Most of us rely on intuition more than we admit.
>>We feel drawn to call someone out of the blue.
>>We sense danger.
>>We walk into a room and (correctly) sense that an argument occured there recently even though we didn’t overhear it.
>>We pause before a decision, even when everything looks fine on paper.
>>We seem to know someone is about to suddently merge into our lane of traffic before they begin to move.
And then—just as quickly—we explain those moments away. Coincidence. Imagination. Luck.
Is it?
For a long time, intuition has been treated as something personal but unreliable—useful in daily life, perhaps, but not worthy of serious discussion or academic research. That attitude is beginning to shift. Not because intuition has suddenly become fashionable, but because some research findings are proving harder to ignore. And persuasive examples are mounting, thanks to the internet
Recently, I listened—twice—to a calm, thoughtful conversation on Our Paranormal Afterlife, featuring researcher Dr. Nicolas Rouleau. What stood out was not dramatic claims or emotional appeals. It was the tone. No one was trying to convince. The focus was on evidence, patterns, and unanswered questions.
In other words: paying attention.
Intuition isn’t the opposite of science
It’s easy to think intuition and science sit on opposite sides of a divide. One is “felt,” the other measured. One is personal, the other objective. But that picture is misleading and highly simplified.
Science doesn’t move forward by ignoring experiences that don’t fit current explanations. It moves forward when enough of those experiences pile up and force a closer look. Think of how people once laughed at the idea that invisible germs caused disease, or that continents drifted apart eons ago, or that the earth was not flat. The problem wasn’t that the ideas were irrational—it was that the tools to explain them hadn’t caught up yet.
Something similar may be happening now with consciousness and intuition.
Two findings that don’t behave the way they’re supposed to
There are two areas of research that keep raising eyebrows, even among cautious scientists.
Near-death experiences (NDEs)
Some people who are clinically unconscious—sometimes with no measurable brain activity at all—report clear, detailed experiences later when revived. In certain cases, they accurately describe events that happened while clinically dead and later confirmed by others. A small number of these experiences occured in a hospital setting where it could be shown that they had flatlined, yet described details of what went on in the hospital around them. (A documentary about one such case is the opening of the first episode of Surviving Death on Netflex in which physician Mary Neal should have died from drowning but came back to recall her near-death experience. See it here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13649692/. )
This isn’t about feelings of peace or symbolic imagery, which can be debated psychologically. It’s about accurate information showing up when the brain shouldn’t be able to produce it, let alone remember it. That’s the part researchers struggle to explain.
A useful analogy here is a computer. If the hard drive is shut down but still transmitting information, where is the data coming from?
Terminal lucidity
Also puzzling is something called “terminal lucidity.”
People with advanced dementia or severe brain damage—who may not recognize family members or speak coherently for years—sometimes experience a sudden return of clarity shortly before death. They may hold conversations, remember names, apologize, or say goodbye. Interestingly it is more likely to occur when they are not on pain medication.
If memory and personality are entirely stored and produced by damaged brain tissue, this shouldn’t happen. Yet it does.
It’s as if a radio with broken speakers suddenly plays clearly for a few minutes before going silent again.
Rethinking what the brain does
To make sense of findings like these, some researchers are revisiting an older idea proposed by psychologist and philosopher Dr. William James more than a century ago. It’s not only been studied in the lab, but brain surgeon Eben Alexander, M.D. who himself had a near death experience agrees. He concluded, “The more I read of the “scientific explanations of what NDE’s are, the more I was shocked by their transparent flimsiness. And yet I also knew with chagrin that they were exactly the ones that the ‘old me’ would have pointed to vaguely if someone had asked me to explain what an NDE is.”
James suggested that the brain might not create consciousness the way a factory produces goods. Instead, it might receive, filter, or limit consciousness—much like a radio tunes a signal rather than generating the broadcast itself.
When the radio is damaged, the signal may be distorted. When the filter weakens—near death, for example—something unexpected sometimes comes through.
Is Earth’s Electromagnetic Field Involved?
Dr. Rouleau pointed to studies showing that during periods of strong geomagnetic disturbance—often related to solar storms—there are small but real increases in heart attacks and seizures. He used this as an everyday illustration of a larger idea: that the human nervous system is not sealed off from its environment, but responsive to external electrical and magnetic influences, much like a receiver reacting to changes in signal quality.
This “receptive” or “filter” model of brain activity proposed by James doesn’t solve everything. But it offers a way to think about experiences that don’t fit neatly into the idea that the brain is the sole producer of mind or consciousness.
Importantly, this isn’t a religious argument. It’s a practical one: what model best explains the data we’re seeing? Could the brain be both a receptive filter and a closed system?
Why this is controversial
New ideas don’t face resistance only when they are wrong. They also face resistance when they force us to rethink things we assumed were settled.
If consciousness isn’t entirely produced by the brain, then intuition, NDEs, and moments of clarity at the end of life aren’t just errors or glitches. They may be clues. And clues make scientists uncomfortable until they can be explained.
That discomfort doesn’t mean the research lacks seriousness. In many cases, it means the implications are large.
What this means for everyday experience
You don’t need to decide what intuition is to treat it with respect.
Taking intuition seriously doesn’t mean acting on every feeling or ignoring reason. It means not automatically dismissing information just because it arrives quietly or internally.
You can think of it the way you’d treat an unfamiliar warning light on your dashboard. You don’t panic. You don’t ignore it. You notice it, make a note, and then see whether a pattern emerges.
That same approach—notice, record, reflect—is increasingly encouraged by researchers studying consciousness. Not to prove anything, but to avoid erasing data before it’s understood.
An invitation to reflect
Most of us have had moments we only understood later—times when something inside us seemed to know before we did. The invitation here isn’t to make those moments bigger than they are, or to turn them into beliefs. It’s simply to respect them. To pause instead of brushing them aside. To allow yourself to pay attention. Science is still working through what these experiences might mean, but you don’t have to wait for final answers to take your own experience seriously. Reflection is often the place where that permission begins.
Alexander, E. (2012). Proof of heaven: A neurosurgeon’s journey into the afterlife. Piatkus Press. pg. 143-144
