Is Intuition the Same as ESP?

What follows is a series of comments, originated by Henry Reed, responded to by others, and concluded by Dr. Reed, on this thorny question. The remarks were posted on a discussion group that is a part of the Intuition Network (www.intuition.org)

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Is Intuition and Psychic the Same Thing?

Can you describe an intution task that doesn't require a psychic skill?

This note is a modest request that you might respond to the theoretical issue I would like to run by the Intuition group.

This question came up for me once again as I am in the process of creating a course on Intuition that will be delivered over the Internet. I was searching websites for intution tasks, and seemed to find only ESP tasks. It got me thinking again, just what is the relationship between intuition and psychic.

When I am asked this question in a lecture situation, my first answer is often, "the way they are spelled." Then I may offer a few of my ideas on the matter. The distinction(s) seem to have both political, theoretical and practical implications.

I notice that most laypeople say they are different realities. When I ask them to explain, they say that they are not psychic, but have some natural intuitive ability. They can't put the difference into words, only to point out that they relate to one word, not the other. It make me suspect that psychic sounds alien, beyond normal, while intuition is more politically correct, more natural. I notice that a lot of trainers go out of their way to say intuition is not psychic, and say so in a tone of voice that is intending to be reassuring. This political aspect of the difference is an interesting sociological observation, but certainly not a rigorous, nor even an intuitive, distinction between two broad classes of phenomena. But at this level we are dealing mainly with words and their connotations.

Coming into developing the internet course, I wanted to use existing web-sites for the bulk of the course content, with packaging and guidance by what I would write as an accompaniment (the course will be self-administered, by the way, with no mentor). I have found many websites that have an interactive psychic/intuitive task, such as remote viewing, guessing cards, and such. It became obvious to me that it is hard to find a task that calls for intuition, not ESP.

I can think of many ESP tasks, and in most of them, if not all of them, there is a right answer, one that can be used to evaluate the reponse. I am hard pressed to find an intuition task that does not contain an element of the psychic, and only one possible intuition task that has a "right answer."

My need for example and my survey of what was available led me to review my own thoughts, and to share them with you, both to get your reactions. It also provides me with an excuse, or motivation, to sit down and write out my thoughts, which I will need to add to the course.

My first step in understanding the relationship between intuition and ESP came a few years back in reading P. Goldberg, The Intuitive Edge. After some analysis, he called intuition "ESP plus," meaning a holistic manifestation of ESP. I looked to the Edgar Cayce readings, and found little help in getting distinct definitions for psychic and for intuition--he often used the words interchangeably--but he did make the remark that intuition was the highest form of psychic ability. I have heard theoretical distinctions from others, such as ESP is a sensory event, as in "extra-sensory" perception, while intuition is a "cognitive" event, as in "inner knowing." Well and good, but most of these hypotheses do not reflect any background in cognitive psychology, which has shown the profound involvement of cognitive activities in perceptual events.

Perceptual illusions are a good example. They show that our perceptions of what is "out there" are really interpretations, and that these interpretations can go wrong. So perception and cognition are not that easy to pull apart in reality. Data and meaning are intertwined from the very first brain response to stimulation, maybe even sooner.

My second step in understanding was to develop an operational distinction, via a hypothetical situation, between intuition and ESP. Here was my invention, to consider two different tasks inside a library. Suppose you have to write an essay on the role of dinosaurs in the contemporary economy. On the one hand, if someone were to go to a particular shelf, open a particular book to a particular page and point to a particular line, your ESP ability could help you describe the words that are on that page. From studies of remote viewing, when a person is given latitude and longitude data, they can report imagery that matches the visible characteristics of the corresponding location on the planet. So your ESP ability may be able to discern the information recorded at a particular point in the library. Yet through that ESP ability alone, it might take a long time to collect information for your essay. On the other hand, consider another scenario, one which may be familiar to you: walking randomly through the library, browsing here and there with no particular purposiveness, you find yourself grabbing a book and letting it fall open to a random page, where your gaze is drawn to a certain passage which contains a statement that provides you with your key insight needed for your essay. This second scenario seems to be more of a picture of intuition, especially as ESP plus. The distinction between these two scenarios seems to lay bare the difference between ESP and intuition in terms of operational terms.

I think it would be useful to create many such scenarios, from daily life, situations we can relate to, and where we can say, or declare, that intuition is what is happening in one scenario, ESP in another. If there really is such a distinction. In terms of the classical ESP categories--telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, clairvoyance--I doubt that these are necessarily distinct skills in the real world, but rather that they are logial categories of how our materialistic paradigm can be violated. Similarly, the one word, intuition, may cover a variety of skills and events.

My third step in understanding has been a brooding over the general findings of the cognitive psychology of perception, specifically that the incoming data is sorted and organized by internal templates. A template provides a paradigm for interpreting, organizing, and assigning meaning to the perceptual data. How is that particular template chosen? I have been playing with the idea that the choice of template is intuitive to some extent, guided by the data, to some extent. I'm very vague about this process, but I'm moving toward some kind of scenario in which data input can come via an extra-sensory means, and choice of template can come through an intuitive process. I've been thinking about Kant, and his idea of intuition as the ÒformsÓ of experience, which relates to Jung and his archetypes, which we rarely see, except in their manifested forms, which partake of the sensory experience of the person. I would seem to be moving toward some formulation of intuition as a form of knowing, as in meaning, as in understanding, as in pattern-matching (which is what understanding, and meaning, means), whereas ESP is some form of data receptivity, just the Òfacts,Ó (as if there could be ÒjustÓ facts). Others have put forward the pattern recognition interpretation of intuition.

By the way, to insert another dimension here, this quest is not merely an intellectual enterprise. I try to intuit why we are so intereted in intuition. It seems to have to do with the clues we get from intution that we are more than we think we are. Some may say that we are faster calculators than we realize, others may say that intuition shows that the whole world is inside us. Its a political fact that it is easier to preach the perennial philosophy if you assure people that it is not ESP.

Anyway,in the context of the cognitive psychological scenario, it is interesting to note that in studies of remote viewing, the experimenters attempt to dissuade the subject from ÒelaboratingÓ upon the sensory data, that these Òguesses as to what they are looking atÓ are usually wrong. It seems that they would be eliminating the intuitive component from remote viewing. Interesting also, that Carolyn Davis, one of my students, who has trained extensively in remote viewing, and who has also trained with me on the ÒIntutive HeartÓ methodology (I had a student demonstrate that method to you one evening in your hotel room, if you recall, when you were in Virginia Beach) reported to me that it is easy to get bored quickly with remote viewing, but that the Intuitive Heart method is never boring. Not meant as a compliment, but more as an attempt to understand the difference. The essence of the Intuitive Heart method is to use a memory as a template to understand a hidden issue. On the other hand, so many exercises in intuition stress interpreting the imagery that you get when intuiting. Just the opposite from instructions for remote viewing. There is some kind of interesting contrast here worth exploring more.

Another connection that the distinction between intuition and ESP brings up for me has to do with divination. It seems that the Intuitive Heart method has in common many divination methods in which the tool (the memory, the hexagram, the Tarot card) is derived synchronistically, then the tool is used as a template for understanding. The process of developing the understanding from the template seems to be a matter of intuition, perhaps also subliminally influenced by ESP channeled data.

I can remember Marcia Emery, who won the prize at the first conference of the Intuition Network, held in Honolulu, by being able to demonstrate Òbeing intuitive.Ó She asked the subject to tune into a hidden target (a question or concern held by another), get an image, then interpret its meaning. It's a form of divination, but instead of throwing out some cards, it is asking the mind to toss out an image. The intuition works at least at two levels: the choice of image, and the interpretation of the image. ESP could easily be involved at both levels. The process does not lead to an identification of the question, but rather provides a template upon which an answer to the question can be formulated. Intuition in these exercises seems best suited to providing guidance, in much the same way as divination does. ESP is involved, but it is used in some creative process of synthesis, in the context of some kind of fluency, such as verbal fluency.

Now, going back to my original quest, which is to locate the best examples of tasks which call upon ESP ability and the best examples tasks which call upon intuition ability. Remote viewing would seem to be a good candidate for an ESP task. Is Tarot reading a candidate for an intuition task? Yes, but I'm not comfortable with that choice as the "paradigm" for an intuition task. But I don't know what I would nominate as the best candidate. I have been thinking about writing up a paper discussing what criteria for intuition my Intutive Heart™ exercise meets, and what we can learn about intuition from studying the elements of that exercise. It does include the experience component that some people point to in describing what makes a person intuitive--someone with a lot of experience in a subject will be more intuitive in that subject, because they have more skill in pattern recognition. On the down side, however, the Intutive Heartª exercise has a large component of improvisational verbiage to it, which is not characteristic of moments of flashes of insight.

Very likely intuition is not a single animal, but perhaps various elements of ability that combine in a variety of manners. Nevertheless, what activities would you propose as an exemplar task for intuitive ability that is not simply an ESP task? You are probably familiar with Wescott's studies that used the task of guessing the pattern underlying numerical sequences. I suppose that playing "hangman" might be a verbal analogy. These tasks require getting answers based upon limited information. They do have right answers--unusual for intuition tasks, but they can't rule out the operation of ESP.

What tasks might you propose as examples of intuition?

Are you aware of any websites that offer tasks for intition? This question brings me to a final subject, and that is the incorporation of the websites belonging to members of the Intuition Network into my course. I am impressed with Jeffrey's offering the transcripts from the Thinking Aloud video series online. They are a tremendous resource. I am going to link to several of those transcripts, accompanied by a study guide, as part of the course.

If you have a website and you have any ideas of how I might link to your site in my course, in the context of a learning opportunity, or if you are aware of other sites that I should consider, I would appreciate your suggestions.

Most of all, however, I am interested in hearing about your thoughts concerning the ESP/intuition issue and any ideas you have about the operational distinction between them in the form of different tasks.

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Initial response from Jeffrey Mishlove, Director of  the Intuition Network