Whether you call it a “gut feeling,” an “inner voice” or a “sixth sense,” intuition can play a real part in people’s decision making, a new study suggests.

For the first time, researchers devised a technique to measure intuition. After using this method, they found evidence that people can use their intuition to make faster, more accurate and more confident decisions, according to the findings, published online in April in the journal Psychological Science.

The study shows that intuition does, indeed, exist and that researchers can measure it, said Joel Pearson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia and the lead author of the study.

Intuition is a popular topic in psychology these days, and generally refers to a brain process that gives people the ability to make decisions without the use of analytical reasoning, the researchers suggest. Despite widespread acceptance of this idea by psychologists and the public, scientists have lacked a reliable test to gather objective data on intuition and even prove its existence.

Previous studies didn’t actually measure intuition because researchers didn’t really know how to quantify it, Pearson said. Instead, these studies relied on information from questionnaires that asked people how they were feeling while they made decisions, which is more of a reflection of people’s opinion of their intuition than an actual measurement of it, Pearson said.