@owenbarnes Thank you for jumping onto this great thread and adding your thoughts. And welcome to the forum. And @NathanFlores, thank YOU for bumping this thread that I'd totally forgotten existed, and yet the questions we pondered in this thread remain as important and unanswered today as when they were asked in 2018, 8 years ago!
@owenbarnes Malcolm Gladwell, in his book "Blink", discusses the phenomenon of "just knowing" that can happen when people are very knowledgeable about a certain field, or their minds have enough information about certain concepts (perhaps seemingly disparate concepts) that the info can blend, congeal, and lead them to a correct conclusion in a "blink". When a person can do this, the line between precognition and logic can be blurred.
I have a lot of knowledge about a lot of things. Some of it's buried so far back in the dusty stacks of memory that I can't recall it upon command, but it's still there, in the subconscious. I am also a quick thinker. Sometimes I just know things. People may question me about how I can predict that such-and-such might be the right path or wrong path to an objective, but I often just know. It is frustrating, in that I may not be able to logically explain it in such a way that anyone would understand, because I can't draw the direct lines showing how I made the connections from the info lodged in my brain. So people may dismiss it. But later I may be thinking, "Told you so."
Changes in the known information would certainly change the conclusions drawn from it. I am not sure how the "Blink" phenomenon would differ from psychic precognition in certain cases, such as short term predictions about events that we can be pretty sure may go one way or another. When it's a prediction about an event far out in the future, or involves great detail, or is about something so unusual that it seems-logically-- highly, highly unlikely, then I am more likely to feel that it is bona-fide precognition. (Which I do believe is real-- just rare.)
@owenbarnes Malcolm Gladwell, in his book "Blink", discusses the phenomenon of "just knowing" that can happen when people are very knowledgeable about a certain field, or their minds have enough information about certain concepts (perhaps seemingly disparate concepts) that the info can blend, congeal, and lead them to a correct conclusion in a "blink". When a person can do this, the line between precognition and logic can be blurred.
@Ana, I'm so glad you brought this up. You also said many things in your post that expand and enrich this discussion. Gladwell's discussion of thin-slicing in Blink is useful because it helps distinguish different kinds of "knowing."
When someone has deep experience with a subject, they can sometimes cut through an enormous amount of information almost instantly and arrive at the right conclusion without consciously knowing how they got there. Gladwell's example of the ancient Greek statue is a good one. Several experts immediately sensed it was a fake, despite scientific tests declaring it authentic. Their minds had noticed subtle clues they couldn't yet put into words.
That kind of knowing can feel almost psychic, but it doesn't have to be. It may simply be the unconscious mind recognizing patterns.
I think, on this website, we often use three different ways of knowing:
1. Thin-slicing – Knowledge distilled through years of experience. Experts often arrive at correct conclusions without consciously retracing every step of their reasoning.
Gladwell also wrote about psychologist John Gottman's research with couples. After studying enormous amounts of videotaped interaction between partners, Gottman and his colleagues found that very brief observations could reveal patterns associated with the future of a relationship. One particularly destructive pattern was contempt—one partner communicating superiority, disgust, or disrespect toward the other.
That isn't necessarily psychic. It is knowledge distilled from repeated observation until the recognition becomes almost instantaneous. I think it might be what is happening when an expert just knows something without knowing how they knew it. Their brain unconsciously distilled vast amounts of information into a single knowing.
2. Pattern recognition – Seeing where a trend is heading before it becomes obvious. This isn't necessarily psychic either. Sometimes we recognize the trajectory of events long before the outcome unfolds and before other people see the pattern. My climate predictions I feel come from seeing subtle trends before other people do, combined with some knowledge of climate science.
3. Direct psychic knowing – This feels different to me. Many of my experiences come as spontaneous inner visions. They are almost like dreams, except I'm fully awake. Sometimes they're a single image; sometimes they unfold as moving scenes. Other times they come as a song, a bodily sensation, or simply a knowing that arrives complete, without any conscious chain of reasoning.
My "cocktail napkin" vision from 2013, where I saw a graph of collective human energy plunging around 2020 and then recovering, belongs in this third category. At the time I thought I was seeing the change in the stock market over time. But it was actually something that shifted from the pandemic, perhaps collective gathering. Only later did it make sense in light of the pandemic.
The fascinating question for me isn't whether intuition exists—it clearly does. The deeper question is whether all intuition comes from the same process.
Are thin-slicing, pattern recognition, and direct psychic knowing simply different expressions of one ability, or are they fundamentally different ways of knowing?
I would love to hear from intuitives what they feel is operating within them when they make predictions.
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I think that when you become engrossed in a particular subject or area, you can arrive at a place where the subject "speaks" to you. I've had this happen to me in areas as trivial as real estate, where after spending months looking at properties I could "predict" what would sell fast, what would linger on the market, and what listings would sell for. I just knew it. Was is just familiarity? I think it was knowledge + familiarity + something else.
I could do it in my job too. I could survey the facts of a particular case and know how a case would resolve itself. Sometimes the universe would give me clues, and it felt like I had an outside partner helping me resolve my cases. For example, I had a case years ago that was before a terrible judge. It was during the Covid years so the hearing was virtual. Well wouldn't you know that the day of the hearing, the audio equipment in my office wasn't working (something that never happened), and the judge ended up continuing the case to another day. That same judge ended up moving out of the jurisdiction and the case was assigned to a different judge who was perceived as much more fair. I knew right away the case would resolve favorably. Same case but the outcome was going to change. To this day I think Spirit did my client a huge favor and intervened. Had the case gone forward as originally scheduled, I think my client's claim would have been denied. That was a possible outcome. Then fate intervened with the malfunctioning audio equipment, and my client's possible outcome veered in a better direction. Both outcomes were possible, one prevailed over the other (with help from above).
@lynn I love your idea that the subject "speaks" to you. That's a way of describing knowing that I hadn't thought of before. It's almost as though there is an interaction between you and the object or situation—as if some part of you is already connected to that particular future.
I had an experience like that with the house we live in now. A friend once casually told me about a house she'd looked at that was for sale. For some reason, her description of that house stayed in my mind for months. It went under agreement, the buyers eventually backed out, and about six months later, when I was looking for a house myself, I came across it. The connection was immediate and powerful. We signed the documents within 48 hours, and we're still living in that house 30 years later.
Then there is your story about the judge you didn't want handling your client's case. Your office audio equipment unexpectedly failed, the hearing had to be postponed, that judge subsequently left the jurisdiction, and your case ended up before a judge you felt was much fairer.
That raises another question for me.
You experienced what happened as Spirit intervening to help your client, and perhaps that is what happened. But then I find myself asking: What do we mean by Spirit? Is it necessarily an outside force, or could our own consciousness somehow participate in what unfolds?
I'm curious about what was happening inside you before that hearing. You cared deeply about your client. How strongly did you not want this particular judge deciding the case? Did you find yourself intensely wishing that somehow the hearing wouldn't go forward that day?
So perhaps there are actually two mysteries in your story:
Did something influence the course of events?
And perhaps even more importantly:
When we sense the future, are we sensing something fixed—or are we sensing the most likely trajectory at that moment, a trajectory that can still change? And can our own consciousness ever participate in determining which possible future unfolds?
Your story has me thinking that sometimes a prediction might change not because the original perception was necessarily wrong, but because the future itself changed.