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Infracognition: The Misunderstood Cognitive Powerhouse

Lillian Skinner
3 min readJul 14, 2024

You’ve felt it before — that deep knowing that goes beyond a simple hunch. That’s infracognition, and it’s so much more than intuition. It’s a vast, complex cognitive system that’s been silently driving your perceptions, decisions, and actions your entire life. And here’s the shocker: we’ve been drastically underestimating its power and scope for centuries.

Infracognition isn’t just gut instinct or a vague feeling. It’s a sophisticated cognitive process that integrates a lifetime of experiences, learned patterns, and crystallized intelligence. While intuition might be a quick, inexplicable feeling, infracognition is a rich, multifaceted understanding that often precedes conscious thought.

Let’s set the record straight: Infracognition encompasses sensory-emotional integration, intuitive pattern recognition, embodied simulation, pre-verbal conceptualization, and emotional-somatic resonance. But it goes even further. It’s the cognitive foundation that enables spatial giftedness, foresight, and what we often label as “higher intelligence.”

Consider a chess grandmaster who can anticipate moves several steps ahead. That’s not just strategy — it’s infracognition processing vast amounts of information, recognizing complex patterns, and simulating potential outcomes at lightning speed. Or think about an entrepreneur who seems to have a knack for predicting market trends. That’s infracognition integrating years of experience, subtle market cues, and embodied knowledge of human…

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Lillian Skinner
Lillian Skinner

Written by Lillian Skinner

Creative Intelligence Researcher, Savant, Prodigy, 2e, & Somatic Intelligence Expert, Philosopher, Futurist, System Thinker, Equality Advocate, www.GiftedND.com

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