Your post hits on an interesting philosophical question.

Michael@ Awareness * Connection’s last blog post..Hamsterbilities: Preparing Kids for Responsibilty

There seems to be a distinction between the sense of touch and the sense of position/orientation you describe. However it’s a very subtle one. If the sense of touch is related to the skin and the nerves beneath it, things like soft/hard, dull/sharp, warm/cold, coarse/smooth and so on come to mind. But balance is not controlled by that part. It is controlled (or measured?) in the inner ear, but felt in other parts of the body. Yet we can feel warmth by touching something, but we can also experience warmth as a wholebody experience. I think both are part of the kinesthetic sense. The sense of touch is a part of it, as is balance.

What you describe as intuition, a subconscious ability to correlate seemingly unrelated inputs, sounds plausible to me. The examples you give are great examples of one of the brain’s abilities: Nexting. I read about this in Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness. Nexting is a mode in our brain that predicts what is going to happen next. But most animals can do that too. But Nexting and Intuition are not necessarily the same I think. Need to think about that some more.

As for “extra-sensory perception”, our planet is awash in electro-magnetic energy from a variety of sources in the solar system. There are large areas of the human brain that seem to be “un-used” most of the time. It is a certainty that our bodies and minds are able to distinguish variations in this field, but this particular sense is overshadowed by the much more powerful and immediate “concrete” senses in the traditional count. The ancient Chinese art of acupuncture comes to mind as an example.

Have you seen the movie What the Bleep – Down the rabbithole? This movies hints at some scientific explanations for things such as telepathy and precognition.

Personally I found this movie very complementary to ‘the secret’, which was a bit too magical to my taste.