The Knowing: Life of intuitives

In the winter of 1966, the people of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, began whispering about a strange winged figure with glowing red eyes that appeared at the edges of town.

The sightings, later tied to the legend of the Mothman, took on an eerie tone when several witnesses claimed they felt more than just fear in its presence—they felt a deep, certain knowledge that something terrible was coming. A year later, in December 1967, the Silver Bridge collapsed, killing 46 people. Whether you see Mothman as a supernatural messenger or just a story wrapped around a real disaster, the accounts are rooted in something profoundly human: the experience of having a gut feeling that the future has already been decided.

A recent UK Times article, “How Your Body Predicts the Future,” tackled that very phenomenon.

This is the opening of the very interesting article:

As a professional and Olympic goalkeeper, Briana Scurry never looked at her opponent as she approached a penalty kick. At pivotal moments, she says, “my MO is to not even look, and just focus on what I need to do, on my preparation for everything”.

But in the Women’s World Cup final in 1999, the USA were tied with China and the game came down to a shootout, watched by 91,000 people inside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and up to 40 million at home. Scurry had failed to save the first two kicks. On the third, facing Liu Ying, Scurry did something differently.

“As I was walking into the penalty area to present myself for the save, I heard something in my mind say: ‘Look’,” Scurry says. She heeded the call. “I watched her approach the penalty spot, which is something that I didn’t normally do, and I knew right then that that was the one I was going to save.”

In that split second before Ying kicked, Scurry says, “time slowed down. Everything she did was slow motion and very clear. She opened her hips up, she approached short from the same side, I saw the inside of her foot she was using, so I knew exactly where she was going before she kicked the ball.”

It explained that what we call intuition is not a prophecy from the beyond but a rapid, almost invisible process in the brain. Without our conscious awareness, we absorb tiny cues from our surroundings—changes in facial expression, a shift in the air, even faint environmental signals—and our brain knits those pieces together into a conclusion before we’ve had time to reason it out. That conclusion often arrives as a quiet certainty, one that feels as if it came from nowhere.

The article also drew a line between true intuition and anxiety. Intuition tends to feel calm and steady, the kind of insight you can sit with without urgency, while anxiety is loud and insistent, driving you toward action through fear rather than understanding.

I’ve had moments that made me wonder which side of that divide I was on. Once, driving on a rural road, I felt with no logical reason that a deer would cross ahead. I slowed down, and sure enough, a mile later it happened. Another time, I bought a raffle ticket convinced (like …convinced) that I would win. I did. Of course, there are countless other days when I’ve bought tickets and lost or driven without seeing a thing, and those moments vanish from memory. That’s part of the trap: we remember the eerie hits and forget the ordinary misses, which makes the rare times our gut is right feel supernatural.

Lately, the internet has been resurfacing clips of Sylvia Browne, the gravel-voiced psychic who dominated daytime talk shows in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Lately, the internet has been resurfacing clips of Sylvia Browne, the gravel-voiced psychic who dominated daytime talk shows in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Sylvia Browne’s persona was built on certainty.. telling grieving families exactly what had happened to missing loved ones, forecasting apocalyptic events, making sweeping predictions on live television. Sometimes she was right, but often she was not. In one notorious case, she told the parents of Amanda Berry, who had been kidnapped, that their daughter was dead. Amanda was found alive years later. Yet Browne’s unwavering confidence kept audiences hooked, because people are drawn to anyone who claims to pierce the veil of the unknown.

This is where I think the “Sylvia Browne Effect” comes into play. When public psychics deliver their visions with theatrical conviction, they blur the line between genuine, personal intuition and staged prediction. For believers, it can feel like proof that the paranormal is real; for skeptics, it’s a reason to dismiss all gut feelings as trickery. The problem is that both reactions miss the point. Intuition is a real cognitive process, shaped by our experiences and environment, but it can be warped by bias, fear, or desire, and that’s where performance and reality start to overlap.

For those of us who enjoy the paranormal and horror, knowing this doesn’t take away the thrill. It can actually make it more intense. There’s still room for the mystery.. it is the moment when your stomach drops or the air feels different, the hair-raising sense that something’s about to happen. But there’s also the awareness that our brains are extraordinary pattern-recognition machines, capable of keeping us alive in ways we don’t always understand.

When I think of the Mothman legend, I don’t just see it as a cryptid tale. I see it as a metaphor for that strange overlap between belief and biology, between the stories we tell to explain our instincts and the quiet, relentless work our minds are doing behind the scenes.

The challenge is not to choose one over the other, but to hold both in our hands at once…the science that explains so much, and the shadow of the unknown that keeps us looking over our shoulder.

Because sometimes, the most chilling part of an encounter isn’t what you saw, but the feeling you had about it before you even knew it was there.