assumption alarms
A couple of things happened to me recently in close enough proximity to each other that put two and two together and realised something naughty that my brain has been doing.
I was playing Rise of the Golden Idol, which is a kind of detective game where you have to figure out various facts about what is going on in a scene by paying attention to details and making deductions. While playing, I noticed a few things that seemed 'wrong', but was too quick to explain them away as quirks of the art before the thought had really penetrated my subconsciousness; the art is pretty quirky to be fair. I ended up having to resort to a hint, and it turned out that the thing I ignored was the thing I should have been paying closer attention to.
Then a day later at work, I was working on a bug where an API was returning an essentially impossible response based on the code I was looking at on my machine. When a colleague brought up the code on his laptop it looked different, which seemed odd but I didn't thing it was worth pursuing at the time. It turned out that the reason the code was different was because I didn't have the latest code synced on my system, and that also explained why the API was returning something other than I expected.
Anyway, what tied these events together for me was that they both involved a situation where my brain was about to tell me something wasn't right, but I was too quick to hit the snooze button on it.
What I've realised is that this actually happens to me all of the time. Every time I hear or see something that doesn't completely fit with my world view, I'm too quick to explain it away.
Having said all of that, coming to this realisation is like discovering a super-power. Although it's still difficult, I can sometimes spot these occasions when my brain tells me something is amiss and act on it, or at the very least check my own assumptions and prejudices.
Perhaps this is what people mean by trusting your gut. I never really thought of that as something that you'd need to practice before.