Brain. Participants initially favoured the dodgy deck for its potential to give greater wins, but after just 10 plays their palms began to sweat and they unwittingly began choosing cards from the good decks. Despite this, they played 50 hands before they had a 'hunch' that something was up. Participants only became clear that the game was rigged and consciously cottoned on to the scam after 80 cards. The discrepancy highlights how many of us are clearly a smidge slow on the uptake, but also how our bodies are a lot smarter than we often give them credit for. Underlying this is the idea that the more we're aware of our gut instinct, the more we can tap into a whole system of inherent intelligence beyond our brains.

Accessing and developing this forms the foundation for Google's most popular training course, Search Inside Yourself (SIY). The course fills up in 60 seconds, has a waiting list of 500 and, last month, it came to Australia for the first time. The "radical" course, unusual for a tech company stereotypically focused on analytics not emotions, encourages an integrative approach to intelligence. “We need an expert,” the course's creator, Chade-Meng Tan told one group taking the course. “That expert is you. This class is to help you discover what you already know.” Discovering what we already know involves attention training, along with developing self-awareness and useful mental habits. For instance learning to stop, breathe, notice, reflect and respond instead of reacting to situations we face in life and at work.

"Why is this important," asks one of the Sydney presenters, business consultant Linda Curtis. "Our answer is that we live in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. "It's a volatile environment, things happen very quickly and on a very large scale... "Then there is the process of being a human being [within this VUCA environment]." The idea is that we'll become more resilient in increasingly stressful workplaces as well as better leaders and listeners with an enhanced sense of wellbeing. "Each of us can develop an extraordinarily capable mind that is, first and foremost, profoundly peaceful, happy and compassionate," Tan says in his New York Times best selling book about the course.

"The methods for creating such an extraordinarily capable mind are available even to you and me." Jono Fisher, the brainchild of the Wake Up Project, who brought SIY to Sydney in June, agrees. Since 2009 he has facilitated mindfulness-based events for seekers of a little more peace and compassion in their lives. But, while people were working on developing these qualities in their personal lives, he found that workplaces - where we spend around a third of our waking hours - were missing them. Fisher got the idea for bringing the course to Australia after chatting with a friend and asking how she felt the Wake Up Project could better serve her.

"She went very quiet," Fisher says, "and then said, 'Can you please find a way for mindfulness and compassion to become part of my workplace?'” It seems others feel the same. More than 350 people - many of whom were there through their work - attended the two-day workshop to get a little more of the clarity that comes with knowing ourselves and knowing how to manage our experience. "Life is chaotic and unexpected," said Linda Curtis. "How do we stay steady? The idea is that mindfulness is a ballast - even if the turbulence of our lives is spinning, we can remain present, on an even keel. "Mostly we're making decisions from our gut, from our emotions ... we want to have some awareness of how to work with them."

In fact a study from earlier this year found that gut instinct can be more accurate than intellectual deliberation. It might be a myth that we only use 10 per cent of our brains, but it is true that we still have very little understanding of how they work or how they utilise our inherent intelligence to its full capacity. Learning to tap into gut instinct and integrating the subtleties of our body is a step towards optimising intelligence as well as our sense of contentment. Searching a little less externally and a little more internally, it seems, might just be a smart move for us all.