Praise for Trading from Your Gut

Emotion Versus Intuition
One misconception people have about right-brain-dominant
people is that they use emotion as the basis for their decision mak-
ing. They think that somehow these people are relying on a more
primitive and, therefore, inferior process for making decisions. This
bias against right-brain-dominant thinking comes from the mistaken
belief that right-brain thinking is based on emotions and is therefore
somehow less rational than left-brain thinking.
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Intuition is profoundly logical; it’s just logic of a
different sort that is communicated via body sensation
and feeling instead of conscious rationale.
Juan Fangio didn’t have a bias against his intuition; he knew to
trust it. If you want to be a master trader, you need to learn to trust
your intuition, too. In this chapter, I show how intuition is not magi-
cal, but simply uses a different mechanism for arriving at its
answers. George Soros’s back pain might appear supernatural, but it
is not—it’s simply his body’s way of communicating intuition. This
intuition is profoundly logical; it’s just logic of a different sort that is
communicated via body sensation and feeling instead of conscious
rationale.
Distinguishing between emotional feelings and intuition that
comes from the right brain is often difficult. In English, the word
feeling is used to describe both concepts: intuitive responses for
which no conscious logical basis exists, and the more primitive,
purely emotional responses. One reason is that both feelings and
intuition make their presence known through the same part of the
brain. Often the output of the logical process of the right brain
comes to our conscious thought through the emotional center of the
brain, the limbic system.
American physician and neuroscientist Paul MacLean first pro-
posed the idea that the human brain is a triune brain, meaning that
it is divided into three separate sections. He called the first section
the R-Complex, also sometimes called the reptilian brain. It con-
sists of the brain stem and cerebellum. The reptilian brain controls
muscles, balance, and autonomic functions such as breathing and
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heartbeats. It is responsible for instinctive survival behaviors and
reacts directly to certain stimuli.
MacLean called the second section the limbic system, also
sometimes called the paleo-mammalian brain (Latin for “ancient
mammal brain”). This section consists of a large number of smaller
organs that are situated around the brain stem, including the