Names Throughout History
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Intuition
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Hunch
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Gut Feeling
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Gut Instincts
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Inner Voice
Common Types of Intuition
Types Classified By The Kind of Impression
From patterns across many spontaneous cases, we might also catalog these types of intuition:
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Claircognizance — From the French clair (”clear”) and Latin cognizance (”knowing”), etymologically rendering as “clear knowing.” It’s basically intuition about an event in the form of a clear “just knowing.”
“A young woman in Chicago was in her kitchen while her baby was asleep in the bedroom and her three-year-old child was in the living room. All at once, the mother felt that the baby was choking on something her older sister had put in the baby’s mouth. The baby had not cried out, there was no reason to suspect that such a thing had happened, yet the woman “just knew.” She ran into the bedroom, took the baby up, held her with her head down, pushed a finger into the baby’s throat and extracted a piece of candy lodged in it.” (Rhine, 1891, pp. 134-135) (Berger, 1991, p. 201)
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Presentiment — From the Latin prae (”before”) and sentire (”to feel”), etymologically meaning “to feel beforehand.” It’s a gut or bodily feeling that an event is about to happen. It might be accompanied by emotions (sadness) and or bodily reactions (chills, hair raising, fingers tingling, butterflies in stomach). This is the spidey-sense.
“I had a sense of tragedy hovering between our new home and my brother-in-law’s, just as though a depressive sadness hung between. I thought it was for my own daughter and I watched her very carefully. One night I began to feel the familiar hunch of something being wrong, tingling finger tips, chills, hair raising, and butterflies in my stomach. I began to cry in panic. My husband gave me three aspirins and tucked me into bed. I cried myself off to sleep. The telephone rang and we were told my brother-in-law’s daughter, the same age as my own, had been struck by a car and killed.” (Rhine, 2018, p. 61)
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Premonition — From the Latin prae (“before”) and monere (“to warn”), etymologically translating as “forewarning” or “to warn beforehand.” It’s basically the intution that something bad is going to happen. Or the presentiment of a bad event. Recall the famous Star Wars phrase:
Two Main Types Classified By Ordinary Inferential Intuition vs Psychic Non-Inferential Intuition
There’s two main kinds of intuition—ordinary intuition and psychic intuition.
Ordinary intuition comes from conscious reasoning, memory, pattern recognition, or subconscious deductions. Basically when your brain or conscious mind recognizes patterns, and then has a “best guess” or inference about something in the future—based on those patterns. Often still arising in your conscious mind as a “sudden knowing,” or gut feeling.
This often happens spontaneously and subconsciously. Like when watching a movie, you suddenly “know” what’s about to happen. This isn’t psychic. As there’s prior clues or pieces of information that allow you to deduce this. Like the background music, or character behavior. Your brain simply uses these clues to subconsciously put the puzzle pieces together, and spit out an educated guess or prediction about what might occur in the next scene. This guess appears in your conscious mind as a gut feeling, thought, or “knowing.” It’s often right, because the brain is quite good at this.
But this is not the kind of intuition we’re focused on. Instead, what we might call “non-inferential, extrasensory intuition,” is a hunch or gut feeling that did not come from the ordinary perception and the logical or reasoning process of your mind or brain—which nonetheless brings you true knowledge about a person or event. Like regular intuition, it also reaches your conscious mind in the form of a spontaneous sense of “just knowing,” a gut feeling, sudden bodily reactions (chills, hair raising, etc), or a simple thought. But this “knowing” is something that you could not have possibly “known” through any ordinary means.
Here’s an example of a real spontaneous case of psychic intuition from Louisa E. Rhine’s collection (an example of “just knowing” type of intuition):
“A relative of ours was staying with us several weeks ago. Her son is in the service, a fine strapping lad who had been home for Christmas. One morning she said to my wife, “I know that something is wrong. Jesse is not at his camp.” Questioning brought no reason, but she was certain. For three days thereafter she was upset. On the third day she received a toll call. It was from her son. He was AWOL.” (Rhine, 2018, p. 58)
Notice, there was no way the Mother could have deduced or inferred this based on the information available to her. So, rather than perception and inference—where the heck do these intuitions come from? Well, once again—that’s the mystery! Like all kinds of “extrasensory” perception, they are coming from some source of knowledge or information which we don’t quite yet understand.
Given all this, intuition is important. Whether normal or “extrasensory,” it can help us know things at a distance, or know things before they happen. It’s an internal guidance system that can warn us, direct us, and impulse us to take action—usually in order to prevent something bad from happening, or perhaps even to make something good happen. It is not always psychic, but it can be. And it's a crucial part of our wellbeing, and those of our social group.
It’s likely still here because we still use it. It’s evolved and become part of one of our many ways that we and our families survive, pass on our genes—and continue this intuitive ability for all humans.
Common Traits
Intuition as “Short Summary” of Event
One characteristic of many intuitions is they don’t usually have specific details of the events—only the most general or holistic meaning.
Take the intuitive example of “just knowing” someone close to you died—you likely don’t know how they died, where they died, with whom they died, when they died. You only know “they died.”
It’s almost like a short summary—telling you the most important thing you need to know, and only that. Not wasting time with the nitty gritty details.
Louisa E. Rhine was actually the one who came to this conclusion after analyzing thousands of spontaneous cases of intuition. As she put it:
“In all Intuitive cases . . meaning is a derivation from, an “abstract” of the entire situation.” — Louisa Rhine (Parapsychologist) (Rhine, 2018)
How Common?
Intution appears to be a very common form of ESP. According to one estimate, in the mass of 30,000 spontaneous cases of psi among Louisa Rhine’s collection of letters of people sent to her laboratory—29% were intuitive (Berger, 1991, p. 201) (Drewes, 2002). Even in just one of her smaller studies, out of 1,073 spontaneous psi cases, about 308 were intuitive (Rhine, 2018, p. 57).
So, have you had an intuition? If so, can you identify what type of intuition? And did it fit with the common traits? Let me know!