Intuition

'Sixth Sense'

Intuition

Intuition is a form of “knowing” (or a feeling of knowing) that arises instantly, without relying on deliberate logical reasoning. It manifests as a sensation or emotion based on unconscious experiences and information, which may take shape as some kind of mental image and guide our decisions and actions.

It can emerge as a hunch that something will go well and be positive (accompanied by emotions such as surprise and excitement) or, conversely, that something will go wrong and turn out badly (manifesting as sudden fear/anxiety or anguish). At other times, it appears as a subtle feeling, which I call a ‘sense of conformity,’ when it has a more cognitive character.

Intuition may or may not be confirmed. However, the focus here is to describe the experience of intuiting regardless of its truth — it is the experience of instantly receiving an answer or sensing an event, along with the feeling that it is, in some way, in accordance with the reality of facts, whether from a “hidden present” or a “future felt as certain.”

I’ve had many intuitions that didn’t come to pass, but, of course, the most striking are those that eventually turn out to be true.

Difference Between Imagination and Intuition

Intuition manifests in a way that is distinct from imagination. I can imagine a situation and feel fear, but that doesn’t mean I am predicting that something bad will happen — it’s merely the expression of my concern.

Phenomenologically, it is possible to distinguish the two. However, in certain experiences, they may become entangled, leaving uncertainty as to whether it is truly an intuition or just an imagination triggered by desire or fear.

In general, with intuition, the information seems to come to me as a mental image accompanied by a sensation or emotion. Sometimes it comes only as an emotion without a clear reference — that feeling that something good or bad is going to happen, without knowing exactly what, because it’s not related to anything specific.

In imagination, there is a conscious elaboration: I mentally create a situation based on past experiences and prior feelings, and then I react emotionally.

Even when this process appears as an intrusive thought, arising without my will, I can often recognize that, since it is about something I already have strong feelings about, it is imagination — even though, for that very reason, it may be mistaken for intuition.

Cognitive Intuition

I often experience a kind of “temporal intuition” related to the duration of activities, exact times, people’s ages, and the release years of movies — and I usually get them right. I joke that this is my “useless mutant power,” and that my codename would be “Mr. O’Clock.”

But I don't need the clocks.😆

In these cases, the intuition doesn’t come as an emotion, but as a subtle sensation of conformity between what comes to mind and what the correct answer is likely to be.

This sensation seems to be based on small physiological adjustments — the breath becomes more centered, as if the air flows without touching the walls of the nostrils during inhalation (see more about this here). There’s a brief pause, a slower and more focused exhale, and the body feels more grounded — perhaps due to this respiratory adjustment, which also involves subtle muscular changes (for example, in the throat). This sensation makes me trust my guess.

(What I find most interesting about these experiences is exactly this: when I say “I feel a sensation,” what does that really mean? How does it happen? What is its physiological basis?)

Sometimes, a time just pops into my mind (as if I mentally see a digital clock — and even the color of the digits seems to help me enter this centered and grounded internal state and feel that particular sensation). If I don’t feel that sense of conformity, I try other possibilities, adjusting the guess based on minimal reasoning, where certain clues become more evident.

If, when forming the new guess, I feel the described bodily sensation, I trust it. That doesn’t mean I’m always right, but it means I feel confident enough to take the risk.

When I do get it right, I always feel a pleasant surprise — because I don’t really know how that information formed in my mind, or what clues I actually picked up. I speculate that some of them might be related to ambient light, although I’ve also gotten it right in places with artificial lighting. Maybe it’s more connected to a sense of time passing, which I can’t quite explain how I perceive.

Example:

The other day, I wanted to test this sensation: I remembered that I had last looked at the clock at 10:53 a.m. The thought came to me that it might now be 11:05, but I didn’t feel the sense of conformity. Then I thought of 11:06 — nothing. 

When I thought of 11:07, I felt the sensation of conformity and could clearly notice the shift in my breathing and overall bodily state, just as I described above. The numbers appeared in shades of yellow and brown. I immediately looked at the clock: it was 11:07.

But when I try to demonstrate this “ability” to people I want to prove it to, I usually get it wrong. The fear of failure makes me overthink — and that seems to block the spontaneous intuition. 

Even if the mental image of the time comes up, it might already be tainted by the anxiety to get it right. (I plan to explore this performance drop under observation in another post.)

While writing this text, I tested it several times. At one point I thought: “I woke up at 7:15. Now it must be 8:02” — I felt the sensation of conformity, checked the clock, and it was 8:03. In another moment, “2:47 p.m.” suddenly popped into my mind — and I got it right! In two other attempts, I was off — once by 23 minutes over, and once by 10 minutes under.

When I finish a meditation practice, I often estimate how long I was sitting. Last time, I finished and thought: “I think it was about 32 minutes.” I was right!

The same thing happens with people’s ages and the release years of movies. The other day, I remembered a film and intuited it was from 2007. I was right! Then, watching another, I guessed it was from 1996. Also right! This happens quite often. When I get it wrong, it’s usually off by just one or two years.

With movies, I notice something in the image quality, the atmosphere, the colors, the filming style — I don’t really know. Sometimes, even without knowing the movie, just seeing a brief scene with no obvious references like actors, objects, or costumes, the year pops into my mind, and if I feel the conformity, I take a guess and then check.

I also experience intuitive insights about the location of lost objects — I see a mental image of the object in the place where I end up finding it — along with many other types of intuitions. But what’s interesting is that all of them come to me in a similar way: as a mental image accompanied by the physiological changes and sensations I’ve already described.

Affective Intuition

I also experience intuitions about people’s emotions, intentions, and possible actions, based on facial, postural, and vocal expressions, as well as the context of the situation — but without any deliberate analysis of these cues. It’s as if something within me gathers all this information and generates a feeling — the intuition.

For instance, sometimes someone seems friendly, but I sense they’re faking it — not just trying hard to be nice, but actually pretending to have good intentions, while deep down they have the opposite.

I notice a slight tension (a wrinkling) around the nose — something like a subtle expression of contempt — that lingers even when the person smiles. Or a way of speaking that doesn’t sound natural.

Once, I sensed I was about to be robbed. I felt a “cold shock” in my stomach — a fear response. I doubted the intuition, felt guilty for judging someone like that. A minute later, the robbery was announced.

I don’t know what I picked up at that moment. Maybe a subtle tension in the robbers — even though everything seemed normal on the surface. 

Rationally speaking, there were no clear signs of danger. But the “shock” came, along with the thought: “Could it be?” And even though I doubted it, the intuition proved correct.

I also get intuitions about larger shifts — that feeling that something is about to happen: movements, ruptures, inventions... something hanging in the air that could change the course of things. All of this happens similarly to what I described in the previous section — intuitions involving stronger, more gripping emotions, which I’ve called affective.

Here, I’ve tried to describe how the sensation of intuiting something arises for me. It becomes clear how difficult it is to precisely identify what leads me to sense a situation or an answer coming. Intuition arises without an explicit structure of reasoning — hence the complexity in describing it accurately.

Check out these posts to understand the phenomenological approach used in providing these descriptions of experience: 1) What is Phenomenology; 2) Naturalization of Phenomenology; 3) Micro-Phenomenology; 4) Intersubjective Validation; 5) Embodied Cognition; 6) 4E