We hypothesize that everything is interconnected, and that embodying this awareness reveals information and energy not limited by space and time, which can create breakthroughs in transformation, innovation, and well-being.
We hypothesize that all humans can access information and energy using capacities beyond the traditional five senses. These experiences range from the common to the rare, and show up differently from person to person.
Most of us have experienced intuition — a gut feeling or a hunch — which can be described as “the ability to understand immediately without conscious reasoning, and is sometimes explained as a ‘gut feeling’ about the rightness or wrongness of a person, place, situation, temporal episode or object” (McCrea, 2010). Others have reported more uncommon experiences such as remote viewing (the ability to know something about a place, object, or person in a remote location) and psychokinesis (the ability to move matter through mental effort alone).
The IONS Discovery Lab studies many of these experiences to better understand commonalities and how we might measure objective markers of individuals’ subjective experiences. For example, one way we test intuition is as follows: A participant is presented with a picture of a jar containing items.
The image is displayed briefly (a few seconds), so the participant is unable to use their “normal” cognitive ability to count the number of items. They then guess how many items they believe are in the jar. Because normal capacities are not at play in this task, people who choose a number closer to the actual number are accessing information not available to us normally, or using their intuition.
Through the IONS Discovery Lab, we are bringing together decades of research in how non-local experiences of intuition, innovation, and deep knowing can be better understood and more regularly harnessed to enhance the lives of ourselves, each other, and the planet.
McCrea, S.M. (2010). Intuition, insight, and the right hemisphere: Emergence of higher sociocognitive functions. Psychology Research and Behavior Management (3), 1-39.
