Noetic Business Defined

The word “noetic” comes from the ancient Greek nous, for which there is no exact equivalent in English. It refers to “inner knowing,” a kind of intuitive consciousness—direct and immediate access to knowledge beyond what is available to our normal senses and the power of reason.

The term “noetic science” has been in use for many years, but was brought into mainstream consciousness with the release of Dan Brown’s book, The Lost Symbol, in 2009.  The book is an artful weaving together of fact and fiction, and the real-life Institute of Noetic Sciences is mentioned several times in the book, as are many of the actual real-life experiments conducted by IONS.

But What is “Noetic Business”?

“Noetic business” is a scientific explanation for “business hunches” or “gut feel”.  It provides scientific proof for skeptics of the “aha” moment.

Joel Levey, Ph.D. of InnerWork Technologies, Inc. describes intuition as “direct, unmediated knowing which functions in a realm prior to thought and is different from thinking.” Levey maintains that if we learn to listen deeply enough, intuition will reveal significant, profound insight into any question we hold in our mind.

Gary Zukav, who wrote The Dancing Wu Li Masters, An Overview of the New Physics and Seat of the Soul, speaks of “non-physical guidance which always prompts you to your highest goals, the goals of your soul.” That, Zukav maintains, is intuition.

Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist is credited with having said, “It is fashionable stupidity to regard everything one cannot explain as a fraud.” In a similar vein, well regarded author and management scholar Henry Mintzberg maintains that it isn’t possible to assess the use of intuition by purely logical processes: “It is a subconscious process, which no one really understands, except by certain of its characteristics (such as the speed with which it can sometimes produce answers.) Thus the dismissal of intuition as an irrational process is itself irrational, just as embracing it as a process superior to formal logic is itself illogical.”

The good news, though, is that intuition can now be understood and explained, using results of experiments conducted over many years by the Institute of Noetic Sciences.