Oddbean new post about | logout
 It sounds similar. One of the stories I heard is about a woman that had a gut feeling, which was processed by her unconscious mind, about a strange man trying to help her take groceries up to her apartment. She didn’t know why she felt unsafe but she ignored it. He ended up raping her. It turns out there were a lot of red flags that her unconscious mind processed to be dangerous. One was that she’d never seen him before in that building so he didn’t actually live there. The other was that the doors locked upon entering the building so there was no way he could get in unless he was following her very closely. Another sign was that he seemed to know where she was when he talked to her while she didn’t know where he was, meaning that he was following her sneakily. He also came off as dangerous. We don’t necessarily think about pheromones but we definitely respond to them instinctively and her unconscious mind probably sensed that his cortisol was elevated. She ignored all those red flags by telling herself that she’s being paranoid. 
 Yes, exactly. I thought you were referring to all of the erroneous information that doesn’t make it through filters. But yeah our survival brain is privy to all kinds of info that our conscious mind isn’t. It just computes all of it and gives us the conclusion most apt for survival. Pure signal. 

People override that signal at their own peril.