The authors don‘t draw any conclusions either way ("Our study, being field work, could not establish causation"), but they seem to lean toward the former with t

The authors don‘t draw any conclusions either way ("Our study, being field work, could not establish causation"), but they seem to lean toward the former with this: Traders in the financial world often speak of the importance of gut feelings for choosing profitable trades. By this they mean that subtle physiological changes in their bodies provide cues helping them rapidly select from a range of possible trades the one that just ‘feels right’. Our findings suggest that the gut feelings informing this decision are more than the mythical entities of financial lore - they are real physiological signals, valuable ones at that. The suggestion here is that there is a way in which the mind/body are able to rapidly process large amounts of information, beyond conscious analysis/calculation, and report an answer as a "gut feeling", and that the people who have a stronger ability to sense their physiological functions are the people for whom this mechanism is more accurate. This notion seems analogous with the thinking behind practices like meditation and other mind+body "tuning in" exercises that have long been used in martial arts training to develop better spatial awareness and more precise reflexes.