That Spidey-Sense Tingle
What our visceral recoil—to everything from politics to AI—is trying to tell us.
The Feeling Before the Word
It starts as a feeling, before it has a name.
A disturbance.
You’re scrolling or reading, and something shifts in your body.
It’s a tightening in your gut, a subtle souring.
You might feel an involuntary urge to physically pull back.
It’s a pre-verbal, visceral sense of wrongness.
An aversion.
This raw sensation is the crucial data.
It’s only a moment later that our mind rushes in to interpret this bodily recoil, to give it a name.
And the name we often give it is disgust.
That visceral pull—and how we translate it—is what I want to explore.
Because understanding how that felt sense shapes our behaviour before we even realise it is one of the most critical skills we can cultivate right now.
The Body’s Gatekeeper
That initial, visceral revulsion is our evolutionary hardware in action. As a feature in The New York Times Magazine puts it, the primal emotion we call disgust is one of the key forces that "define — and explain — humanity.”
It’s our ‘behavioural immune system’, the ancient guardian designed to protect the body from contaminants.
The felt sense of revulsion is the alarm bell, the body screaming "potential poison!" long before the conscious mind has time to analyse the situation.
When the Gatekeeper Goes Rogue
And here is where it gets complicated.
That same visceral pull has been co-opted to protect our social and moral selves.
The work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is interesting here, showing how we apply the logic of physical contamination to the moral sphere.
We feel that same gut-level revulsion in response to a "filthy" idea or a "rotten" character.
Our body sends the same alarm signals.
Our mind, using the circuitry it knows best, interprets that visceral ick as moral disgust.
The Uncanny Contaminant
Have you felt it recently?
A new texture to this disturbance.
It’s that "spidey-sense" you get when reading an email that’s a little too slick, seeing art that’s a little too perfect, or encountering a comment that is grammatically flawless but utterly soulless.
It’s our internal alarm bell ringing in the face of something generated not by a human, but by AI.
This, too, is a form of visceral recoil.
It isn't a moral judgment, but a reaction to a new kind of contaminant: inauthenticity ( really don’t like that word but I’m struggling to find anything else, so it will do for now - let me know if you think of something better).
The felt sense is one of wrongness, of a counterfeit trying to pass as genuine.
It’s the digital equivalent of seeing a person with a fixed, unblinking smile—it sets off our deepest pattern-recognition systems that something is profoundly off.
This spidey-sense seems to be firing more and more lately.
And it makes me wonder: how is this constant, low-grade revulsion to inauthenticity shaping our behaviour?
Does it make us more cynical online?
More tired?
Does the feeling spill over into our real lives, making us crave genuine, messy human connection more intensely, or perhaps making us more suspicious of human interactions that feel too polished or performative?
Notes on Tuning In to the Visceral
If the raw, felt sense is what truly drives our behaviour—whether from moral outrage or uncanny AI—then our work is not to suppress the emotion, but to get closer to the sensation itself.
• Notice the sensation before the story. The next time it happens, pause. Before your mind labels the person "disgusting" or the text "AI," just notice the physical feeling. The tightening, the lurch, the urge to pull away. In the space between the raw sensation and the label, that's where your power and agency lie.
• Ask the sensation: What is your source? Gently interrogate the feeling. Is this visceral recoil about a genuine physical threat? A symbolic threat to my worldview? Or is it a reaction to a perceived lack of authenticity? Differentiating the source is a crucial step.
• Question the scale of the recoil. Acknowledge the feeling, and then ask: Is the intensity of this visceral reaction proportional to the actual event? Or has the alarm bell been amplified by outside forces, or by its novelty? Who, or what, benefits from my feeling this powerful urge to reject?
• Challenge the distance it creates. The felt sense wants to create space. Your conscious self can choose to challenge that impulse. This isn’t about condoning harm or accepting fake content as real. It’s about resisting the powerful, bodily urge to dehumanise or dismiss out of hand. It is a choice to lean into the complexity rather than recoil into the false certainty of revulsion.
Before it is a named emotion, disgust is a felt sense.
By learning to tune into that visceral experience—to understand it, question it, and get to know it—we can begin to see how it shapes our world.
We can move from being unconsciously driven by it to consciously working with it.
And in doing so, we take back a crucial part of ourselves.