Where does the muse reside? Various explanations have been suggested.
Clinical psychic intuition
It is possible to know information without inputs through our five ordinary senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. We call these psychic impressions. They provide another level for intuitive awareness.
Researchers have dissected psychic abilities into theoretical components.
Telepathy: The transfer of thoughts, images or commands from one living being to another, without use of sensory cues.
Clairsentience: Knowledge about an animate or inanimate object, without the use of sensory cues (sometimes called psychometry). This may appear in the mind of the perceiver as visual imagery (clairvoyance), auditory messages (clairandience), or other internal sensory awareness, such as taste, smell, or a mirroring of bodily sensations from another person.
Precognition: Knowledge of a future event prior to its occurrence.
Retrocognition: Knowledge of a past event, without use of sensory cues.
The above four modes of acquiring knowledge without cues from any of the external senses: have been called Extrasensory perception (ESP).
ESP is often reported by people who also have abilities to move or transform an object without use of physical means; commonly called “mind over matter,” which is technically labeled psychokinesis (PK)..
ESP and PK are referred to as the psychic, or psi (from the Greek letter, Y) abilities.
Research on psychic intuition
Surveys of experiences of psychic experiences were conducted by Louisa Rhine at Duke University starting in the early 1940’s. People commonly reported they knew information without sensory inputs. For example, they claimed they had premonitions of dangers before these materialized, would know when someone in the family was in need of help, and were able to project their thoughts to others.
Spontaneous ESP occurs frequently during dreams, during times of distress, and in response to needs. It also occurs with no apparent pattern and for no apparent reason.
J. W. Dunne published a classic series of precognitive dreams. For instance, he foresaw the eruption of the volcano on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1902, in which 40,000 people were killed. Clearly this is an event that could impact the collective consciousness of the planet, and would be more “available” for psychic perception than lesser events. However, Dunne also records a dream in which he is standing on a bridge, looking at a particular scene. About 25 years later, he found himself on that very bridge, surveying that particular scene. He could find no special significance to this precognitive experience, which seemed simply to have been a window across time.
Skeptics suggested that such individual reports could simply be coincidences, so the hypothesis of psychic perception was put to the test.
Joseph B. Rhine, at Duke University, ran hundreds of thousands of tests on psi abilities. His basic tool for ESP testing was the deck of Zener cards, containing twenty-five cards, five of each of five different symbols: a star, a circle, a square, a cross, and three wavy lines. (See Figure 1.) The deck of 25 cards was thoroughly shuffled, sometimes with a mechanical shuffler, prior to each test of ESP perception.