EEJ Issue #62

The End of the Spectrum Nobody Talks About

Why the arguably most powerful dimension of intuition keeps getting left out of the conversation

Welcome to The Executive Energy Journal, written for professionals who choose to lead with purposeful clarity. A grounded, science-informed take on managing subtle energy, spanning from neuroscience to spiritual connection.

How EEJ works

• What's measurable: what research and observable mechanisms support
• What's unknown: where evidence ends, and interpretation begins
• What I do pragmatically anyway: the simplest reliable practice I use with clients
• Your role: take what is useful and leave the rest

1. Where I started, and where I've been

When I began writing this journal, I wrote a lot about intuition.

I wrote about it as a spectrum; from the fast, pattern-based recognition that research calls system one processing, all the way to the quieter, more expanded kind of knowing that doesn't seem to originate in personal, accumulated experience at all.

I've had clients across that entire range, and I noticed that the people who functioned well at the far, transpersonal end of it were not confused or vague. They were often among the most precise thinkers I had worked with. They simply had access to more of the signal.

Over time, as EEJ evolved and the audience grew, I moved closer to what could be verified. I leaned into neuroscience, into mechanism, because that approach is also useful and interesting.

But the more I work with the question of release — why understanding something does not automatically free you from it — the more clearly I see that the answer lives partly at the end of the spectrum I've been writing less about.

So this issue is a return to the full map.

2. The whole picture of intuition

The most common mistake in discussions of intuition is treating it as a single thing that either exists or doesn't, works or doesn't, can be trusted or can't.

In research terms, intuition has no clean common definition across scientific fields precisely because it operates differently at different levels of processing. Adinolfi and Loia (2022) argue that intuition is best understood as an emergent phenomenon. Something that arises from the interaction of multiple levels of processing simultaneously, rather than residing cleanly in any one of them. That framing is more accurate than most popular accounts, and it supports something I have worked with practically for two decades.

The continuum looks roughly like this.

• At one end: intuition as rapid pattern recognition. The brain draws on accumulated experience and delivers a conclusion before conscious analysis can catch up. This is what Daniel Kahneman's work describes as system one processing, and it is efficient, reliable in familiar domains, and well-documented. A seasoned consultant who senses in the first ten minutes of a client conversation that something is structurally wrong, before anyone has said anything explicit, is likely drawing on this.
• In the middle: intuition as deep integration. This is the kind of knowing that emerges not from speed but from stillness, from the mind moving between focused and diffuse processing, from a question that has been allowed space rather than pushed. It often arrives after a night's sleep, or in the pause between one task and the next. It is less about what you have learned and more about what the system can integrate when it is not being forced.
• At the other end: something that researchers in transpersonal psychology and some cognitive scientists are beginning to take seriously again. A mode of perception that seems to extend beyond the individual processing system. Where information arrives that cannot be cleanly traced to prior experience or current environmental input. The perceptive professional registers something about a future event, a person's unexpressed state, or a systemic pattern that they could not have inferred from available data alone.

I work with clients across all three positions. The first two are where most professional development conversation stops. The third is where the most interesting and least-discussed questions currently live.

3. What the current research says and why it matters for release

Take a slow breath before this section. What follows asks something of your thinking.

In the previous issue, I left a thread open deliberately. I mentioned that some things stay active in the system not because they are unresolved in content terms, but because the frame is too narrow. That when the system is oriented only toward the immediate interaction, it keeps circling. And that when it reconnects to something larger, the grip often loosens.

I called it an incomplete area. I want to develop it now.

In research terms, the experience of awe — the specific state that arises when something vast challenges your existing framework of understanding — produces measurable reductions in default mode network activity (DMN). The DMN is the brain's self-referential system: the one that generates the internal narrator and the rumination loops.

When awe is present, the DMN quiets. Not through effort or discipline, but through orientation toward something larger than the bounded self.

A 2023 review by Monroy and Keltner found that awe experiences, across diverse contexts, spontaneous and cultivated, are associated with reduced self-referential processing, lower stress markers, and increased sense of connection. The mechanism is not mystical. It is structural: a different orientation of attention produces a different neurological state, and that state is one in which holding gives way more readily to release.

A preprint published in March 2026 (not yet peer-reviewed, so I am flagging it) identified a distributed brain network whose disruption increases trait self-transcendence. The finding is striking: the network that normally limits self-transcendence overlaps significantly with the default mode network. In other words, the same system that drives rumination and the inability to release may be what actively suppresses the transpersonal dimension of perception under ordinary conditions.

I am not claiming this proves anything about subtle energy or expanded perception. It does suggest that self-transcendence is a structural capacity, not only a belief system. Something present in our architecture, available in varying degrees, and not accessible through more individualistic effort.

This connects directly to the question of release. If the self-referential system is what holds, and if contact with something larger is what allows that system to loosen its grip, then the transpersonal end of the intuition spectrum is not a "spiritual luxury". It is part of the mechanism.

4. The problem with solving everything alone

There is a cultural context to all of this that is worth naming here.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes contemporary work culture as an achievement society: one that has shifted from external authority enforcing limits to internal self-exploitation with no limits.

The modern professional is not disciplined by an institution, but by themselves. Han describes the depressive achievement subject: someone entirely incapable of stepping outward, of relying on anything beyond their own sovereign processing capacity.

This is clearly an extreme, but it is also a description of a particular relationship to intuition and to release.

When the self is the only reference point, every signal gets routed back through the same processor.

Every intuitive hit gets interrogated by the same analytical system that generated the question. So, attempts at release become cognitive tasks assigned to the same already-loaded system.

This model of professional development (optimise yourself, manage yourself, regulate yourself, perform yourself) also eliminates the very orientation that allows the deepest processing to occur. Perceptive professionals have capacity, that's obvious. But this narrow framing keeps routing their perception through a filter that often goes unnoticed.

5. What I cannot honestly claim

I want to be precise here, as always.

The neuroscience of self-transcendence is real and growing, but it does not prove the full range of what practitioners and clients describe at the transpersonal end of the intuition spectrum.

Research can support the idea that orienting toward something beyond the self changes brain state. It can support the idea that this shift is associated with reduced rumination and greater wellbeing, even flourishing. It can support the idea that self-transcendence has a neural architecture rather than being purely a belief.

It cannot prove that expanded perception — the sense of knowing something that the individual system could not have processed from available data — is accessing a real external signal, rather than generating an internally but not externally valid one. The capacity is real, but calibration of it is not guaranteed.

What I observe in practice is that the perceptive professionals who work well at the transpersonal end of the spectrum are not credulous. They are, if anything, more careful about the difference between signal and noise than those who only work with the pattern-recognition end. They have had to develop discernment precisely because the signal is less structured, less verifiable, and more easily contaminated by their own unprocessed material.

The transpersonal dimension is not where you go when you want certainty. It is where you go when the "individual processor" has reached the edge of what it can achieve alone.

6. What I do pragmatically anyway

I have worked with clients at every major point on this continuum, and I have observed that where a person sits on it is not fixed. It shifts with state, with context, with the degree to which their system is overloaded, and with how much of their perceptive capacity is being used for self-monitoring versus actual sensing.

A person operating under the conditions Han describes, performing, optimising, solving, holding everything themselves, will tend to experience intuition primarily at the pattern-recognition end, and will often be challenged to hear from the middle and far end.

Not because those capacities are absent, but because the self-referential system is too active to allow the weaker, subtler signal through.

In practical terms, I do not try to push people toward the transpersonal end. Instead, we reduce the noise that blocks access to the fuller range. That means helping the system release what it is holding unnecessarily, locate what actually belongs to the wider situation rather than to the self, and return to a state in which perception can operate more freely.

When that happens, clients sometimes find that the transpersonal end of their spectrum becomes available again, as something that had simply been crowded out.

The continuum does not need to be believed in to be worked with. It only needs to be taken seriously enough to stop cutting it off at the edge of what is currently comfortable to acknowledge.

A brief pause

Notice where you are on this intuitive spectrum right now.

Not where you think you should be, or where you used to be, or where this article might be suggesting you could be.

Just notice where you actually are today. What kind of knowing feels available? What feels crowded or inaccessible? Is there something you have been trying to resolve through more analysis that might belong to a different register?

You don't need to do anything with that yet.

7. If the load is too constant for the signal to come through

The Quick Preview audio guides you through the start of the exact sequence I use to clear the density that blocks access to the full range of perception, before you walk into your next meeting, or at the end of a day when the self-referential loop is running loud. [Listen here]

8. Let this settle

You have been reading about something that the professional world mostly treats as either obvious ("of course intuition is pattern recognition") or embarrassing or uncomfortable (anything beyond that).

Neither response is accurate.

The full spectrum is real as a lived and practical map. Parts of it are increasingly supported by research, while the far end still requires discernment and humility.

I'm not asking you to position yourself on it today. You do not need to defend it, explain it, or even fully believe it.

The continuum has been present in your work longer than you may have realised. What may be new is simply the permission to acknowledge the whole range. 

Until next Sunday,

Niina

References

• Adinolfi, P. and Loia, F. (2022) Intuition as Emergence: Bridging Psychology, Philosophy and Organizational Science. Front. Psychol. 12:787428.  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.787428
• Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press. 
• Hu X., Zhang H. and Geng M. (2023) Letting go or giving up? The influence of self-transcendence meaning of life on goal adjustment in high action crisis. Front. Psychol. 14:1054873. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1054873
• Hu, T., Leppänen, I. and Franco, L. A. (2025). “Intuition in Decision Making: Insights From Drift Diffusion Modeling.” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making38, no. 3: e70033. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.70033
• Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2023). Awe as a Pathway to Mental and Physical Health. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 309 320. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221094856
• Tran, T. Q., et al. (2026). A network for self-transcendence derived from patients with brain lesions. bioRxiv [preprint, not yet peer-reviewed]. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.24.713239
• van Elk, M., Arciniegas Gomez, M. A., van der Zwaag, W., van Schie, H. T., & Sauter, D. (2019). The neural correlates of the awe experience: Reduced default mode network activity during feelings of awe. Human Brain Mapping, 40(12), 3561–3574. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24616