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There is very good book on this topic "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Instincts can be very misleading sometimes.

Research trumps all :)

The mechanism of instinct has emerged from the evolutionary process to provide a survival and reproduction advantage over others. Instinct most certainly is an advantage for species (may be just random path-dependent mutation), not for the individual. Thus we shouldn't trust on instinct alone to find an optimal solution for sense/meaning problem.

That's my feeling too. We have lots of famous examples of intuitive, breakthrough, "a-ha" moments by great inventors, so we use that for inspiration.

However, there have been billions of bad-instinct decisions as well, ranging from "should have zigged instead of zagged" while driving a fast car around a curve to Napoleon invading Russia.

Instinct is certainly handy and much faster than reason.

But, if instinct trumped logic as the author suggests, humans wouldn't be at the top of the food chain and driving cars.