65-year-old man has 'superhuman' intuition traits and experts are backing his claims

At some point in life, many people wonder about becoming superhuman and achieving unattainable. Unfortunately, not everyone gets lucky, except for some people like Wim Hof, who goes by @iceman_hof on Instagram. Known as the "The Iceman," 65-year-old Hof hails from the Netherlands and holds 26 world records, including running a full marathon in the Arctic Circle in only shorts and staying submerged in the ice for 2 hours, per Future Mind Labs. In 2023, he shared an Instagram post revealing that he participated in a study conducted by Wayne State University's School of Medicine.

"Brain scans from this study demonstrated that I was able to activate parts of my brain at will that had been thought to be inaccessible to humans," as mentioned in the post's caption. The study will "offer a new perspective on how we might be able to deal with psychosis, fear, anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder independent of drugs." His website, Wim Hof Method, further highlights him being a superhuman with different study claims.

The scientists have researched how he can "voluntarily influence his autonomic nervous system," which was previously thought impossible. According to neuroscientist and psychologist Joel Pearson, that is not the case with Hof only. In his book "The Intuition Toolkit," he documented several instances of people using unconscious information in their brains, such as reaching out and grabbing objects they can't see or climbing Everest, giving it the term "intuition." 

"Have you ever made a decision because it just felt right? Maybe you trusted someone or chose not to trust them, and you could never quite pinpoint why. That was probably intuition. Yes, it's a real thing," shared Pearson, who works at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Future Minds Lab, in his YouTube video. While defining the phenomenon, the psychologist divided it into three components, "it's learned, it's productive and it's based on unconscious information," per The Guardian. But the critical question remains: how to attain the levels of consciousness to achieve what has often been described as "the sixth sense?"

Neuroscientist Anil Seth publicly challenged the idea of consciousness as beyond science in Nature's podcast "Tales from the Synapse." He said that the mystery of the subconscious lies in the experience(s) of being self and that human beings live within a "controlled hallucination." As per Seth, people undergo a perceptual experience based on the world around them, which does not have direct and unfettered access to whatever is out there.

According to Chelom E. Leavitt, an assistant professor at Brigham Young University, intuition is obtained through the brain processing patterns from earlier experiences, and it has a "symbiotic" relationship with mindfulness, as the latter is a skill for an intelligent person to be able to read more cues in any difficult situation, per Psychology Today.

So when we see Hof staying immersed in ice for just under two hours, it is believed that he does so with his "copyrighted method," which helps him control the autonomic nervous system, portraying characteristics of a superhuman, per his website. The extreme sports athlete’s breathing, cold therapy techniques and commitment, in addition to his strong-headedness, helped him not only recover from a virus but a study published in a US-based scientific journal, "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," discovered a unique immune response after he was injected with endotoxin, which may result in a life-threatening situation for ordinary people.

Hof practices conscious control to withstand extreme temperatures, according to Future Minds Lab. His social media is filled with him giving credit to his mind. "Our minds are like dogs that have been tied to a tree. Or like children who have been told to sit still and be quiet," he wrote in an Instagram post, concluding that the mind needs to be freed from the bondage of dogma, the stress of daily existence and perceived limits. Similarly, Pearson advocates for safeguarding one's own intuition in the age of the internet, where our perceptions are cluttered by the personas of people on social media.

You can follow Wim Hof (@iceman_hof) on TikTok for more superhuman content.