Educational Media Reviews Online

In this skillfully produced documentary from the long-running Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series The Nature of Things, intuitiveness and other psychic abilities are examined. Whether labeled luck, instinct, gut feelings, clairvoyance, therapeutic healing, prayer, ESP or telepathy, these occurrences are neither easily explained nor adequately disproved. Using anecdotal evidence from ordinary people who experienced unexplainable events in the course of daily life, the case for a wider recognition of the reality of paranormal phenomena is presented. Interviews with credentialed experts--an astronaut, a parapsychologist, a physicist, and several medical doctors—provide further argument that there are multiple ways of knowing the universe and not all of those ways fit neatly into conventional, rational wisdom. The film attempts to show that scientific methods can be applied to the study of the paranormal and several tests are mentioned or demonstrated. However, by also calling for new definitions of the scientific method to include more attention to “quantum interconnectedness,” the message becomes somewhat diluted. Do those who study psychic abilities want to be accepted into the conventional scientific community or do they want to create a new branch of science? Crisply written and edited, the film may provide the starting point for a thought-provoking discussion on scientific method, cognition and the human need to understand the cosmos. As such and because of its high technical quality, Intuition is recommended for high school and undergraduate psychology programs, as well as general adult audiences.