Marlene Rockwell has a knack for knowing what to look for as a private investigator. When she is not outside or out of town tracking down clues, she works in her Lawrence home office.

Marlene Rockwell uses a combination of reason and intuition for her private investigation business.

When Bickell Lund works on a missing person case, she checks the facts, talks to loved ones and follows leads.

But there’s often one tool of the trade that helps her piece everything together — her intuition.

“There was a case where we looked at the missing person and their habits, and I kept coming back to their love of wilderness and the outdoors,” says Lund, of Peace of Mind Investigations in Eudora. “Sure enough, we ended up finding that person in the woods.”

Lund, who has been a private investigator for 12 years, believes that intuition and reason have a parallel relationship.

“As an investigator, you want to use all your senses,” she says. “You wouldn’t want to just use intuition, or just reason either. It would be like searching around in the dark. Why just use two fingers, if you have 10?”

A feminine mystique

Harriet Lerner, a Lawrence-based clinical psychologist and author, says women may indeed have a biological edge when it comes to an empathic attunement to emotions. But rather than a magical gift carried in the X chromosome, she believes women’s intuition is ultimately a result of environment, not just biology.

“In relationships between dominant and subordinate groups, the subordinate group members always possess a far greater understanding of dominant group members and their culture than vice versa,” Lerner says. “Historically speaking, intuitive skills for women have been nothing short of tools for survival in a world where access to economic security and social status has depended on an ability to please men and ‘read’ them accurately.”

While Lund’s intuitive skills may give her an edge in a male-dominated field, she is careful not to take them for granted.

“As with any other side of the brain, it needs to be exercised,” Lund says. “It’s so easy to get caught up in the facts that sometimes I like to take a break and put it all in the back of my mind. In 15 minutes or so, I come back to it and see what work my subconscious has done.”

Marlene Rockwell, of Rockwell Investigations in Lawrence, agrees.

“When I’m doing a case and lose track of someone, I close my eyes and listen to my first impressions,” she says. “About 75 percent of time that instinct turns out to be right.”

A former Army officer, Rockwell believes women are particularly adept at picking up on body language and unspoken clues.

“You listen to your gut, and if you feel something’s not right, most of the time it’s not and then you can figure out who really committed the crime,” she says.

Intuition in art

Denise Low of Lawrence, the Kansas poet laureate, believes that poetry uses intuition by working with subconscious rather than rational capacities.

“Like dreams do in a sleeping state, I think poetry and good language knit together the conscious and subconscious in a waking state,” she says.

And while Low believes women may be particularly in tune to their subconscious side, she doesn’t think that men are inherently any less intuitive.

“Coming out of some experiences and traditions where gender roles aren’t sorted in that way, I think we all have this capacity,” she says. “It just depends on how it is socialized. I raised two sons, and one was particularly intuitive. But I found that social structures around us do not encourage that for boys.”

Low, whose stepdaughter and husband are American Indian, believes native heritage may provide more language and tools for dealing with those intuitions.

“In my husband’s tribe, it was the man’s role to be the dreamer, to reveal things from another place,” she says.

Low seeks to infuse her writing with these influences and invoke the whole range of mental, intuitive and even spiritual responses in her readers.

The handwriting on the wall

For Debra Dunlap, a forensic document examiner from Ottawa, intuitive writing has an entirely different meaning. She says people who are more intuitive tend to break words after syllables or in two- or three-letter sections.

“Some people don’t have the intuitive trait show up in their writing at all,” Dunlap says.

When it comes to analysis, she finds that intuition is a valuable tool when combined with methodology and past experience to determine the validity of handwriting on wills and other documents.

For Rockwell, intuition is just another tool of the trade.

“For the past several years I have been working on a missing person’s case in Oklahoma,” she says. “For the longest time there were never any leads.

“However, I spent years trying to investigate the finances of the missing man on a hunch something was not right. This hunch led me to a confession that financial documents had been forged, which led to other evidence, which eventually led to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations reopening the case last year.”