unusual and highly complex situations that arise suddenly, gut feeling is the only way forward. Especially when a decision must be made, in scenarios of immediate threats and high-stake contexts. Evidently, human emotion-driven gut feeling may not be the best option. This is why we have developed a science-based version thereof.

Want to try it?