The inner life
Sixth Sense
Direct answer
Sixth Sense: Sixth sense is the popular name for a supposed power of knowing things without sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell. It is used both for claimed psychic perception and for ordinary quick intuition.
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At a glance
- Also called
- 6th sense
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Intuition, Extrasensory Perception, Clairvoyance, Telepathy
Sixth sense is the popular name for a supposed power of knowing things without sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell. It is used both for claimed psychic perception and for ordinary quick intuition.
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What is the sixth sense?
The phrase rests on the old count of five senses, which goes back to Aristotle, who argued that there could be no others. To speak of a sixth is to claim a further channel of knowledge. In popular use that covers a wide range: a mother who knows that her child is in trouble, a soldier who feels that a path is unsafe, a person who senses a stare from behind.
Two different things shelter under the name. One is the claim of perception beyond the body's known channels, which researchers call extrasensory perception and which experiment has not established. The other is intuition, the fast recognition of patterns by the ordinary senses, which is well established. The body also has more than five senses in plain fact, among them balance, temperature, pain and the sense of where its own limbs are.
On the tree of the hidden arts: The sixth sense.
What sets Sixth Sense apart
The phrase is a moving label. Each time a real further sense has been described, such as balance in the inner ear or the sense of limb position, it has been called a sixth sense for a while and then simply added to physiology. What stays under the name is whatever remains unexplained or unproved. That is why the term covers both the trained hunch of an expert, which research supports, and perception without any bodily channel, which it does not.
- Count of five: from Aristotle, On the Soul, who argued there is no sixth
- Real further senses: balance, body position, temperature, pain
- Muscle sense: described by Charles Bell in 1826 and once called the sixth sense
- Psychic usage: Charles Richet, in a book of 1928
- Film: The Sixth Sense, 1999
Often mistaken for something else: Intuition works through the known senses and past experience; extrasensory perception, the strict meaning of a sixth sense, would work without them.
The story behind Sixth Sense
Aristotle fixed the number at five in his work On the Soul. In 1826 the anatomist Charles Bell described the muscle sense, by which the position of the limbs is known, and it was often called a sixth sense. The French physiologist Charles Richet took the phrase for psychic perception in a book of 1928. The film The Sixth Sense, released in 1999, made it a household term for seeing the dead.
Why Sixth Sense matters
The phrase blurs proven intuition with unproven extrasensory claims, and pulling the two apart is the first step in judging either.
How to read Sixth Sense
In everyday speech it praises a good hunch; in psychic writing it names a faculty; physiologists use it loosely for senses beyond the classic five.
Sixth Sense in practice: an example
A driver brakes before seeing any danger, and later realises that the brake lights two cars ahead had flickered at the edge of vision.
Where readings of Sixth Sense go wrong
A strong feeling of knowing is not evidence that the knowledge is right, and it calls for checking where anything rests on it.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- sixth sense meaning, what is the sixth sense, do humans have a sixth sense, sixth sense intuition, 6th sense
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is the sixth sense?
It is a loose term for knowing something without using the five familiar senses. People apply it to psychic claims such as telepathy and to everyday intuition, which are very different things.
Do humans really have a sixth sense?
Humans have more than five senses, including balance and the sense of body position. A sense that reaches beyond the body's known channels has been tested for more than a century without a result that other laboratories can repeat.
Is the sixth sense the same as intuition?
In everyday speech the two are used alike. Psychologists explain intuition as rapid pattern recognition built on experience and the ordinary senses, which needs no extra faculty.
