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

In this episode, I break down what IONS (the Institute of Noetic Sciences) means by "noetic," why they're studying these experiences as a normal human capacity, and how their team built the Noetic Signature Inventory — including why their inclusive, ethics-forward approach matters in consciousness research. The finding that keeps surfacing, in the data and in real people's stories: the capacity may be universal, but its expression is deeply individual, shaped by culture, identity, and experience.

Then we tour all 12 noetic signatures — from inner knowing and embodied sensations to healing intention, knowing the future, telepathy, mediumship and channeling, and guidance that supports self-awareness and decision-making. I also compare this map to the clair senses vocabulary, share where those "clair" terms come from, and explain why I don't see these systems as competitors. They're different tools for overlapping territory, and the best tool is the one that helps you listen to yourself with clarity.

Tell me which signature resonates most. Subscribe for what's next, share this with a friend who doubts their own knowing, and leave a review so more people can find grounded, thoughtful conversations about intuition and human potential.

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Why Intuition Has A Style

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Blooming Wand, your home for grounded spiritual content. I'm Emily O'Neill, Evidential Psychic Medium, Intuitive Healer, and Mentor. And on today's episode, I want to talk about the idea that your intuition has a signature style and that science is finally making the efforts to map those styles. Let's dive in. Now you know I'm always looking for ways to learn and grow, not only as a person but as a medium and as a channel. And 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. So when IONS, which is the Institute of Noetic Studies, put out a call for participants to pilot their new course, which they called 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. Now, the main thing that I took away from this course was new ways of thinking about old ideas, and I can't wait to dive into that with you. 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, this really matters to me. Now what stayed with me wasn't the curriculum, it was the people. Hearing participants share their own intuitive experiences and their journeys was a genuine reminder of how vast and unique each person's inner life is, and how unique and vast their relationship to their intuition is, and how it moves through everybody in unique ways. No two people describe their experiences in quite the same way. Now there were themes, and that, as it turns out, is exactly what the research confirms. Before

What Noetic Knowing Really Means

SPEAKER_00 1:57

we go further, let's talk about the term noetic, because I didn't know what it meant. I had to look it up. It's from the Greek word gnosis, and 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. Now, Ions is a research organization founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell after a profound experience of interconnectedness that he felt on his return home 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. And I think that that's a rare combination. One of the things that came to me or that I really noticed when we were in the class was they do speak to their research, but there was a lot of sharing and storytelling from participants that was pretty extraordinary stuff. And even though they're a lot of them scientists and they're trying to really understand noetic signatures, if if you want to use their term, or intuition or psychism or mediumship, there are a lot of things that they just can't answer, and they're really open to hearing those stories. I like this idea that there's still mystery around a lot of these topics, and they're really open to that and real and what the limitations are with perhaps the scientific method or the scientific process in trying to understand some of these experiences, but at the same time, they try. And I think that that's really interesting. They don't one doesn't have to negate the other, I guess is what I'm trying to say. And I feel like I hold space for scientific rigor and thoughtfulness, but I also remain really open to the fact that there's a lot that we don't know, there's a lot that we may never know, and that's okay. Now I have participated in a few of their studies over the years and attended one of their discussions on ethics in mediumship and channeling. So they are trying to help those of us that work in the field or actually reaching out to those of us in the field. I know that some people participated in their surveys around this. I did not. I just went to the discussion and review of what they came up with in terms of a code of ethics around mediumship and channeling. But I appreciate that they're trying to put one together so that those of us that work in the field can kind of have something to work from and point to so that we can raise the standard of care and not cause harm. Oh, you're not gonna believe a butterfly just came to the window as I was saying that. That was kind of sweet. So I just love and appreciate how they're very serious about their work and they're dedicated to it, because I'm serious and dedicated to my work, but I also like to have fun and explore, and it's okay to not know all things, and it's okay to not understand all things. So let's

The Research Goals Behind The Course

SPEAKER_00 5:12

get back to the course. The Noetic Integrity course is built around years of study and is based on the guiding hypothesis that, and this is a quote from them, all things are interconnected and embody that awareness that all things are interconnected, and embodying that awareness rather reveals information and energy not limited by space and time, and it can profoundly amplify transformation, innovation, and well-being. I think that's an interesting guiding hypothesis. In other words, the intention behind the research is threefold. Uh, this is what I understand. The first is to validate that these experiences are real and universal, so noetic experiences, they're not anomalies, they're not signs of mental illness, and they're not the province of a gifted few. The research consistently frames noetic experiences as normal human capacity that most people have, but many don't have language or context for. The second theme or root of their intention behind this course and this work is to create a reliable scientific instrument. The noetic signature inventory, which they call the NSI, this can measure these experiences consistently across populations. So they created it so that all of our noetic experiences can be studied rigorously, gives a little bit of a framework. A lot of consciousness research has struggled because there was no standardized way to assess what people were experiencing. And the noetic signature inventory was built to solve that problem, and we're going to get into that later. The third thing was to understand individual variation, not just whether people have these experiences, because we know that they do, but how and in what form and what patterns exist across age, gender, and 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 Ion's director of research, Dr. Helene Wabe. And here's how it came together. I think that this is important. The first phase: 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. Those themes are ways of engagement, so how people enter or access noetic states, ways of knowing the modes through which information is received, types of information, what kind of information comes through, ways of affecting how people use or direct noetic information, and ways of expressing how people communicate or work with their experiences. And 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. And I think that's important. Now, phase two looks something like this. Those five themes were developed into a 44-item questionnaire called the Noetic Signature Inventory. We mentioned this already, I've mentioned this already. Thousands of people completed it and statistical analysis identified 11 factors describing the different ways people experience noetic phenomenon. In phase three, a new group of 1,752 people from 62 countries completed the inventory to see if the 11-factor model held up. And it did. And the analysis then revealed that a 12-factor model fit the data even better, and thus the 12 noetic signatures were confirmed. And we're going to go into what those are in a bit. In phase four, 3,884 people completed the full inventory. Researchers looked at norms and patterns across age, gender, and ethnicity, and what they found is that noetic experiences are universal. Age made little difference in overall scores, and 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. But here's 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 researchers' intentions. They want future research to inform curricula and therapies to support people in these experiences. I think that's really important. 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 that 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 and it's also very 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 that they couldn't explain. Science is just catching

The 12 Noetic Signatures Tour

SPEAKER_00 11:21

up. Now let's dive into the 12 noetic signatures. This is where it gets fun and interesting, folks. Here's what the research surfaced as the primary ways people access intuitive information. As we go through these, as I go through these with you, notice what resonates. Most people experience more than one at varying intensities, and they may change over time. The first is inner knowing, the sense of just knowing something is true without being able to explain how. It comes with a feeling of authority, like I just know this. And William James described noetic experiences as states of knowledge that arrive without intellectual analysis. There's no breadcrumb of how you got there. And this is one of three subcategories. So there's under this inner knowing is knowing through emotions, feeling in the body, and knowing mentally. And I do appreciate these subcategories because inner knowing is a big one for me. And I feel like it does come to me in these three ways, and sometimes knowing through emotions, feeling in the body, and knowing mentally happen at the same time, not just one by one. The second is embodied embodied, I'm sorry, embodied sensations. So specific physical sensations that signal your receiving information. So heat, cold, goosebump, tingle, sounds, smells, the body is the receiver. The third noetic signature is visualizing to affect or to access or affect. So using mental imagery or intention to assess information or influence outcomes in your life or the world. The fourth is inner knowing through touch, gaining information through physical contact with an object or person, what has historically been called psychometry. The fifth is healing, using noetic information and intention for healing. Others report benefit from your healing presence or intentions. The sixth is knowing the future, accessing information about events before they happen, both consciously and unconsciously. The seventh is physical sensations from other people, feeling someone else's physical experience in your body, their pain, their heat, their cold, sometimes called telosomatic experience. So you literally feel other people's physical experience in your body. The eighth is knowing yourself, using noetic information for your own growth, self-awareness, and decision making. You know I love this one because this is what I love to do with my clients. Help them know themselves using their intuition or their noetic, the noetic information that they receive on themselves. The ninth is knowing others' minds, receiving information from other people's minds. What most people know is telepathy. The 10th is 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. Knowing through dreams, accessing noetic information while asleep. That's the 11th. The 12th is inner voice, receiving information through an inner voice historically called Claire Audience.

Using The NSI Without Overtrusting It

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Now, Ions developed the 44-item noetic signature inventory directly from this research as a tool for understanding your own intuitive profile. And you can take this inventory. You can find it on the Ions website. If you're following along, I'm I always have a transcript of this. If you kind of want to read through and go through those noetic signatures again, you can find it at BloomingOne.com, click explore, go to the blog. I'll have a link in the blog there. But if you just go and look up Noetic Signature Inventory, it's going to come up on any internet search engine. There's a fee to take the full inventory, just a heads up. It probably funds their research. 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. I just frankly didn't feel a need to, but lots of folks in the course did, and 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 I thought that was interesting. I do think sometimes the way we perceive things and maybe the way the inventory would perceive it or categorize it might be different. I think that that's probably part of what that gap is, but there could be other things that caused it. But a lot of people thought found it relatable. But you know me, I'm always going to tell you to trust your instincts and your own sense of how your relationship to your intuition works over any survey. That said, the inventory might be useful to you. And maybe one day I'll take it too. I don't know. I just didn't feel called to do it right now. Now,

The Origins Of The Clair Senses

SPEAKER_00 16:28

if you read my earlier writing on the Claire census, so way back I've I've probably even used the Claire terms in a variety of content that I made, you know that I used that vocabulary and value it. So I use clairvoyance, clair audience, clairsentience, claircognizance in their cousins. And there are practical embodied terms that give people immediate recognition and a shared language for experiences that can be hard to describe. But you'll notice that's not the language that Ions is using. But these Claire terms have served intuitive and spiritual communities for more than 150 years, and they continue to serve them. But like I said, Ions isn't using that vocabulary. Are you curious about why? Because I was. But first, let me give you a little context on where the Clare vocabulary comes from, because you might not know. I didn't. The Clare terms have their roots in 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 was developed largely by educator Alan Kardec in the 1850s, and it created its own systematic framework for understanding psychic and mediumistic phenomenon. 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, clair audience meant clear hearing, clairsentience meant clear feeling. Over time the vocabulary expanded to claircognizance, clairgustance, clairalience, and more, each naming a different kind of channel through which information beyond the ordinary arrived. And it's worth pausing to acknowledge something about Cardex 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 to systematize them is something he shares with Dr. Wabe and her team at Ions. The difference is in the starting point. Kardec worked within a metaphysical framework he accepted as given. The spirits exist, they communicate, and 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 the metaphysical claims out of the language as much as possible. At least that's how I took it. And that's not a criticism of Kardec, it's simply an acknowledgement 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 times and traditions.

How Noetic Signatures Expand The Map

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Now, here's 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 Claire vocabulary, it might take you a second too. I had a hard time like adapting my brain to the new, to this ion's noetic signature language, because I've always just thought of things in terms of the Claire senses. Now the Claire framework is organized around the body as receiver. It asks, which sensory channel did the information come through? I actually find that very useful. Did you see it, hear it, feel it, know it, smell it, or taste it? That's a useful and accurate question. The body absolutely is the instrument, and extended perception is an embodied experience. I always tell people that it's like a physical job because like I my whole body is engaged when I'm working with clients. The cleric senses honor that, and that's one of their genuine strengths. Now, 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 as three specific things that the Claire 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 Clare senses are almost entirely organized around receiving information, but the noetic signatures include signatures for which you for what you do with your intuitive capacity once you have it. So 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 well being. These aren't about which sensory channel information arrives through, they're about agency, expression, and relationship. And the Claire framework doesn't have a home for that in this dimension, but the noetic signatures do. The second is a finer distinction within Claire Sentience. ClaireSentience does a lot of heavy lifting in the Claire 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 claire sentients know intuitively that these experiences feel different from each other, but don't always have a language for why that might be. 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. So not just empathizing, but receiving their emotions as data. Feeling in the body describes sensing information through physical gut feelings and body awareness. So 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. So their pain, their temperature, their physical state, which researchers call telosomatic experience, and which is genuinely distinct from the other two. And I don't know if as you're listening to this, you're going through the same thing that I went through when I was trying to understand the noetic signatures, is when you're kind of coming from one framework like the Claire senses to understand your intuitive experiences, and then another one is presented, there can be a little bit of dissonance there. I know that I went through that. I was like, what? What? Wait, what are they talking about? And it took me a minute to settle into what they meant for each of those signatures. So give yourself time to explore it. I'm still exploring it. Now, 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. And the noetic signatures give each their own home. And I think that's the gist of it. And I think that it's important. 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. So 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. This is my favorite playground to play in. The Claire vocabulary built around sensory reception doesn't have a natural home for this. The noetic signature plays it as one of the 12 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 Claire framework. I can speak, I think that's true. I've worked with a lot of people who would say that. And they're not seeing things or hearing things or feeling things in ways that they can name. They just know or they use that knowing to live well or grow deeply, and the noetic signatures say that counts, and I think it does too. That's real, and now it has a name. Now, what does this mean practically? The Claire senses and the noetic signatures are not in competition. They're mapping overlapping territory with different tools and different organizing questions. The Clare vocabulary asks which sensory which sensory channel is activated, and the noetic signatures ask how you relate to your intuitive capacity across its full range. So receiving, processing, acting, growing, and expressing. If the Claire 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 Claire framework, the wider map might be exactly what they or you have been looking for, which is why I really wanted to share it. 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 the spiritual community, all without asking 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, it's more inclusive, and it creates room for people whose experiences don't fit neatly into the CLER categories, which, if the course participants taught me anything, is a lot of people. And I

Your Signature Matters More Than Models

SPEAKER_00 27:03

want to close with something important. The 12 noetic signatures are a research framework, they're a map, and a useful one, but they're not the territory of your personal experience. Ions didn't invent these ways of knowing, they gave them a scientific structure. That structure is valuable for research, for conversation, and 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 this, and I needed that reminder. And their experiences were so varied and so individual and so alive that it actually excited me and reawakened a whole new interest in what it what intuitive styles are like. And this is what I want you to walk away with more than anything. You have your own signature, you always have, and science is just beginning to find language for it. I'd love to know which of these 12 noetic signatures resonate most with you, and have you always accessed inner knowing a particular way without having language for it? Do share, you know I love to hear from you, and stay tuned, friends. My next piece is going to go deeper into what to do with what you receive intuitively and how to tell intuition from the rational mind and what it means to live in relationship with your own intuitive knowing. I hope you found this information exciting. It was exciting to me, and I couldn't wait to share it with you. And you know what I'm gonna say take good care of yourselves, get those journals out, and I'll see you soon.