"The feeling of certainty"

My friend Julianne also recommended On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert Burton, which I have not yet read. It is one of an increasing number of books dealing with the interrelation of mind and brain.

I was taken by the idea of the "feeling of certainty" which is apparently addressed in the book and is addressed in its reviews. As I understand it, the phrase suggests that while "certainty" is a concept applied to factual knowledge, "feeling" is rather applied to emotion. People do get emotional when what they believe to be their knowledge is challenged. Indeed, I think we introspectively understand how we "feel" we know things, even when reflection indicates that that knowledge is of a very tentative kind.

I would be interested if others have experienced the intuition that something can be known that is not now known, if only one worked hard enough to discover that knowledge, with an intuition of the path to the knowledge.