The Art of Intuition

HOW OFTEN DO WE have a hunch that we refuse to listen to? Mary Anne offers one such cautionary tale. She married a man she was wild about. One month after the wedding, she was making coffee one morning when she felt compelled to open her husband’s suitcase, and saw among the many papers it contained one envelope that drew her attention. To her surprise she discovered her husband had been stealing money from her to pay for school tuition that he claimed he’d already paid.

“I’ll never forget walking down the street to his car, feeling like a fool but also like a robot being led. I found the car and felt satisfied, but then found myself urged to open the back door and look in a specific area, where I found a letter from the same woman with her name, her phone number, and the keys to her house. I could no longer hide from the facts. I had married a philanderer and a con artist!”

A cynic would sneer that the intuition would have been more useful before she ever married the man. Another might argue that Mary Anne was unconsciously reading subtle signals that set off her suspicions: body language, a tone of voice, too many wrong numbers on the phone, the shrug of a shoulder, a look: nothing paranormal or metaphysical, just plain old ordinary common sense.

IT IS COMMONLY BELIEVED that psychic phenomena cannot be replicated under laboratory conditions and therefore cannot be scientifically demonstrated. It’s not true. Scientists have been studying telepathy, intuition, and psychic matters (psi) since the early 1800s. The London Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by such scientific luminaries as the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge (known for contributions to wireless telegraphy); Nobel laureate Baron Rayleigh; Samuel P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; psychologist William James; and Edward C. Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory. The Society does academic research. Two years later, in 1884, the College of Psychic Studies was founded in London to explore and teach a consciousness beyond matter. In 1911 a chair for psychical research at Stanford University was funded, and in the 1930s biologist J. B. Rhine (who coined the term ESP and also the word parapsychology) was in full swing at the famous paranormal research program that he founded at Duke University and that continued until 1965. It was Rhine, together with Sir Oliver Lodge in Britain and German colleagues, who developed the analytical and statistical methods necessary to professionalize parapsychology research, and Rhine who founded the Journal of Parapsychology. Meanwhile, in 1951, the brilliant medium Eileen Garrett established the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City.

But the great flourishing of paranormal research came only toward the end of the twentieth century with the rise of technology and computers. Hundreds of thousands of laboratory studies have now been carried out in such acclaimed institutions as Harvard University, Princeton, Stanford, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and in venues from Scotland to Sweden, Germany to Australia. They have substantiated the reality of intuition, clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition. Do we need more proof? Dean Radin, in his 2006 book Entangled Minds, charts the numerous tests that document precognitive dreams, telepathy, intuition, the uneasy sense of being stared at, and remote viewing. He notes that the studies show odds against such things happening by chance so astronomical that you can hardly read the figures: odds of 48 billion to one, or of 1.1 million to one, or of 131 million to 1²⁷ (which is .0000000000000000000000000001, or twenty-seven zeros before the 1—pretty small). More than one thousand controlled studies of psi have been concluded with combined odds against chance of 10¹⁰⁴ to 1.

In one analysis of precognition studies conducted in the fifty years between 1935 and 1985, two researchers analyzed 309 tests consisting of nearly two million individual trials using over 50,000 subjects. In these “forced-choice” tests a person is asked to predict which one of a fixed number of possible targets would be randomly selected later. The targets were colored lamps or the face of a tossed die or Zener cards (showing the symbols of a circle, square, cross, triangle, or wavy lines). The time interval between the guesses and the selection of future targets ranged from milliseconds to a year. The results of the 309 studies produced odds against chance of 10²⁵ to one, which means the chance that coincidence was involved was 10 million billion billion to one! Ten years later two researchers from the University of Edinburgh published an analysis of forced-choice experiments comparing clairvoyance (perceiving the present) to precognition (perceiving the future) and found twenty-two studies from 1935 to 1997 with odds for clairvoyance of 400 to 1 and of precognition of 1.1 million to 1.

New inventions and technologies have led to increasingly sophisticated tests. We can now measure brain waves, heartbeat, and tiny fluctuations in skin conductance (sweat), and these offer exquisitely sensitive indications of presentiments. In one of my favorites on telepathy, performed at the University of Pennsylvania, a husband and wife were isolated in two separate rooms. While the husband watched a variety of images on a computer, his wife was hooked up to electrodes that measured unconscious physiological responses, including tiny fluctuations in skin galvanization. Among the many images on her husband’s computer were photographs of his wife, and each time her picture came on the screen he experienced a wave of pleasure. Remarkably, each time he thought of her, his wife, in the next room, showed tiny changes in skin conductivity, telepathically picking up her husband’s warm response.

In another study, this time of precognition, again using electrodes to measure subtle physical changes in the palms of the hand, researchers devised a test using three kinds of images appearing randomly on a computer screen. The images were either calm or emotionally charged. The participant presses a button on the computer when he’s ready for the test. Within five seconds (six seconds in another study) the computer selects a picture at random from a pool of images, displays it for three seconds, and goes blank. After ten seconds a message appears telling the subject to press the screen again when he’s ready for the next picture. The idea behind these tests is that we are constantly and unconsciously scanning the future and preparing to respond to it, and that the body responds in direct proportion to the (future) emotional impact: it’s the gift of fear, it’s the gift of fear we’re speaking of. A poisonous spider is something to be concerned about, and the woman who intuitively withdraws her hand from the wood-pile for no apparent reason may be the one who survives.

Participants reacted with changes in skin conductivity two to three seconds before the violent images, as might be expected, while calm or neutral pictures produced small or no results. But on average the subjects anticipated an extremely emotional future situation by three seconds. In this study the odds against chance were 500 to 1.

We know, however, that intuition can occur far in advance of three small seconds. Mishkat Al Moumin, a divorced Iraqi woman (and anyone familiar with Muslim culture knows the degradation that divorce incurs), a lawyer and Ph.D., was minister of the environment during Ayad Allawi’s 2004-2005 term as prime minister. She believed that “environment” meant clean drinking water for families, functioning sewer lines, the ability to find food and cooking oil, and even human rights for women. When a fatwa was issued calling for her death, she eventually left Iraq and works now for her country in the United States. But the story I want to tell happened when she was still in Iraq, a minister of the fledgling government.

Beautiful, with short hennaed hair, a round face, and intelligent eyes, Mishkat is a woman of enormous willpower and energy. One night, she dreamed that she was being hunted by men with rifles who were intent on killing her. That morning she could barely drag herself to work. Every movement was slow. Usually she was gone by eight in the morning, but on this day it was eight-thirty before she stepped reluctantly out her door, unable to shake her lassitude, her uncharacteristic lethargy—or the dark sense that something was wrong.

Mishkat drove to her office with her bodyguards in a three-car caravan designed to blend into normal traffic: the first car, white, was a small two-door vehicle containing three men. Her four-door yellow auto held the driver and a bodyguard in the front seat and herself in the back, where a woman should sit when driven by her brother or father in a Muslim country. The last car, a black van, trailing unobtrusively by fifty meters, held four more bodyguards.

They drove down a narrow street. Mishkat was engrossed, reading files, when suddenly her car swerved to the right and careened up onto the sidewalk, followed immediately by an explosion as the car behind blew up, killing all her guards. A suicide driver had tried to ram her car, missed, and hit the following vehicle!

She was devastated. Grieving for her men. But looking back, she wondered if she’d had an intuition that morning, had tried intuitively to change the situation—albeit unsuccessfully—by being late. Later she decided that a scout must have been posted outside her apartment to telephone the suicide bomber the moment she reached her car, for how else could they have orchestrated the attack?

IN 2004, psychophysiologist Rollin McCraty and his colleagues reported in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine on their experiments in determining where in the brain or body intuition lies. Their measurements included skin conductance, heart rate, and brain measurements. Replicating the earlier study, thirty calm and fifteen emotionally arousing pictures were presented to twenty-six participants. It was found that the heart rate significantly slowed down before a future emotional picture; that while both the heart and brain receive and respond to intuitive information, the heart appears to receive intuitive information before the brain; that the brain responds in different ways to calm or to emotionally charged stimuli; and that women are more attuned than men to intuitive information from the heart. Is intuition found, then, in the heart?

“The heart,” wrote McCraty, “appears to play a direct role in the perception of future events.” In a personal e-mail to me, he continued: “What our studies suggest is that the heart is the main conduit that connects us to our higher self or spirit (whatever you want to call it), and that it is the heart that relays intuitive information to the brain, where we may become aware of it. After the leap of the heart, multiple sites in the brain show pre-stimulus responses, and I suspect the centers involved depend on the type of information passed along (visual, auditory, etc.). But the primary center in the brain appears to be the frontal cortex.”

I’ll tell of one last test on intuition. In this study ten adult volunteers were hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) system to measure the oxygen in their blood, on the theory that the higher the oxygen level in one part of the brain, the more likely that that area is being stimulated. (The acronym BOLD means “blood oxygenation level dependent.”) Again the participants were asked to look at three kinds of computer-projected images: erotic, violent, and calm or neutral. Each image appeared on the screen for 4.2 seconds, with a blank screen for 8.4 seconds. The results showed that presentiment was distributed throughout the brain, but significant stimulation appeared in one common area.

Men and women showed vast differences. Just before an erotic image appeared on the screen, the men experienced sharp premonitions, but for neutral and violent images they showed nothing. The women, on the other hand, had significant intuitions of both erotic and violent images. Is this why men (some men) find violence less disturbing than women (some women)? Why some even seek out violent adventure in films or games or dangerous sports? The important fact is that the brains of males lit up before an erotic image even appeared, while those of females did so for both erotic and violent ones—and this though neither knew which picture was about to come on screen. Unconsciously, then, we dip into the future—perceive it—and God knows how important this is if you’re about to step on a snake.

In spite of the research, skepticism runs high in the scientific community. Reputations are at stake, and there is something a little shady and disreputable about investigating hunches, intuition, premonitions, telepathy, and psychic divination. Intellects revolt. But worse is the circular logic that prevails in scientific circles. Research on a topic cannot be taken seriously until it is reported in the “respectable” journals—and it won’t be reported until it is considered “respectable.”

It is a scandal that the dispute as to the reality of these [psi] phenomena should still be going on, that so many competent witnesses should have declared their belief in them, that so many others should be profoundly interested in having the question determined, and yet, the educated world, as a body, should still be simply in the attitude of incredulity.

HENRY SIDGWICK, Cambridge professor of ethics and moral philosophy, 1882

Moreover, two curious problems arise concerning studies of intuition and psi. First, the more the test is repeated, the worse the perceiver gets. Effects decline. Is that because the human mind revolts in boredom at the endless repetition, or is it because the laboratory setting doesn’t really matter anyway; your life is not at stake? Either way, this feeds the disbelief of skeptics.

A second factor is the “Experimenter Effect,” whereby the degree of the observer’s disdain appears to affect the outcome. “Believe and all things are possible,” Jesus Christ admonished. Disbelieve and the study cannot be replicated, as if the mental state of the scientist corrupts the material. Later, we’ll see that the trust or skepticism of a client also affects a psychic who is giving a reading, and this should come as no surprise. Have you never found yourself struck speechless before a hostile or contemptuous audience, unable to express yourself? We’re all affected by what goes on around us. A flighty horse is panicked by its terrified rider, picking up her fear. A dog senses when you are sad or angry. In the world of subatomic particles, the photon seems almost to adjust to the observer’s will, functioning either as a wave or particle, a phenomenon addressed in 1927 by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in which he stated that the act of observation itself interferes with the location and velocity of electrons. (This is because observation requires light, and light has momentum.) Why shouldn’t the attitude of the investigator, then, affect the studies of higher perception or intuition?

Observer and object are intimately connected. A stream of photons is shot at a screen with two tiny slits in it, while a sensitive camera records where each photon lands. (To me, the first marvel is the camera!) If one of the slits is closed, the photons move single-file like bullets through the single slit. If both slits are open, they meander through the two openings in varying bands of intensity, consistent with a wave.

If you close one slit after the photon has already passed through, the photon is seen to have behaved appropriately as a particle; and if you open both slits, then judiciously as a wave. Yet the slits were opened or closed only after the photon had already passed through! How could the photon know after it had passed through the slits that one slit would later be shut? In other words, the physicist’s choice appears to determine the behavior of the photon. Is reality created by intention? Our Free Will?

Nothing is static. Nothing is set. In place of locality, in which objects remain fixed in space and time, nonlocality is the operating force; in place of causality, in which everything is clearly caused by an earlier condition (time moving only forward), events are apparently influenced by intention; instead of continuity, which assumes no tears in the fabric of time and space, we find discontinuous reality, where isolated objects are connected across space and time. Where we once thought things progressed in orderly and predicable ways, we find only chaos and questions, for all our assumptions of reality have been destroyed.

OUR MINDS ARE AT WAR: intellect and intuition are enemies. The Greek word skepsis means “examination” and “doubt,” however, not “denial,” and current scientific antipathy becomes ludicrous at times, wrote one engineering school authority: “It’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t believe, even if it were true.”

“If we imagined [as on a clock] that all funds raised for cancer research were spent in a single day,” wrote Dean Radin, “then the comparative funding for psi research—all of it, worldwide, throughout history—is conservatively equivalent to what cancer research consumes in a mere 43 seconds. From this perspective, it’s amazing we’ve learned anything at all. ...”