What's the difference between intuition, premonition, and coincidence?

Intuition is fast pattern recognition. Your brain compares what is happening now with patterns learned from past experience, then delivers the result as a hunch before you can explain every step. It is strongest in domains where you have real practice: a nurse noticing a patient looks wrong, or a driver sensing another car is about to drift.

Premonition is a feeling about the future: “something bad is going to happen” or “I knew this would occur.” Sometimes that feeling may come from subtle cues you have not consciously noticed. Other times it is anxiety, memory bias, or the brain turning uncertainty into a story. There is no reliable evidence that premonitions predict future events beyond ordinary inference.

Coincidence is an unlikely alignment without a demonstrated causal link, like thinking about a friend and then getting a text from them. The event can feel meaningful, but humans are pattern-seeking by design. When thousands of thoughts and events pass through a week, some will line up by chance.

The practical split is simple: trust intuition more when it comes from experience, treat premonitions as a signal to pause and check facts, and let coincidences be interesting without turning every one into proof.