Everything came together including previous experience, memories, brain signals, and emotion to produce that churning in the stomach that told them, in an instant, to go. Those who hesitated and waited for more input signals, unfortunately, perished. If you follow that leap of faith into intuition and gut feeling, then you realize that their brains had "learned" that it didn't need layers of data to reach a decision. It had learned, through previous intuitions and/or gut feelings that it had could rely on those feelings.

Learning and the Mind-Body Connection

Dr. John Ratey, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, noted that "neurons that fire together, wire together." That, he says, is that way we learn. Enough said? Not hardly. Ratey calls two natural brain chemicals -- nerve growth factor (NGF) and brain-derived neuroropic factor (BDNF) -- "Miracle Gro for the brain" (Weiss, 2001, p. 1). When we are in...
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