Scientists Mapped 12 Types of Intuition — Here's What They Found

I’m always looking for ways to learn and grow, not only as a person, but as a medium and channel. I try to keep up with my skill development and look for opportunities to come together with others in the field around areas of common interest. When IONS (Institute of Noetic Sciences) put out a call for participants to pilot their new course, Noetic Integrity: Navigating Inner Knowing with Clarity, I signed up. This is my area of expertise, and I was curious to see what they had to offer.

The main thing I took away from this course was new ways of thinking about old ideas. I have a deep appreciation for the scientific process the IONS team uses to approach and understand intuition. They bring genuine thoughtfulness to a field that doesn’t always get that treatment, and as someone who cares deeply about raising the standard of practice in mediumship, psychism, and channeling, that matters to me.

What stayed with me most wasn’t the curriculum. It was the people. Hearing participants share their own intuitive experiences and journeys was a genuine reminder of how vast and unique each person’s inner life is. No two people described their experience the same way. And that, as it turns out, is exactly what the research confirms.

Before we go further, let’s talk about the term noetic, which comes from the Greek noēsis — it means inner wisdom, direct knowing, intuition, implicit understanding. It’s the kind of knowing that arrives without a logical trail behind it. You’ve probably experienced it. Most people have.

IONS is a research organization founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell after a profound experience of interconnectedness on his return from the moon. Their mission is to explore the science of consciousness and human potential. What I appreciate about them is that they bring genuine scientific thoroughness to questions that a lot of institutions won’t touch, while still holding space for awe and wonder. That’s a rare combination.

I’ve participated in a few of their studies over the years and attended one of their discussions on ethics in mediumship and channeling. I love how serious and dedicated they are to this work.

The Noetic Integrity course is built around years of study and is based on the guiding hypothesis that, “All things are interconnected, and embodying that awareness reveals information and energy not limited by space and time, and can profoundly amplify transformation, innovation, and well-being.”

In their own words, the intention behind the research is threefold:

1.) To validate that these experiences are real and universal — not anomalies, not signs of mental illness, not the province of a gifted few. The research consistently frames noetic experiences as a normal human capacity that most people have but many don’t have language or context for.

2.) To create a reliable scientific instrument — the Noetic Signature Inventory (NSI) — that can measure these experiences consistently across populations, so they can be studied rigorously. A lot of consciousness research has struggled because there was no standardized way to assess what people were experiencing. The NSI was built to solve that problem.

3.) To understand individual variation — not just whether people have these experiences, but how, and in what form, and what patterns exist across age, gender, culture. The later phases of the research move from “does this exist” to “how does it vary and what does that tell us.”

The Noetic Signature research unfolded across four phases over several years, led by IONS Director of Research Dr. Helané Wahbeh. Here’s how it came together:

Phase 1 — 521 people from around the world wrote about their noetic experiences in their own words. Researchers analyzed those accounts qualitatively and found five themes running through them:

1.) Ways of Engagement — how people enter or access noetic states

2.) Ways of Knowing — the modes through which information is received

3.) Types of Information — what kind of information comes through

4.) Ways of Affecting — how people use or direct noetic information

5.) Ways of Expressing — how people communicate or work with their experiences

What I love about this is that the research began with listening. Not with a predetermined framework, but with real people describing real experiences in their own language. The categories came from data collected from real people.

Phase 2 — Those five themes were developed into a 44-item questionnaire called the Noetic Signature Inventory. Thousands of people completed it, and statistical analysis identified 11 factors describing the different ways people experience noetic phenomena.

Phase 3 — A new group of 1,752 people from 62 countries completed the inventory to see if the 11-factor model held up. It did — and the analysis revealed that a 12-factor model fit the data even better. The 12 Noetic Signatures were confirmed.

Phase 4 — 3,884 people completed the full inventory. Researchers looked at norms and patterns across age, gender, and ethnicity. What they found is that noetic experiences are universal. Age made little difference in overall scores. Gender showed more variation — women reported stronger and more frequent experiences, and participants identifying outside the binary scored even higher on average. Cultural background also shaped how people reported their experiences, though the sample skewed heavily toward people of European descent, so that finding needs more research. The big takeaway: while the capacity appears to be universal, how we experience and express it is shaped by who we are and where we come from.

After diving more deeply into the research studies, I’ve come to appreciate the ION researcher’s intentions — they want future research to inform curricula and therapies to support people in these experiences. They’re not just mapping for the sake of mapping. They want this to be useful.

Before we go any further into the 12 Noetic Signatures, I want to mention IONS came up with a way to name and categorize (or map) intuitive experiences, but humans have been having them forever, across every culture, every tradition, every corner of the world. What IONS is doing is something specific, they’re trying to categorize and measure these experiences for scientific purposes, so we can talk about them with more precision and take them more seriously in research and clinical contexts. I would add that their work helps folks take the very natural expression of intuition more seriously in general. This is important to me as well and central to my work.

That said, I don’t need science to validate my experiences, and you don’t either. Humans have always experienced things they couldn’t explain. Science is just catching up.

The 12 Noetic Signatures

Here’s what the research surfaced as the primary ways people access intuitive information. As you read through these, notice what resonates. Most people experience more than one, at varying intensities, and they may change over time.

1. Inner Knowing — That sense of just knowing something is true, without being able to explain how. It comes with a feeling of authority. William James described noetic experiences as states of knowledge that arrive without intellectual analysis. This one has three subcategories: knowing through emotions, feeling it in the body, and knowing mentally.

2. Embodied Sensations — Specific physical sensations that signal you’re receiving information — heat, cold, goosebumps, tingles, visions, sounds, smells. The body as receiver.

3. Visualizing to Access or Affect — Using mental imagery or intention to access information or influence outcomes in your life or the world.

4. Inner Knowing Through Touch — Gaining information through physical contact with an object or person — what has historically been called psychometry.

5. Healing — Using noetic information and intention for healing. Others report benefiting from your healing presence or intentions.

6. Knowing the Future — Accessing information about events before they happen, both consciously and unconsciously.

7. Physical Sensations from Other People — Feeling someone else’s physical experience in your own body — their pain, their heat, their cold. Sometimes called telesomatic experience.

8. Knowing Yourself — Using noetic information for your own growth, self-awareness, and decision-making.

9. Knowing Other’s Minds — Receiving information from other people’s minds. What most people call telepathy.

10. Apparent Communication with Non-Physical Beings — Receiving information through communication with deceased people, spirit guides, or other entities. This is what most people call mediumship or channeling.

11. Knowing Through Dreams — Accessing noetic information while asleep.

12. Inner Voice — Receiving information through an inner voice. Historically called clairaudience.

IONS developed the 44-item Noetic Signature Inventory directly from this research as a tool for understanding your own intuitive profile. You can find it and take it at noetic.org/research/noetic-signature-inventory. There is a fee to take the full inventory.

I’d encourage you to approach it as a starting point for self-knowledge rather than a definitive answer about who you are or how you work. I have not personally taken the inventory, but lots of folks in the course did. There were some mixed reviews on whether it was helpful as most people felt that their primary noetic signatures were a bit different than the ones the inventory revealed. And you know me, I’m always going to tell you to trust your instincts and your own sense about your relationship to your intuition over any survey. That said, the inventory might be useful to you.

If you’ve read my earlier writing on the clair senses you know I use that vocabulary and I value it. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, claircognizance and their cousins are practical, embodied terms that give people immediate recognition and a shared language for experiences that can be hard to describe. They’ve served intuitive and spiritual communities for more than 150 years and they continue to serve them. But you might have noticed that IONS isn’t using that vocabulary. Are you curious about why? Because I certainly was, but first, let me give you a little context on where the clair vocabulary comes from.

The clair terms have their roots primarily in 19th century Spiritualism, a movement that emerged in the United States and spread rapidly through Europe, built around the belief that the living could communicate with the dead, often through mediums. Alongside Spiritualism, French spiritism, developed largely by educator Allan Kardec in the 1850s, created its own systematic framework for understanding psychic and mediumistic phenomena. Both movements were deeply interested in categorizing how information was received, and they reached for the French word clair, meaning clear, to describe different modes of extended perception. Clairvoyance meant clear seeing. Clairaudience meant clear hearing. Clairsentience meant clear feeling. Over time the vocabulary expanded: claircognizance, clairgustance, clairsalience, and more, each naming a different channel through which information beyond ordinary perception arrived.

It’s worth pausing to acknowledge something about Kardec specifically. He was, in his own way, doing what the IONS researchers are doing today. He gathered hundreds of firsthand accounts, looked for patterns across them, developed categories, and built a systematic framework for understanding experiences that most of his contemporaries dismissed entirely. The impulse to take these experiences seriously enough to study and systematize them is something he shares with Dr. Wahbeh and her team.

The difference is in the starting point. Kardec worked within a metaphysical framework he accepted as given. The spirits exist, they communicate, mediums are the conduit — those assumptions came first and his categories were organized around them. IONS deliberately inverted that process. They let the data produce the categories and kept metaphysical claims out of the language as much as possible. That’s not a criticism of Kardec. It’s simply an acknowledgment that the tools available in the 1850s and the tools available today are different, and that the intention to understand these experiences is worth honoring across both traditions.

Now here is what I think the noetic signatures are bringing to the table — because this took me some time to see clearly and if you’re used to the clair vocabulary it may take you a moment too.

The clair framework is organized around the body as receiver. It asks: which sensory channel did the information come through? Did you see it, hear it, feel it, know it, smell it, taste it? That’s a useful and accurate question. The body absolutely is the instrument. Extended perception is embodied experience. The clair senses honor that, and that’s one of their genuine strengths.

What the noetic signatures do differently is widen the map beyond reception entirely. They’re not just asking which channel the information came through. They’re asking about the full arc of your relationship with your intuitive capacity — how information arrives, yes, but also what you do with it, how it serves your growth, how it moves outward into the world, and how it shows up in dimensions that don’t resemble a sensory channel at all.

That widening adds three specific things that the clair framework, organized as it is around sensory reception, wasn’t designed to address.

The first is the active and relational dimensions of intuitive capacity.

The clair senses are almost entirely organized around receiving information. But the noetic signatures include signatures for what you do with your intuitive capacity once you have it.

Visualizing to Access or Affect describes using intention and mental imagery to influence outcomes — not just receiving but actively directing intuitive capacity outward. Healing describes using noetic information and intention in service of another person’s wellbeing. These aren’t about which sensory channel information arrives through. They’re about agency, expression, and relationship. The clair framework doesn’t have a home for this dimension. The noetic signatures do.

The second is finer distinctions within clairsentience.

Clairsentience does a lot of heavy lifting in the clair vocabulary. It covers emotional empathy, physical gut feelings, energetic awareness, and the experience of feeling another person’s physical sensations in your own body — all under one term. Many people who work with clairsentience know intuitively that these experiences feel different from each other but don’t always have language for why.

The noetic signatures separate this territory into three distinct categories. Knowing Through Emotions describes feeling another person’s emotional state as information regardless of physical proximity (not just empathizing but receiving their emotions as data). Feeling in the Body describes sensing information through physical gut feelings and body awareness (the body registering knowing about people, places, or situations). Physical Sensations from Other People describes feeling someone else’s physical experience in your own body (their pain, their temperature, their physical state) which researchers call telesomatic experience and which is genuinely distinct from the other two.

If you’ve ever tried to explain to someone the difference between feeling empathy for a person and feeling their knee pain in your own knee, you know these are not the same experience. The noetic signatures give each of them their own home.

The third is space for experiences that don’t fit a sensory channel at all.

This may be the most valuable addition for many people. Knowing Yourself (using noetic information for your own growth, self-awareness, and decision-making) doesn’t arrive through clairvoyance or clairsentience. It doesn’t resemble a sensory channel. It’s a deep inner guidance that many people navigate by without ever calling themselves psychic or intuitive. The clair vocabulary, built around sensory reception, doesn’t have a natural home for this. The noetic signatures place it as one of the twelve primary ways people engage their intuitive capacity.

This matters because a lot of people who have rich and reliable inner knowing don’t recognize themselves in the clair framework. They’re not seeing things or hearing things or feeling things in a way they can name. They just know, and they use that knowing to live well and grow deeply. The noetic signatures say: that counts. That’s real. That has a name.

What this means practically

The clair senses and the noetic signatures are not in competition. They’re mapping overlapping territory with different tools and different organizing questions. The clair vocabulary asks which sensory channel is activated. The noetic signatures ask how you relate to your intuitive capacity across its full range (receiving, processing, acting, growing, expressing).

If the clair vocabulary already works for you, keep using it. I do. But the noetic signatures offer a wider map, and for people whose experience has never quite fit the clair framework, that wider map might be exactly what they’ve been looking for.

This is exactly why IONS chose different language. The term noetic signature describes the experience, a unique and individual way of accessing inner knowing, without prescribing the mechanism or the tradition. It can hold a Spiritualist medium, a Buddhist monk, a secular scientist, and someone who has never set foot in a spiritual community, all without asking any of them to adopt a framework that isn’t theirs. It travels across traditions because it isn’t captured by any one of them.

I appreciate this reframe. It’s more precise, more inclusive, and it creates room for people whose experiences don’t fit neatly into the clair categories, which, if the course participants taught me anything, is a lot of people. I want to close with something important. The 12 noetic signatures are a research framework. They’re a map — and a useful one. But they are not the territory of your actual experience.

IONS didn’t invent these ways of knowing. They gave them a scientific structure. That structure is valuable for research, for conversation, for helping people recognize themselves. But your experience is wider and perhaps stranger and more personal than any inventory can hold.

Use these signatures as a starting point. Notice what resonates. Notice what feels close but not quite right. Notice what’s missing entirely. Your intuitive life doesn’t have to fit any framework, including this one.

The course participants reminded me of that. Their experiences were so varied, so individual, so alive. That’s what I want you to walk away with more than anything: you have your own signature. You always have. Science is just beginning to find language for it.

I’d love to know which of the 12 signatures resonates most with you. Have you always accessed inner knowing a particular way without having language for it? Do share, you know I love to hear from you.

Stay tuned my friends. My next piece goes deeper into what to do with what you receive, how to tell intuition from the rational mind, and what it means to live in relationship with your own inner knowing.