I knew intuitively when the Bush House receptionist said, “Take a seat please”, that I would be forgotten. Intuition tells me that being invited to take a seat, though punctual, is a way of being ignored.

But I sat obediently for 20 minutes, then marched back to the desk. I was right: no message had reached Dr Mark Lythgoe, whose radio programme on intuition I had come to discuss. How would he see my hunch? Was it intuition, or was it experience, from years of dealing with incompetence at reception desks? He decided that I had exercised “informed intuition”: anticipation based on the wisdom of long experience.

Dr Lythgoe, 44, a neuroscientist who makes professional choices based on real scientific information such as brain scans, began his research with a healthy scepticism. Was intuition anything more than a glorified guess, backed by commonsense? His first self-inflicted intuition test was at Walthamstow greyhound stadium, where he bet £2 on a dog named Millie Moo to win: he had a good feeling about Millie Moo. But Millie Moo lost. “If gamblers win,” he says, “it’s only because they have a mathematical system. Gamblers at racecourses study form. Intuition can’t be relied on.”

Of much more general application is the most famous gut feeling of all, the one that rules our hearts. Is love at first sight intuitive? Not yet having found his soulmate, Dr Lythgoe tested his instincts by speed-dating: he sat in a Fulham pub with 14 other lonely hearts, conducting three-minute interviews with 15 women. “But I didn’t need three minutes,” he tells me. “Within three seconds I had picked out a girl called Sarah as the only one I fancied.”

Just as we instantly register, and respond to, the emotion on a friend’s face, people (women especially) make up their minds in a fraction of a second about whom they trust. But Dr Lythgoe knows, as a scientist, that “the initial dopamine physical attraction is not sustainable. It lasts two to three years. Then it changes. Physical attraction can’t underpin all areas of the relationship. The brain lights up, but it starts to wane as people move into an attachment phase, when another chemical kicks in.” He cites the example of the prairie vole, which expresses a chemical that makes him mate for life.

For his radio programme he conducted an experiment in jam-tasting at a farmers’ market, applying two kinds of judgment: a snap decision first, followed by rational consideration of the three jars of jam. “Using intuition only, I went for jam C. Next time, applying a slow appreciation of colour, consistency, texture, I realised I had taken against one jam for being the same red as the carpet in my flat, and I hate that flat. When we involve our feelings and associations in our deliberations, these obscure our real thoughts. When I used only my intuition, I got the same result as the food expert.”

Jam is of tangential interest compared with how important intuition might be in police investigations, in jury verdicts (how do jurors feel when, having pronounced someone not guilty, they learn of previous convictions?), in house-buying, in business investment, in picking an employee or – even more difficult – deciding whether to accept a job offer from an employer you don’t instinctively like. And what about the life-or-death arena of health? The discovery that intuition is unreliable in the medical profession is as surprising to Dr Lythgoe as it is alarming to all of us. “Doctors who use scientific evidence, as opposed to their intuitive powers, are more likely to come up with the correct answers,” he tells me.

He reminds us that had we been alive 600 years ago we might have watched the sun rise and set and concluded that the sun travelled round the earth. “Not until Galileo came along did we know we were not the centre of the universe. The vast majority of science is counter-intuitive, an unnatural way of thinking.

“If I toss a coin and it comes up heads four times, what’s more likely next?” Tails, I say, with a doomy instinct about being wrong. “Tails is the Gamblers’ Fallacy. It is 50/50, of course, the same as it always is. That is expertise. The more expertise or experience you have, the better you can intuit. Experience is the backbone. Football coaches who must decide how to beat the other team are a good example of learned intuition.”

Dr Lythgoe is personally more open to his own intuition now that his expertise has improved. “It’s now become part of my armoury. I have always used it in rock-climbing. It’s a matter of life or death for me. I reach out for a rock and rely on my intuition to judge its dependability – operating on autopilo: but that’s now informed by years of climbing experience.”

Inside Intuition, Radio 4, Friday, 11am

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