How we see with our eyes closed

On clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience and claircognizance — and on what happens within us when, eyes closed, we see nothing at all

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“Imagine you are walking along a beach. You see the warm sand, the sea stretching to the horizon, the afternoon light on the water.”

The voice of the guided meditation goes on, gentle. All around, people breathe slowly. Some are smiling.

And someone, eyes closed, sees nothing. Not a blurry beach, not a pale sea. Nothing. Only the darkness behind the eyelids and, perhaps, the feeling that everyone else has received something he hasn't.

After the meditation, one person says she saw colors, a gate, a guide. Another says she “felt” the presence of a grandmother. And the man who saw nothing stays quiet and wonders, not for the first time, whether something is wrong with him. Whether he is “closed.” Whether he simply doesn't have the gift.

I have heard this question too many times to consider it an exception. And I think it deserves to be taken seriously, from two directions at once: what we know about how people experience their inner world, and what spiritual traditions say about the paths by which what we call intuition, message or subtle perception reaches us.

The words that begin with “clair”

In today's spiritual language, the “subtle senses” are often divided into four:

Clairvoyance — information arrives as an image: scenes, symbols, colors, faces seen “with the mind's eye.”

Clairaudience — information arrives as sound or words: a voice, a phrase, a melody that appears in the mind.

Clairsentience — information arrives through the body and emotion: a tightness in the chest, a warmth, a sadness that doesn't seem to be your own.

Claircognizance — information arrives as plain knowing: you know something without being able to say how.

The division is intuitive and, for many, useful. But it isn't as old as it seems.

The wordclairvoyancespread among the French magnetizers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From 1784 onward, the Marquis de Puységur described people who, in the state he called “magnetic somnambulism,” seemed to see things hidden from ordinary sight. Clairaudience became a common term in nineteenth-century Spiritualism, alongside mediumship and séances in which messages were “received.” Clairsentience and claircognizance, as terms, are much more recent additions, from twentieth-century New Age literature.

This doesn't mean the experiences they describe are new. Socrates spoke of a daimonion, an inner voice that stopped him before he made a mistake. Joan of Arc heard voices. Prophets saw. Mystics from almost every tradition have described a knowing that did not pass through reason. What is relatively new is the system: the idea that there are four distinct channels and that each person has one or two “dominant” ones.

And this system bears a striking resemblance to another.

An uncomfortable parallel

In the 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the founders of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), proposed that each person has a “preferred representational system”: visual, auditory or kinesthetic, which could supposedly be recognized even from the words someone uses or the direction in which they move their eyes. Around the same time, a related but distinct idea was taking shape in education: “learning styles,” according to which some children learn better by seeing, others by hearing, others by doing. The first hypothesis was about how we think. The second, about how we ought to be taught. They influenced each other, but they are not the same model.

They are appealing ideas. The problem is that, when they were tested, they did not hold up. Studies that examined the NLP hypothesis — the existence of a stable, detectable preferred representational system — found no consistent support for it. And in the case of learning styles, a major review published in 2008 by Harold Pashler and his colleagues found no solid evidence that teaching matched to a student's “style” improves their learning.

Why does this matter for clairvoyance and the rest?

Because the four-“clair” typology resembles both in its structure: distinct sensory channels, a dominant type, an identity built around it. And the story of learning styles shows us how easily we mistake a described preference for a real architecture of the mind.

This says nothing about whether people have intuitive experiences. It only says that the way we have sorted them into categories is a map. And, like any map, it can be more rigid than the territory.

A spectrum, not a gift

If we want to understand why some people “see” and others don't, we first have to look at something far more ordinary than clairvoyance: the simple ability to imagine something.

In 1880, Francis Galton sent a questionnaire to hundreds of people. He asked them to recall that morning's breakfast table and to describe how clearly they “saw” it in their mind. The answers surprised him. Some described images almost as vivid as reality. Others, including many scientists, insisted they saw nothing and that “seeing with the mind's eye” was just a figure of speech.

The observation was largely forgotten for more than a century. Then, in 2015, neurologist Adam Zeman and his colleagues at the University of Exeter published a paper about people who have no visual mental imagery, and gave the phenomenon a name: aphantasia. After publication, thousands of people wrote to them. Many were discovering only then, at 30, 40 or 60, that for everyone else “imagine” had never been a metaphor.

How common is it? Estimates vary depending on the questionnaire and the threshold used, but the order of magnitude is roughly this: around 1% of people report having no visual imagery at all, and a few percent have very faint imagery. At the other end, another few percent describe hyperphantasia— inner images so vivid they resemble real perception. Most people fall somewhere between these extremes.

It isn't only what people say about themselves. In recent years, researchers have also found measurable traces. Joel Pearson's team at the University of New South Wales showed that, in most people, merely imagining a bright light makes the pupil constrict slightly, as if the light were real. In people with aphantasia, this effect is largely absent. The same group showed that, for those without visual imagery, what they imagine does not influence their subsequent perception the way it does for others.

And details emerge that complicate the simple picture. Many people with aphantasia still dream in images. Many can represent spatial relationships very well — where things are — without “seeing” them. And a 2021 study by the same team found that, when reading a description of a frightening scene, people with aphantasia show a much weaker physiological response than others. When they see a frightening photograph, however, their response is comparable.

What does this mean? That mental imagery is not mere decoration. It is one of the paths by which thoughts come to move us emotionally. And that, for some people, this path works differently. Not lesser in value. Differently.

One example: Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, has spoken publicly about having aphantasia. The man who helped create some of animation's richest imaginary worlds has never seen them with his eyes closed.

Imagination, in other words, is not the same thing as imagery.

Beyond images

Once we accept that visual imagery varies so much from person to person, it becomes natural to ask whether the same is true of the other “channels.” And here research begins to meet, without having planned to, the vocabulary of the four “clairs.”

Inner sound. Some people can “hear” a melody in their mind with all its instruments. Others hear nothing. For the absence of auditory imagery, some researchers have recently proposed the term anauraliaAnd studies of aphantasia show that many people without visual imagery also report weak imagery in other senses — but not all of them. There are people who see nothing yet hear perfectly.

The inner voice. Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, has spent decades studying inner experience with a simple method: participants wear a device that beeps at random, and they note exactly what was going on in their mind at that moment. One of his conclusions is that inner speech, which many of us assume is universal, occurs very often in some people and almost never in others. In 2024, Johanne Nedergaard and Gary Lupyan proposed a name for its absence: anendophasiaPeople with reduced inner speech in their study performed somewhat worse on a few verbal tasks, such as remembering words or judging rhymes. They thought — just by other routes.

The body. What spiritual language calls clairsentience has a close neighbor in psychology: interoception, the perception of signals from inside the body, such as the heartbeat, the breath or tension in the stomach. Research by Sarah Garfinkel and her colleagues has shown something important here: how much someone believes they feel their body and how accurately they perceive it, measured objectively, are two different things that don't always coincide. Someone can feel very intensely without perceiving very accurately. And vice versa.

Knowing without a reason. Claircognizance has a neighbor too: intuition,, studied by psychologists such as Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman. In a paper they wrote together in 2009, the two — who started from opposing camps — reached a shared conclusion: intuition is trustworthy mainly where the environment has regularities and where a person has received, over time, feedback on how often they were right. An experienced firefighter who “senses” that a building is about to collapse knows something real, even if he cannot say what.

It is worth saying clearly: the fact that these mechanisms exist does not prove that every experience called clairsentience or claircognizance can be reduced to them. Explaining a mechanism is not the same as explaining the whole experience. But it shows us something the spiritual typology tends to hide: that people's inner worlds are far more varied than four boxes.

When what we feel becomes what we think we know

So far we have talked about that inner experiences appear to us. But there is a question that runs through all four, and that the “clair” typology rarely touches: how do we know that what we feel tells us something true?

Take an example. In a group exercise — a meditation circle, a workshop or a constellation — someone suddenly feels pressure in the chest, an intense sadness, or the impulse to move away from another person in the room. The experience is real. The body really produces it. But what it means can have several explanations: a reaction to the context, one's own history, the group's implicit suggestion, an association the person isn't aware of, or the meaning they are constructing in that very moment.

That is why I think a simple distinction is worth keeping close at hand:

The experience is real. The interpretation is a hypothesis. Information about someone else requires verification.

The first idea here: the feeling of certainty does not guarantee truth.Neurologist Robert Burton has described certainty as a sensation of the mind — something we feel, not something we deduce — which can arise just as strongly when we are right as when we are wrong. Memory research has seen this directly. In 1986, the day after the Challenger space shuttle exploded, Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch asked students to write down where they were when they heard the news. Two and a half years later, many told a different story, with the same confidence. Some did not change their version even when shown their own notes.

The second idea: the body can send authentic signals without the explanation we give them being correct. The research on interoception mentioned above shows exactly this: feeling intensely and interpreting accurately are different abilities.

Third: intuition becomes more useful when it remains open to verification.We don't need to give it up, but to treat it as a good question rather than a verdict. “I feel something here. What might it mean? How could I find out?”

This distinction does not invalidate spiritual experience. On the contrary, it gives it a space in which it can be explored without automatically becoming certainty. And an experience that isn't required to be proof has, perhaps, more room to say something.

Is it impossible without clairvoyance?

Back to the man in the guided meditation. Somewhere — perhaps in a course, perhaps in a book — he came across an idea that circulates often in the personal development world: that without the ability to visualize you can't truly meditate, can't go into hypnosis, can't do a regression, can't “receive” anything.

What can we say about this?

Meditation

Most meditative traditions don't need images. Some actively avoid them.

Attention to the breath, which Buddhism calls anapanasati, requires nothing to be seen. Vipassana works with observing sensations. Zazen, in its simplest form, means just sitting. The body scan moves through the body, not through images. Mantra meditations work with sound. Loving-kindness meditation, mettaoften works with phrases repeated silently.

There are, of course, practices in which visualization is central. In Tibetan Buddhism, for example, the practitioner builds in the mind, with great precision, the image of a deity. And many modern guided meditations rely on imagined landscapes. Perhaps this is where the confusion comes from: a highly visible part of contemporary meditation has come to be mistaken for meditation as a whole.

Hypnosis

Research shows that people differ widely in hypnotizability. On standardized scales, roughly one in ten people respond very strongly to suggestions, one in ten very weakly, and most fall somewhere in between.

Interestingly, hypnotizability seems less related to how vivid someone's images are and more to a trait called absorption, described by Auke Tellegen in the 1970s: the capacity to become completely immersed in an experience, whether a book, a piece of music, a sunset or a thought. And many of the suggestions used to measure hypnotizability are not visual at all: the hand that grows heavy and lowers, the fingers that stay locked together, the arm that can no longer bend.

Direct research on aphantasia and hypnosis is still in its early days, and current data don't allow a firm conclusion. What we can say is more modest: the fact that many hypnotic suggestions are not visual, and that hypnotizability seems linked mainly to absorption, makes it plausible that a lack of imagery is not a decisive obstacle. Plausible, not proven.

Regressions

In a regression, experience doesn't take only the form of images. It can arise as emotion, as a bodily sensation, as a word, as a sudden certainty about a place or a person. Someone who “sees” nothing can still have an intense regression. But the intensity of an experience does not, on its own, tell us where it comes from: an emotion or a certainty that arises in a regression is not, by that fact, the content of a recovered memory.

A note of caution belongs here, valid for anyone, whatever the channel. Memory research, especially the work of Elizabeth Loftus and Steven Jay Lynn, shows that the hypnotic state tends to increase people's confidence in what they remember more than the accuracy of those memories. This doesn't cancel the value of what arises in a regression, which can be deeply meaningful as experience, as symbol or as story. But it invites us to be careful before treating the content as a literal recording of the past.

The question that shapes the answer

There is one more factor, perhaps the least visible: how the question is asked. “What do you see now?” assumes there is something to see. “What do you notice now, if you notice anything — an image, a sensation, a thought, an emotion, or perhaps nothing?” leaves the experience open. Likewise, “Do you feel your mother's sadness?” already brings in an interpretation, while “What do you notice in your body when you think of your mother?” lets the person discover for themselves what arises.

Psychologist Martin Orne showed back in the 1960s how sensitive we are, in a structured situation, to what we believe is expected of us. And quiet, absorption and trust in the person guiding can amplify this sensitivity. That is why whoever leads a meditation, a regression or a constellation carries a real responsibility: their questions don't only gather experience. They can also shape it.

What remains of the myth

The idea that “without clairvoyance you can't” seems to confuse two things: the form in which an experience appears to us and the capacity to have the experience. A person without images is not a person without an inner world. It is a person whose inner world is not, first and foremost, visual.

And the intensity of inner life is not the same as the intensity of images. Someone may never see their mother's face in their mind, yet immediately feel the emotion connected to her. They may be unable to picture their childhood home, yet remember its smell, its atmosphere, the feeling of safety. We don't have enough data to say that people without imagery are, in general, more bodily sensitive. We can only say that an experience can be deep along many paths.

Sometimes, in meditation or in somatic work, the very effort to produce an image can pull us away from what is already happening in the body.

And for someone who has felt “closed” for years, this can change everything. They don't need to become someone else in order to meditate. They only need a practice suited to the way they already work.

Endowment or practice?

A deeper question remains: are these experiences a gift you are born with, or something that can be cultivated?

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, of Stanford, spent years in evangelical Christian communities in the United States, among people who said God spoke to them. Her conclusion, described in her book When God Talks Backis subtle. The experience of “hearing” or “seeing” something in prayer was not randomly distributed. It was more common among people with a natural tendency toward absorption. But it was also learned:: through practice, through prayers that asked people to imagine scenes vividly, and through the way the community taught people what to notice and how to name what they noticed. In one of her studies, participants who practiced imaginative prayer for a month reported more vivid mental imagery than those who only listened to lectures.

In other words, the way our inner world appears to us is shaped both by what we bring with us and by the culture in which we learn to listen to it.

Current psychology and neuroscience offer a possible mechanism for this. In a line of research called predictive processing , associated with names such as Karl Friston and Andy Clark, the brain is seen not as a passive receiver but as an organ that constantly anticipates what it is about to perceive and interprets signals in light of prior experience, context and expectation. Psychology had long spoken of a simpler form of the same idea:“top-down” perception).

If I attend a workshop where I'm told I will receive a message in the form of a color, I may start paying closer attention to the colors in my imagination. If I'm told the information will come through the body, I will become more attentive to sensations. And if I'm told to expect a spontaneous certainty, I may more often notice thoughts that arise without an immediate explanation.

This doesn't prove the experience is invented. But it shows that the way we learn to look for an experience can influence the way we live it. Cultures, rituals and those who facilitate are, among other things, schools of attention.

And if we look toward the Eastern Christian tradition, we find a surprise. Hesychasm, the tradition of the prayer of the heart, made known in Romania through Father Dumitru Stăniloae's translation of the Philokalia, goes in exactly the opposite direction. Fathers such as Evagrius of Pontus and Gregory of Sinai advised those who prayed not to accept any image during prayer — not even one that seemed holy. Images were seen as possible distractions, not as signs of progress.

A nuance is needed here. Theology speaks of a kataphaticway, which names God through images, words and attributes, and an apophaticway, which recognizes that God remains beyond any representation. The imageless prayer of the hesychasts is related to this second way, but not identical to it: one is a way of speaking about God, the other a practice of attention. And the Eastern tradition holds them together. The same tradition that teaches monks not to accept images in prayer fills its churches with icons.

And one more distinction. In hesychasm, the renunciation of images is an intentional practice, cultivated over years of discipline. In aphantasia, the absence of images is a particularity of the mind. From the outside they may look alike. They are not the same phenomenon.

In a tradition that does not seek images, the person who sees nothing is no longer the one who lacks something. But neither does the absence of images automatically bring them closer to a deep spiritual experience. What matters is not how much they see, but how they meet what they live.

What an article cannot say

The question that has probably been on the mind of anyone who has read this far remains: so does clairvoyance exist? Do people who say they receive information they had no way of knowing perceive something beyond themselves?

Research has tried to answer. In the United States, a government-funded program, later known as Stargate, studied so-called “remote viewing” from the 1970s until 1995. When the program was evaluated in 1995, the two experts called in to analyze the data reached different conclusions: statistician Jessica Utts considered the observed effects worth taking seriously, while psychologist Ray Hyman considered that they proved nothing. The program was closed.

To be fair to the state of the research, the two positions do not carry equal weight. To this day there is no robust, widely accepted scientific demonstration of clairvoyance as paranormal perception, and most researchers consider the evidence so far insufficient. This doesn't close the philosophical question. But it is good to know where the evidence stands when we ask it.

What we can say with more certainty is something else: people live their inner worlds in very different ways — far more different than we long believed. Some see. Some hear. Some feel. Some know. Many combine all of these in proportions that change from one day to the next. And the fact that an experience has a psychological basis does not prove that it can be reduced to it.

I don't know whether what we call clairvoyance is a perception of the world or a very fine way of perceiving ourselves. But I don't feel the need to decide.

Perhaps the image that appears in a meditation is a memory that has reorganized itself. Perhaps it is a symbol the mind chose to say something it couldn't say in words. Perhaps it is something else, for which we don't yet have a good name. Perhaps, for someone, it is all of these at once.

I don't think an article can — or should — decide that on behalf of the person living the experience.

I return, once more, to the man who sat with his eyes closed and saw no beach.

Perhaps he didn't need a beach. Perhaps, for him, meditation began exactly where the image ended: in the breath, in the weight of the body on the chair, in the silence that doesn't ask to be filled with anything.

And perhaps the question “what gift do I have?” could be replaced with a gentler one: “how does what matters reach me?”

How do you come to know the things no one tells you?

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If you feel you want to explore further the way your inner world speaks to you, there is a space for that.