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Intuition Is the Highest Form of Intelligence

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by Bruce Kasanoff

This is an expanded version of an article I first published on Forbes; that piece has been read over 1.3 million times.

Intuition, argues Gerd Gigerenzer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, is less about suddenly "knowing" the right answer and more about instinctively understanding what information is unimportant and can thus be discarded.

Gigerenzer, author of the book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, says that he is both intuitive and rational. "In my scientific work, I have hunches. I can’t explain always why I think a certain path is the right way, but I need to trust it and go ahead. I also have the ability to check these hunches and find out what they are about. That’s the science part. Now, in private life, I rely on instinct. For instance, when I first met my wife, I didn’t do computations. Nor did she."

I'm telling you this because recently one of my readers, Joy Boleda, posed a question that stopped me in my tracks:

What about intuition? It has never been titled as a form of intelligence, but would you think that someone who has great intuition in things, has more intelligence?

My "gut instinct" is to say yes, especially when we are talking about people who are already intellectually curious, rigorous in their pursuit of knowledge, and willing to challenge their own assumptions.

Let me put this a bit simpler. If all you do is sit in a chair and trust your intuition, you are not exercising much intelligence. But if you take a deep dive into a subject and study numerous possibilities, you are exercising intelligence when your gut instinct tells you what is - and isn't - important.

In some respects, intuition could be thought of as a clear understanding of collective intelligence. For example, most web sites are today organized in an intuitive way, which means they are easy for most people to understand and navigate. This approach evolved after many years of chaos online, as a common wisdom emerged over what information was superfluous and what was essential (i.e. About Us = essential).

Theo Humphries argues that intuitive design can be described as "understandable without the use of instructions". This is true when an object makes sense to most people because they share a common understanding of the way things work.

You might say that I'm a believer in the power of disciplined intuition. Do your legwork, use your brain, share logical arguments, and I'll trust and respect your intuitive powers. But if you merely sit in your hammock and ask me to trust your intuition, I'll quickly be out the door without saying goodbye.

I say this from personal experience; the more research I do, the better my intuition works.

Although this may be a paraphrase of his thoughts on the subject, Albert Einstein has been widely quoted as saying, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Sometimes, a corporate mandate or group-think or your desire to produce a certain outcome can cause your rational mind to go in the wrong direction. At times like these, it is intuition that holds the power to save you. That "bad feeling" gnawing away at you is your intuition telling you that no matter how badly you might wish to talk yourself into this direction, it is the wrong way to go.

Smart people listen to those feelings. And the smartest people among us - the ones who make great intellectual leaps forward - cannot do this without harnessing the power of intuition.

Wharton professor Adam Grant, author of numerous bestselling books, recently observed that, “Writers and physicists report that 20% of their most important ideas happen during mind wandering—and those ideas are more likely to be ‘aha’ moments.”

He then suggests, “Time set aside to daydream is an essential part of a creative day.”

Is this how your company works? Does it carve out time for people to be creative and to explore?

In many cases, the answer is no. That may be why large companies often hit a wall and stop innovating, or growing. Small companies hit this wall, too, whenever a leadership team gets too rigid or regimented.

There are limits to what discipline and data can produce. Our increasingly “data-driven” world has severe limitations.

Writing a few years ago in The New York Times, Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis pointed out that "A big data analysis might reveal... that from 2006 to 2011 the United States murder rate was well correlated with the market share of Internet Explorer: Both went down sharply. But it’s hard to imagine there is any causal relationship between the two."

In other words, big data does some things very well, but it is a long way from a magic solution to, well, anything. And yet we are increasingly surrounded by leaders and organizations that want to make every decision based on data.

But there's another problem, and it's a significant one: big data can be just as biased as your stubborn old uncle who thinks everyone who disagrees with him is an idiot.

According to the Irish Times, "researchers at Eurecat — the Catalonian Centre for Technology — in Spain and the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Italy, agreed that 'algorithmic bias exists even when there is no discrimination intention in the developer of the algorithm'."

This does not mean that the programmers were biased; it could also be that the data sources contained certain forms of bias.

The antidote to such flaws and weaknesses is not more data. Instead, we need to raise the amount of respect given to the very human skill of intuition. Mind you, I'm not talking about blind hunches or a "feeling" that comes over you one Sunday night while you watch House of Cards.

In the context of professional organizations, intuition literally means arriving with confidence at an answer without being able to explain how you got to that answer. In the big data era, being unable to explain your logic is a huge liability, and yet this is exactly what happens with expert intuition.

In the years ahead, artificial intelligence and automation are going to kill millions of jobs, maybe even your job. You're not going to be able to protect your job simply by acting more like a computer… because every computer will be able to out-computer you.

Instead, you need to foster uniquely human skills, such as intuition. The same is true for your organization. Human qualities will become more important in the years ahead, not less.

I'm a realist. Many leaders and professionals will read this article and scoff at my conclusions. They'll argue that gut instinct is the realm of biased, lazy workers. They'll say that facts and logic rule today, nothing else.

Time will tell. I'd still bet on the judgment of true experts — actual human beings — who know how to study the data, apply rational thoughts, but ultimately also trust their intuition.

In far too many cases, the facts tell you to do one thing, but your intuition screams the opposite. When that happens to me, I never ignore those screams.

My best invention is Ikigai Explorer, which stops you from wasting any more of your precious life. You can find it here.

Honesty without Compassion is Cruelty

by Bruce Kasanoff

I am a Creative Partner to entrepreneurs. Reach out to schedule a complimentary introductory call with me.

While in a meeting several years ago, I saw the words "honesty without compassion is cruelty" posted above the other person's desk. It so struck me that I paused the conversation for a moment to absorb the intent.

People like to say that honesty is the best policy, and many segments of society are increasingly focused on getting at the truth. Schools are obsessed with standardized tests. Companies want better metrics to measure, well, everything. Nearly everyone is connected to everyone else... and these connections produce data that provide an honest picture of reality.

I'm worried that these honest snapshots of the truth could lead us to a far crueler world.

For example, think about the last couple of years and ask yourself whether our public discourse is getting kinder or harsher?

(I rest my case.)

In a civilized world, honesty and compassion need to go hand in hand. You must use honesty to help other people, not to hurt them. And you must be extremely cautious not to accidentally harm others.

When you meet up with a friend you haven't seen in a year, you wouldn't immediately say, "You are 17 pounds heaver than you were last year."

Why not?

Doing so would be tactless and cruel, so instead you say something like, "It is so great to see you again," while you might think to yourself that your friend looks a bit on the heavy side.

Technology allows us to gather massive amounts of data on human beings. If you take a test online, a system is theoretically capable of not only revealing how many answers you got correct, but also whether it took you more time (or less) to take the test versus others.

You don't need to know that you were slower than 42% of the people who took that test... and neither does anyone else.

If we are going to gather more data about our collective lives, we will also need to muster more compassion.

What can you do to move us in the right direction?

  1. Be discreet. Resist the movement to document every aspect of your work or personal life. There are true advantages to preserving gray areas in which people can let their hair down and relax.

  2. Be human. Recognize that humanity is more important than the absolute truth. Use facts to help another improve his or her life, rather than to do something that might destroy their life.

  3. Be cautious. Recognize that the "truth" is always subjective. Each of us sees "facts" through a haze of beliefs, attitudes and experiences. No single test can judge the worth or potential of another human being.

  4. Be generous. Ask more of yourself. The best skill is bringing out talent in others, so rather than judging others, do your best to help them.

Beliefs About Time

There’s a moment in Scott Britton’s recent podcast with Martha Beck when everything quietly falls into place.

You feel it. Not because she says something persuasive—but because her joy begins spilling through the screen, and then through your chest, until you remember something you didn’t know you had forgotten:

The analytical, logical left side of your brain will not guide you safely through life. It won’t connect you with the love and joy you’re seeking.

But your right brain might.

This is my favorite episode of Scott’s podcast—by far. And that’s saying a lot. He’s a former tech entrepreneur who’s spent the last six or seven years actively seeking a higher level of consciousness.

Martha, a Harvard-trained sociologist who has had more out-of-body, psychic, and reality-bending experiences than most mystics, does something astonishing: she bridges two worlds that rarely meet. She takes the mystical and makes it practical. She wraps love around suffering. She talks about bending time—not as theory, but as lived truth.

At one point, Scott says:

“Imagine that… I know what I'm supposed to be doing, and I'm doing it. But for whatever reason, life still feels kind of hard—like the fruit isn’t ready to harvest yet.”

He asks Martha what advice she has for people who feel like they’re in integrity… but life still isn’t clicking.

Here’s where it gets beautiful.

Martha responds with a series of statements that gently dismantle our most basic assumptions about time:

  • “Examine very, very closely your beliefs about time… If you look at the physics of it, nobody understands why it only seems to run in one direction. And we do know it’s highly malleable. That’s what Einstein said—it actually does stretch and collapse.”

  • “Time is something our culture believes in absolutely. And because of that, a lot of us think we’re in the wrong place in time…. It’s not happening fast enough. My God, I’m too late. I’m too old.”

  • “If I had just reached through time to the place where I knew I was supposed to end up—and felt that it had already happened, from a perspective outside of time—I would have been as satisfied through the whole run-up as I was after I received what I was asking for.”

It’s hard to fully grok this part of the conversation without listening to the 57 minutes that come before it, but please trust me: it will make sense.

What struck me most is this:

Martha doesn’t dismiss or bypass our suffering. She honors it. And then gently invites us to let it guide us home.

“Wherever you find psychological suffering, there you will find a misalignment between your beliefs and your deepest truth. Pain is pain. But suffering? Suffering is the whisper of your soul saying, ‘Not this way.’”

She also says we live in “the most frightened culture in the history of the world—a society that teaches fear is productive, even virtuous. That fear keeps us anxious, distracted, and disconnected from presence.

“So I came to think that the awakened mind is simply a functioning human brain that has completely gone past fear and anxiety. And if you can do that, it just opens for you like a flower.”

She even calls out Amazon’s culture of fear as a prime example of how our left-brained systems are actively stoking panic as a business strategy.

“Every Amazon employee has to wake up terrified and stay terrified all day because that’s how you get productivity,” Martha quotes Jeff Bezos as saying—and she’s not okay with that logic.

“Thousands of people who are barely making ends meet are being told to live in fear—not to become wealthy themselves, but so one of the wealthiest people in the world can become wealthier still.”

If you enjoy living in fear, go ahead and delete this email.

But if you’re ready to experience love and joy every day—even in an imperfect world—I urge you to listen to this extraordinary conversation between two people who’ve walked the path, and want to show you how to do the same.

Personally, this episode has me focused on ways to turn off my left brain more often. Over the past three days, I have walked about nine miles a day, simply wandering through Manhattan; late yesterday afternoon, I took the photo in at the top of this issue.

Lean into Resistance

by Bruce Kasanoff

I come to you with wonderful news!

You already possess a treasure map.

The treasure map will lead you to everything you want in life, including many desires you have that you don't even recognize yet.

The map uses an ingenious system to guide you. I can explain it in just three words: lean into resistance.

The mere fact that you find it hard to talk about a given subject is reason enough that you should force yourself to talk about it.

If you are hesitant to change a habit that hasn't been working for you, that hesitance is solid evidence you need to change the habit.

Resistance, in the form of your own internal reluctance to say or do something, is how you find your treasure. It is what nature uses to test whether you are worthy of finding the treasure.

For eleven years (and counting), I have had deep weekly conversations with a small handful of entrepreneurs, coaches and consultants. Over that time, I have seen that the topics people are most reluctant to discuss are the spaces in which each person has the greatest potential for growth, additional impact and a more fulfilling life.

To cite a personal example, I have been known to avoid topics that might make me overly emotional or anxious. Well, guess what? Those are the areas in which I have finally—kicking and screaming and dragging my feet—made real progress. It would have been preferable to make such progress 20 years ago, but...

Such is the nature of resistance; it masquerades as your friend, but really is keeping you away from your treasure.

I bet you have already observed friends and colleagues misunderstanding how to deal with resistance. Perhaps they make the same ill-guided decisions repeatedly or they fall victim to the same blind spots? That's the result of running around resistance rather than confronting it head on. If you can see this misguided response in others, learn from it. Lean into resistance.

Try this... play with the difference between fear and FEAR. Don't tackle immediately the most vulnerable part of your life. Instead, pick an area in which you feel a little bit of fear and unease. Lean into your resistance and do the opposite of what your inner voice is suggesting. Poke where you are a little bit sensitive.

When that works, pick an area that's slightly more challenging. Over time, you may even be ready to confront your one or two most resistant areas. That is where your treasure lies.

The Future Already Knows

A flashlight flicks on. Just an everyday light source. But imagine this: the photons it emits — before anyone decides how long the flashlight will stay on — already behave differently based on that future choice.

This is not fiction. This is physics. Experimental physics, repeated over 365 days.

Julia Mossbridge, a cognitive neuroscientist with a sideline in messing with our understanding of time, just published her first peer-reviewed physics paper. The study replicates and expands on something she calls CADS — Causally Ambiguous Duration Sorting — and if she’s right, the implications are staggering.

Let me try to explain what she found, in plain language.

The Setup

You have a machine that turns on a light and records photon counts — how many little particles of light get absorbed — during a short “pre-decision” period. Then, after this, the machine randomly decides how long to keep the light on: sometimes a few seconds, sometimes several minutes.

The key here is that the machine doesn’t know the duration in advance. A truly random number generator (powered by a tank of scintillating oil, because apparently that’s a thing) makes the choice after the early measurements are taken.

Now here’s the kicker: those early photon counts — again, taken before the decision is made — vary in statistically significant ways depending on the future duration.

Let me say that again: particles of light seem to “know” how long they’ll be shining, before that decision has even been made.

What?

Exactly. This is why Mossbridge’s work is so hard to categorize. It’s not just “spooky action at a distance.” It’s spooky action back in time. It's as though time isn't flowing forward or backward at all, but unfolding all at once.

She puts it poetically: “Each event of a different duration may have its own distinct signature woven through the universal calculation of spacetime.”

This “woven” metaphor isn’t just artistic license. The photons appear to be grouped, entangled not just in space, but in time. The boundaries of their grouping aren’t spatial — they’re temporal: when the light turns on and when it turns off. These on-off times seem to define something like a shared identity across time.

The CADS Equation

Mossbridge was able to derive an equation that estimates the magnitude of this effect based on the future duration. The paper is based on physicist Winthrop William's replication data, but Mossbridge designed and conducted the analyses, and derived the equation. Previous papers (Mossbridge 2019, 2021) established the effect.

This is extraordinary. It suggests we’re not just seeing statistical noise, but a predictable, measurable relationship between future and past.

Now, before you start building a time machine or sending love letters to your former self, know this: the CADS effect doesn’t allow messaging the past — at least not yet. The data is still probabilistic and group-based, not individual and deterministic.

Still... the photons know. That much is clear.

And Then the Moon Showed Up

Just when things couldn’t get weirder, the year-long dataset revealed another anomaly: the photon absorption rates varied with the lunar cycle.

Yes. The Moon.

Specifically, photon counts dipped during both the new moon and the full moon — two phases with wildly different luminance. This suggests something more subtle at play, maybe gravitational or electromagnetic influences. Nobody knows yet.

But it’s a reminder that we’re swimming in unseen tides.

Why This Matters

If CADS holds up, it strengthens the idea that time is not a straight line. It hints that the universe may unfold all at once, and what we experience as the passage of time is just us walking through a pre-woven fabric.

It also means that some part of us — the unconscious mind, perhaps — may be sensitive to these ripples from the future. Mossbridge has been studying this human sensitivity for years. She believes our minds are already tapping into this timeless structure, in dreams, intuition, and moments we brush off as coincidence.

So maybe — just maybe — our sense of something happening before it happens has a quantifiable means of unfolding; it’s no more “woo woo” than the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening. It’s just a form of perception we don’t yet understand.

The Bottom Line

We may not be living in linear time.

Instead, we might be navigating a universe that’s whispering clues from every direction — future included.

Ponder that this weekend.

Have a Mystical Experience

by Bruce Kasanoff

The basic idea: An international, multi-disciplinary team of researchers has identified two attributes that make individuals more likely to have vivid experiences of God (and spirits). They conducted four studies involving over 2,000 participants across five countries: the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China and Vanuatu.

The first attribute is porosity, which the researchers define as: the idea that the boundary between “the mind” and “the world” is permeable. Intuitions that wishes or curses might come true, that strong emotions might linger in a room to affect others, or that some people might be able to read minds are examples of porosity.

The second attribute is absorption, defined as: an individual’s personal tendency to be engrossed in sensory or imagined events. People with a greater capacity for absorption tend to “lose themselves” in their sensory experiences and are capable of conjuring vivid imagined events. For example, they might get so caught up in music that they do not notice anything else, or they might feel that they experience the world the way they did as a child.

The greater your leanings towards porosity and absorption, the more likely you are to have spiritual experiences.

A bit more background: I realize today's topic is a huge subject to tackle in a newsletter designed to be read in about one minute. Fortunately, there are three excellent resources already available online:

In particular, I found fascinating this passage from the paper:

Some distinction between an “inner” mind and an “outer” world likely exists in most cultural models of the mind. Most of these models also include everyday ways in which such a boundary might be crossed (e.g., thoughts being exchanged across minds through conversation). When people in a particular context speak of divine inspiration, divination, telepathy, witchcraft, or miraculous healing, they accept that, for some people, under some circumstances, knowledge enters the mind from the outside in unusual ways and emotions or intentions leave the mind to affect the world in unusual ways. These representations likely draw on common human experiences—insight, intuition, wishing, awe—but the ethnographic record makes clear that the ways in which the inner–outer, mind–world boundary is drawn, and the more extraordinary means by which it might be crossed, vary across social worlds. Different social-cultural settings invite people to attend or disattend to this distinction; to take some experiences more seriously than others; to identify different sets of conditions under which these events can occur; and to invoke different causal mechanisms to explain these events. We speculate that cultural differences in models of the mind reflect, at least in part, the incentives provided by different social conditions.

I'd summarize things this way: if you think you are separate and alone, you are. But if you perceive yourself—and your mind—as being interconnected with the world around you, then you are likely to have a completely different, much more spiritual existence.

I would love to hear both your reaction to this study as well as your own personal experiences in this regard.

One last comment: it pleases me to see a rigorous academic approach to a subject like this that is often the province of self-help books. Here are the researchers and their affiliations:

John C. Dulin, Vivian A. Dzokoto, Cristine H. Legare, Michael Lifshitz, Emily Ng, Nicole Ross-Zehnder, and Rachel E. Smith

Department of Anthropology, Stanford University

Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Department of Behavioral Science, Utah Valley University

Department of African and African American Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University,

Department of Psychology, The University of Texas, Austin,

Department of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam,

Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.

Don't Be a Smartypants

Intelligence isn't the Holy Grail; clarity is.

I know a lot of smart people, including virtually all of my clients. Many find it difficult to focus on one idea at a time. They get so excited by new insights and opportunities, that the words can come racing out.

But even a series of brilliant ideas are bound to confuse others. People don't want eight genius ideas. They want one actionable, understandable and useful insight.

The tough part isn't finding something of value to say; it is limiting yourself to one such gem.

As you wander across social media today (and then the rest of your world), stop and consider the different communications you encounter. How many of them have one powerful idea, instead of a mishmash of thoughts? My guess is that you won't find many offerings with one solid idea.

If you want to reach and help others, resist the impulse to impress. Instead, just offer one clear and simple message.

Cherish Time

Albert Einstein is reported to have said, "Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."

But when you dig a little deeper, it turns out that Einstein created this anecdote to help his secretary deal with the vast volume of inquiries pouring in asking for explanations of his theory of relativity.

So, to better manage his time and that of his secretary, Einstein came up with the shortest, simplest, and most engaging sound bite possible. The man who understood time better than any other human also knew how precious it is.

Don't cherish money, power, or fame. Cherish time, and figure out ways to protect the time you are able to devote to what truly matters to you.

Growth is Hard

Growth is HARD. Anyone who tells you otherwise is almost certainly not growing.

Growth requires discomfort and hardship. For periods of time, you might feel like a moron, or at least an absolute beginner.

It's natural to question your sanity. Why did you leave your cushy existence to tackle a new challenge, learn a new skill, or reboot your entire career?

You did it because you are capable of more. Much more. You did it because you are brave and strong and willing to endure hardship.

You don't need it to be easy. You just need it to work.

All content copyright 2026 by Bruce Kasanoff. All rights reserved.