Slashdot Mirror
Study Points to Sixth Sense in Humans
Ben Sullivan writes "St. Louis researchers say there's something to the notion of a 'sixth sense' in humans. A part of the brain known as the cingulate cortex, they've found, likely combines multiple, sometimes unconscious data streams to come to conclusions and send warning signals to the conscious mind. Example: Aboriginal tribesmen somehow sensed the impending danger of December's tsunami in time to flee to higher ground before the first sign of water."
...this topic is going to generate a lot of flames.
...that called being "the one"?
"Example: Aboriginal tribesmen somehow sensed the impending danger of December's tsunami in time to flee to higher ground before the first sign of water." I do not envy the person who gets to tell the tsunami survivors: "You should have saw it coming"
I had a feeling this article was coming.
Did the aboriginal tribemen ever go to higher ground when there wasn't a tsunami, or was this the first time they went there?
Oh for crying out loud, can we please stop posting this "X-files" nonsense as if its for real? As if we don't have enough propaganda and lies being blasted our way in our media.
Look, we're talking about ESP. If you can't get James Randi to believe it, please don't bother us about it.
"Aboriginal tribesmen somehow sensed the impending danger of December's tsunami in time to flee to higher ground before the first sign of water"
No, they fled to higher ground after they saw the water level drop knowing that it would come back up the same amount that it dropped.
It would be more useful to know precisely what triggers it, and why - then saying it merely exists.
Im sure most people have at one point in their lives for an unexplainable reason (till now i guess) done something other then what they wanted to - and was better off because of it.
It's true! Everyday I use anonymous communication/travel methods in order to stop big brother from monitoring me. I don't have any evidence there watching me, I just feel it, because of my sixth sense you see.
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
No, AFAIK, the tribesmen affected by the tsunami (were they aboriginal? I don't know) knew to run to high places for safety not because of any sixth sense, but because of wisdom passed down the generations saying that whenever water in the ocean very quickly receded, it would soon come gushing and flood them. No sixth sense there!
It's those damn vorlons!
Now we'll never know.
Before any liberals are tempted to mod up one of my comments, a word of warning: I'm actually making fun of you.
I was on a boat off the coast of southern thailand. I had been telling people for the last week the world was going to end. I had dreadful nightmares about massive amounts of death the night before and i keep thinking a giant wave was going to knock the boat over. I was continually looking on the horizon. I was glad to get onto shore and inland to higher ground. 20 minutes later the tsunami hit.
Sadly I had half expected, but also thankful to be alive.
F5 F5 F5 F5 :D
All your base are belong to Google.
Your sense of balance in your inner ear is your sixth sense (it's a sense of gravity). It just doesn't get any credit.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
the ones that headed for the coast at the first sign of danger.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
Aboriginal tribesmen induced the tsunami with thier magic power and hocus pocus. One tribe member couldn't keep his mouth shut it appears.
I wouldn't say it's entirely successful. 260,000+ people still died in that tsunami.
There are many examples of where an individual or small group of people have missed a tragic fate just out of 'feeling'. Like leaving for a trip at a certain time avoided a car accident, etc. It happens all the time.
"...described by some scientists as part of the brain's 'oops' center..."
My brains "oops" center is located in a more southern and groinular region.
hi mom!
Calling this a "sixth sense" is very misleading. The normal five senses - sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, for those few who don't already know - involve the intake of information through specialized organs or tissues (eyes, ears, skin, etc.) in addition to the processing of those stimuli. This so-called "sixth sense" is simply the subconscious reprocessing of the same information obtained by the regular five senses (and that description misses the real point of the discovery anyway*), and so it hardly qualifies as a sense.
* The point of the discovery is that the region of the brain discussed in the article helps to determine, based on past experience and the current situation, whether something is a bad idea or not.
I knew you were going to say that. ~~
I've hated that oversimplificaion since I was a tiny kid.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/14/world/ma in667167.shtml
(one of many)
synopsis: tribe saved because historical warnings from ancestors said to run inland if the sea recedes quickly.
Slashcode decides to print this fortune when I enter the article:
When you're dining out and you suspect something's wrong, you're probably right.
Well, better head back to the Dreamland...(and no, that's not the name of the new Arnold restaurant)
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
Amazing how moms develop that "eyes in the back of the head." A sudden silence, absence of noise or motion around the house, and you just know the toddler is unravelling the toilet paper or eting out of the dog's dish (hey, it looks like Cheerios), or leaning over to retrieve a toy from the edge of the swimming pool. This extends to the tiniest facial expressions that tell you your kid's lying or troubled about something, or you notice the cookie jar lid is slightly awry, or someone got into your purse and didn't close it quite right, or a thousand other little signals. It probably helps the species survive.
I can't explain the tsunami warning phenomenon, but a lot of subtle perceptions lie close to the surface, and I think there's a scientific explanation for everything.
too bad they didn't have it when purchasing the ticket. -It- refers to whatever the story refers to.
When I was 9 or 10 I climbed onto the neighbour's roof to get a model plane back. There was a staircase leading up to a flat area, a two foot wall and then the roof itself. I climbed that wall onto the tiles and put my hand out to grab the railing (a kind of stranded black wire).
Then I realised it was an overhead power line. There were four of them, crossing the house at shoulder level.
I don't know what made me stop my hand, inches from grabbing hold of that high voltage wire, but I've made the most of my life ever since. (And I never got that damned plane back, either.)
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
...does it run linux?
The rest of the article says essentially the same thing -- the brain learns to recognise a pattern of making mistakes, not that is able to sense impending danger before it happens or whatever.
The slashdot summary needlessly sensationalised this simple fact.
...that the aboriginals weren't just following the animals?
The sense of ballance, and quite a few other "feelngs" have nothing to do with touch, smell, taste, hearing, or seeing. Other possible ones would be hunger, thirst, diziness, nausea from food poisoning, etc.
But I guess it gets the readers turning the page. Anyone who listened to the animals would have known the wave was coming. It's about adjusting our senses to perceive what has always been there and doesn't require a new sense. It's about getting quiet and plugging into perception that is not normally needed in the modern world. Also consciousness is really a delusion. The consciousness mind is always the last to know. Hell, muscle movements have been shown to be already occurring before the consciousness is made aware, but we somehow create the delusion that the conscious mind has initiated the movement. This isn't to say free will is a delusion, but the idea the conscious mind runs the show is a lie, created for the comfort of the conscious.
for high ground, they decided that they'd better get their butts in gear.
That's also known as the "herd instinct". We see that a lot in the business world, I've never heard it referred to as a sixth sense though.
Our brain region can actually learn to explain religion and is capable of complex executive control over our behavior. The findings offer rigorous explanations. NOT. It wasn't any '6th sense' that the tribesmen figure out bad things this way come. Alriite, alrite, time to go RTFA...
Real scientific results are reported in scientific venues like professional conferences and peer-reviewed journals. Not press releases.
How did they get a pop-up to appear in Firefox?
I've seen that twice lately, and I consider it a bug in FF.
But what is the Javascript (I assume) that is making it pop up a window?
As an ex-cowboy (I'm from Montana), I can tell you that animals have sharp senses, and can find a small spring of water in a 10 square mile desert. If you spend enough time away from the noise, smells and chaos of civilization, you also develop sharp senses and can sense weather changes and natural phenomenon. Once in the city (when I live now) there is so much noise, weird smells and chaotic energy, this ability fades. I have no doubt that the aborigines sensed the Tsunami.
Even before I saw this article I knew there would be "i knew this" posts coming.
For claims of pseudoscience and paranormal, it's really just a little sensationalism on the part of journalists wanting to make a catchy introduction. Animals typically can "sense" these disasters before there's overt evidence something bad is going to happen. Why would it be so far-fetched to believe that humans have some element of this capability too? Unless, of course, you don't REALLY believe in evolution. :P
Identifying a neurological component in our intuition by way of a reasonable study doesn't scream "pseudoscience" to me. Maybe we, as supposedly enlightened slashdotters, can be a bit more open-minded about such things?
they are all around me-they don't even know they are dead...
"Nature bats last..."
Other senses beyond 6 ones would include suffocation and the lightheadedness before fainting. It's wierd how people try to group those into the sense of touch just because they're called "feelings".
I'm able to use my synaesthetic powers to detect complete bullshit!
It's true that there is definitely a region of the brain that manages anxiety - and that all sorts of things can make people anxious - seemingly for no reason!
However, neurotic != psychic. There are no *new senses* under discussion here, just a better understanding of how the brain manages that feeling of impending doom you sometimes get.
Do other mammals have similar brain structures? Yes.
Do they probably use them to avoid danger, incl. forest fires and tsunamis? Almost certainly.
Do we, higher mammals, probably retain whatever hard-coded sensory cues cause our little forest friends to flee natural disasters? We probably do, yes. When someone is in the supermarket and they have a panic attack for no reason, might it be because the kiwi display is triggering the same mechanism that is supposed to make us flee from a tsunami? Maybe.
"In the past, we found activity in the ACC when people had to make a difficult decision among mutually exclusive options, or after they made a mistake," Brown said. "But now we find that this brain region can actually learn to recognize when you might make a mistake, even before a difficult decision has to be made. So the ACC appears to act as an early warning system -- it learns to warn us in advance when our behavior might lead to a negative outcome, so that we can be more careful and avoid making a mistake."
This has nothing to do with psychic powers! Fucking idiot journalists.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I guess the server admin don't have a sixth sense...
My spidey-sense is tingling.
Last week black box project (or global conscientious), now the "six sense", shouldn't a PSEUDOSCIENCIE icon needed in Slashdot?
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, pressure, hot/cold, pain, kinethesis, and proprioception.
Wow! These people "somehow sensed" a magnitute 9 earthquake!!! Amazing.
You watched the "herd" run to higher ground and you followed?
Well, that doesn't sound very hard...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Just try closing your eyes and touching your fingertips together. That's your sense of location working. Ever fly in an aerobatic aircraft? That strange feeling in your stomach is your sense of acceleration telling you which direction you're being shoved in. There are plenty more, if you care to think about them.
The headline is misleading though. The activity being measured in the tests;
is a consequence of analysis, not sensation. It looks like we have mechanism in brains which can reflexively assess and respond to novel dangers.
Quelle surprise...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Other possible ones would be hunger, thirst, diziness, nausea from food poisoning, etc.
The difference is those aren't senses of the outside world, but rather feelings about the state of your own body. That doesn't mean they aren't relavent or as "real" as the normal 5 senses, but they aren't really a sense in the same way that smell or sight is. I can't say to someone else "hey, do you feel that hunger over their?"
AccountKiller
The question wasn't with or without sixth sense or unconscious data. But With or whithout higher ground.
What about the guys who "got a feeling" they should head to higher ground when there wasn't a tsunami coming? What about the guys who didn't get a feeling when it was?
People get feelings and act on them all the time. We only hear about the rare times when they coincide with an actual event.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
> "hey, do you feel that hunger over their?" No, you couldn't, or you'd get slaughtered by the slashdot spelling nazis! :)
the layman's guide to computer science
Don't we have six senses anyway - sight,hearing,touch,taste,smell and time. Our sense of time passing may be wildly inaccurate at times, but I can 'sense' the difference between a day and a minute pretty easily. Presumably there's some sort of time-keeping circuitry in the brain somewhere.
That would make this the seventh sense, unless there's some reason that time is never included.
The tribes men did not "sense" the disaster. Their elders had told them that when the water recedes quickly, they must run to the mountains. No sixth sense there.
Better recharge your sixth sense before you take it on a test drive in Vegas.
Which included beached deep-water fish due to seismic activity, retreating seas and the other classic signs. Nothing sixth sense about it. Anyone watching and dealing with the environment on a daily basis would have noticed it. In fact, fishermen off the coast of kerala in India warned the government that something was "fishy" when their catches started turning up unusual numbers of rare red-tailed deep-water fishes. Most people chose to ignore these warnings.
and they just won't shut up!
You can't handle the truth.
...be used to make peril sensitive sunglasses?
I wish to remain anomalous
Then how come I can never get First Post?
I am always 32 posts down.
I subscribed to Slashdot yesterday, and already my impression is that this site isn't trying to deliver any quality howsoever.
This is getting to be cheap tabloid news.
There's research, and there's GOOD research.
Dumbasses are trying to get funding.
How long will it take them to figure out how to actually use this sixth sense, and its application to deathmatching? Until then im not interested in merely knowing it exists.
Soap box, Ballot box, Jury box, Ammo box. Use in that order.
The human mind really is a fascinating thing. Think about all of the things that you perceive during the day. All the sights, smells, tastes and everything else. You're continually bombarded with so much information that you cannot possibly be paying attention to everything coming in. Doesn't it make a certain amount of sense for evolution to put some sort of mechanism into the brain to help collate those little signs that you would otherwise ignore into a larger, more apparent picture if it adds up to something Farking Dangerous?
Preaching about listening to Malu's on /.? bite your toungue sir, err clip your fingers? um pour coffee on your keyboard?
Calm down people, its a religion not an operating system.
1-5 you probably know
6 Gravity (calcium crystals on hairs in ears)
7 Rotational motion (liquid flow in ear tubey bits that I forget the name of)
8 Body location (feedback via nervous system tells you where your arms are)
We'll prolly find a few more if others here chip in...
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
There are moments of hightened conciousness. Sometimes people 'something is wrong' without being able to pinpoint it.
Usually it is sensing something 'different' in their environment.. maybe silence, maybe smell, maybe birds headed one direction, earth quakes can make very low noises we can not hear but animals could, it could disturb electromagnetic fields, which we know birds use to follow their way south.. There are many many ways to explain these things without making indifferentiated statements like 6th sense in humans.. no, we still use our 5 senses for these things. Unless 'conciousness' is considered a sense. When I can make estimations and predictions and take precautions because of them, and probability makes me be right (or not), we can go turn around and think perhaps we're psycic, but people who do that really are just ignorant.
"In both cases a "sixth sense" had nothing to do with it; it was just recognising the available signs for what they were and acting accordingly."
Oh gee. Who would have guessed that that's exactly what the article is saying? Weither that's a "sense" is another question entirely?
There was no sixth sense on the Sentalese tribesmen. It was simply a cultural education that stated that if there was a strong earthquake, and/or if the seas receded quickly, a tsunami is about to arrive, so one should go to higher grounds. Also, elephants are sensitive to infrasonic frequencies, which is why they also avoided the shores.
This may be only tangentially related but I thought I'd get someone else's opinion (however little you guys know about the subject!).
Whenever I've been taught computer architecture they mention the four main taxonomic categories, SISD, SIMD, MISD and MIMD, but never manage to come up with a sensible explanation of what a Multiple Instruction Single Data computer would be.
Would a brain count as one? For example, the human eye provides a single set of visual data at a time, which gets independently analysed and processed by different parts of the brain: facial recognition, language and writing, peripheral vision, the blink reflex.
Is this a reasonable assumption to make? Has anyone ever said this much in as many words? Are there any books or such discussing the similarities?
the layman's guide to computer science
and if it looked like the US was favoring Kerry, the rest of the world would've probably thought he was trouble instead :)
Serious question: are you mentally retarded?
I don't think this is far-fetched. I myself have on one occasion experienced a "supernatural" sensation, meaning that I experienced something I simply can't explain. I'm not talking about freaking UFOs or something, but rather a brief and massively intense visual and emotional experience for which I have no scientific explanation at all (I wasn't on drugs, either).
For some time, I thought it might actually be a spiritual thing, but being someone who doesn't believe in God, I settled with that it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but nonetheless entirely human.
Why can't there be senses that simply aren't used normally and only fire up on exceptional occasions?
...rather than a sixth sense. Just as many have pointed out, it's still the 5 senses that are doing the input gathering here -- it's just that another part of the brain is doing some number crunching.
/., like Wired, is just prone to blowing these sorts of stories out of proportion.
I liken it to Bayesian because it seems to be based on analyzing what happened in the past in order to attempt to predict what is *going* to happen in the future.
For spam:
Stuff with these characters are often spam, let's bump this score up a bit.
For danger:
Everytime x happens, y seems to happen afterwards, so I should flee.
This isn't magic, guys. It's just another advantage of the subconcious doing work behind the scenes.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
that got stuck behind them glaciers for so long, this is a natural aspect of all creatures created by This Earth. every creature on this planet "knows" pretty much everything that is going on around here, without any fancy-schmancy "studies". we know these things; you have to "study" them, and get it wrong durn near every time. if your abilities hadn't gotten so diminished by that time spent cut off from nature, you'd understand this, but they did, so you won't/can't.
if y'all would get off your burning looting and pillaging long enough to _really_ smell those roses, you might, eventually, realize this yourselves. but you are too busy messing this planet up with your "progress". if you would actually stop and look at things, who is responsible for every bit of damage to this environment?! since y'all have made it so difficult for the rest of us to do any of this "progress" crap, you are the only ones who could possibly be messing things up. as you've done every since you yo-ta-ho'd back out of the north atlantic!
"aboriginals"
as they say "payback is a bitch" and your time is coming!
AKA Dreams. The USA's money also says we have a third eye.
Get rid of the brown stuff.
Some of the local indigenous people had stories handed down over generations from their ancestors who had also suffered through a tsunami, and from these stories some of them recognized the warning signs and knew what to do. No mystical explanation required in that case.
A good example of the value that even conventional science holds over anything paranormal is the 10-year old British girl who recognized the warning signs from having listened in her geography class, and saved hundreds of lives by warning those on the beach and nearby hotel to evacuate.
By comparison: Even though there are millions of psychics/clairvoyants and other people who claim to be able to predict the future worldwide, not one predicted the tsunami! Remarkable?
This is not to say that there isn't something to the study descibed in the article; animals and aboriginals may all have 'felt' the earthquake (even from far - elephants' feet for example have specially adapted sensors that are very sensitive to vibrations), and just thought it prudent to get out of the way just in case. However the use of the term "sixth sense" implies a paranormal explanation, when in fact you can pretty much bet that the true explanation, whatever it turns out to be, is going to be quite logical and rational. This is perhaps more likely just poor journalism rather than poor science.
(These stories with a 'pseudoscientific bent' seem to reveal a creeping trend away from rational thinking on slashdot, which several years ago used to feel like one of the few good places on the Net where one could get away from that sort of gullible mainstream uninformed discourse :/ Is Slashdot now officially "mainstream"?)
As any good Scientologist knows.
So, your brain listened to irrational fear, created a new sitation, and sent it to your concious mind? Because fear, as we all know, is usually unconcious. Knowing this, it would be easy to extrapolate that yes, Bush did win by exploiting this.
"This has nothing to do with psychic powers! Fucking idiot journalists."
More like idiot readers. The article says nothing about psychic phenomenon.
My Sixth Sense is saying that there is a huge flame coming over.
While I personally believe in a Sixth Sense. I remember reading that Indian tribespeople avoided the tsunami for two reasons:
1) Their land was not deforested and the trees slowed down the onslaught of the waves.
2) An ancient legend warns them to seek higher ground when the ground shakes.
Thus, all of them survived.
This must be how I know that when I get my Cingular bill it will be fucked up and I will have to call customer service to correct it... over and over again...
I didn't know scientists knew enough about the function of the brain to construct a computer model of a part they assume they know the function of. (nice sentense structure, I know) In other words, they assume they know the function of one part of the brain and they make a computer model of it. The computer model can predict when something in the computer model will happen. Does this seem a little fishy to anyone else?
In my opinion, I believe that yes, our subconscious mind can make connections between seemingly disparate facts and spur action the conscious mind can't understand the reasoning for. I also believe the tribesmen in question used both this, lessons handed down through the generations and the activity of the animals to save themselves. I don't think you need a computer model to tell you this.
But why is the rum gone?
From the bottom of the page when this story was posted...
"When you're dining out and you suspect something's wrong, you're probably right."
"People get feelings and act on them all the time. We only hear about the rare times when they coincide with an actual event."
Maybe we have a future detecting Random Number Generator in our heads?
When you know the answer, but forgot the question.
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
heck - I saw it coming too - 0101001011111110100101010100101 see? a spike in 1's. I'm sure the aborigini's saw it too.
--- Caffeine is directly responsible for some of my greatest ideas, and some of my most embarrassing moments...
A reporter went there to see them. IIRC, they said something like that themselves. They certainly didn't say that the spirits told them or anything along those lines.
IMHO, it was a simple case of people who live close to noticing small changes that people in your high-rise office block have no notion about, since they're indoors with central heating etc.
As for a six sense... I've often thought that, sensing when someone is behind you was akin to taking the 'data streams' from things like barely noticeable reflections IN your field of view, or the people you can see looking at the one you can't. There are plenty of things that go on every second, which could be easily picked up on a subconscious level, but that's subconscious processing of available sense data, not a NEW sense.
Basically? Six sense my ass. Worst story on slashdot, ever.
This is like saying we've discovered a second Mac mouse button just because you can make more use of the single one you've got if you're smarter and more experienced, or because you're so used to using the control key that you're no longer conscious that you're doing it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Even CNN was able to report this diligently. They passed on knowledge through their generations that retreating water was a sign of disaster, so when the waters went out (whatever the technical term is) they all scarpered.
I am sure the brain does have sub systems that try and trigger responses from us, like when we tune into a baby crying or other things, I am sure that our senses are more sensitive than we realise, but mostof it is filtered out.
Sounds like headline grabbing terminology bending.
But saying it is a sixth sense does not mean that IT KNEW MORE than what was being told to it by the 5 senses we do actually have (perhaps we can like pigeons sense magnetics also).
So please, like robotics, nanotech and every other buzz word that gets recycled, make sure you really are saying what you are saying.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
"Actually, in the silly paranormal world, you'd have to call it more like "delivery" of information, since the implication is that some magical part of the universe informs you of something, rather than you processing stimuli from your senses to derive that information. "
There's the belief that some psychic phenomenon may be based upon Quantum Entanglement. No magic there, just a poorly understood phenomenon.
"Um... gee, is it possible it's just that simple, and there's no need to keep my mind open for magic?"
Or maybe, much as people are drawing incorrect conclusions from the history of the word "Sith Sense". "Magic" likewise is so burdened, and some of it may have an underlying physical basis?
Not to interrupt with facts, but I read in the Guardian that the tribes apparently went upland well prior to the tsunami, during a time of year they would have normally been on the coasts.
Alas, I can't find a handy link for that story, but there are stories about the Sentinelese, Shompen, and the more western-integrated Nicobari - that last who didn't fare so well.
I do see a travel journal (not the most reliable of sources, I fear) that indicates the Sentinelese went upland immediately after the earthquake. No ESP involved, but some amount of sensitivity and prudence.
I only found out when I turned the TV on...
There was no sixth sense involved in avoiding the Tsunami.
All people near the ocean saw and heard that something was different. When wild animals see something 'different', they run away from it full tilt and later on cautiously approach it to find out more.
When idiot people and domesticated animals see something 'different', they walk up to it to get a closer look.
Thus, you saw animals and people with 'sense' saying "Hey... this is really odd. Let's say we go away from the ocean for a bit." and those without sense saying "Wow! The ocean drew right out to sea! Let's walk out on the new beach and take a look at this strange-and-potentially-dangerous new development. Even better, let's call our friends on cell phone and have them join us!
"Wow! Look at the size of that wave! I wonder how high the surf will get?!?"
There's no 'sixth sense' involved. Plain, simple common sense saved people and animals from the Tsunami.
"It appears that this area of the brain is somehow figuring out things without you necessarily having to be consciously aware of it,"
So you see, when they come down to it, they do not even try and establish themselves as proponents for the sixth sense idea.
If you search on a p2p network for hypnosis books they even talk about sub conscious (not being consciously aware of actions) systems, such as breathing or even flinching from pain.
Another example would be when you suddenly feel unsafe in a car, when you realise you might be going too fast, this happens before you could possibly calculate that you have not slowed enough (perhaps your peripheral vision has seen something, or you are starting to have to look at too many things so your brain panics).
Again, the study talks about training the brain to autonomously respond to stimulii, in this case white or blue flashes.
Even dogs can learn from the result of things, if you always feed a dog, they will always expect you to feed them.
In this case, if the brain always registers a failuire with a blue flash, then it will expect a failuire to occur when a blue flash occurs, not because of any predictive sensing, but whatever string programming is going on in the brain has written a stronger pathway from 'blue' to 'failuire'.
I think this is weak science. Sorry, but not everyone with a fancy functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) should be allowed to make any claims they want, after discovering something less exciting than the fact that your body remembers how it felt after it ate something, which is why you hate vodka if you ever drink too much and throw up afterwards.
ok me out
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I knew it was there all the time!!!
You're only upset because the voices talk to me?!
I didn't rtfa, but I'm wondering, what about mere "intuition" ? There's a whole lot of details our brain processes that are not bound to reach the consciousness level. The unconcious part of our brain nevertheless plays a role in the way we think, and "gives us warnings" in the form of "impressions", "feelings", etc. I wouldn't think a sixth sense is involved here.
...someone trains through meditation (zazen) to balance the strength of thalamus and hypothalamus. IMHO, satori or enlightment is something like a sixth sense translated into the "logical" world i think.
"That's not a sense (i.e. an input into your brain) .. it's your brain's model your body's current position."
Actually it is a sense. There are nerve cells embedded in your muscular structure that gives feedback on what's happening.
"#7 - kinethesis" is a layer on top of that. e.g.Internal model.
Science isn't a matter of belief. It is a matter of education.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Or at least, similar actions can be explained without inventing a sixth sense.
It's basically a combination of these two things: your skin is much more sensitive than you realize, and that sense is not nearly as accurate as you think it is.
To see this, get two friends to help test this sense. You will stand (or sit, whichever) in the middle of the room, blindfolded and wearing ear plugs, and one friend will stand behind you at a designated spot, being careful not to breath on the back of your neck. The other friend will blow a loud whistle - loud enough to hear through the earplugs - occasionally and at each whistle blow you will need to say if someone is behind you or not. Make sure that your friends choose whether to stand behind you or not before each whistle blow by using some random source, such as a coin flip or dice roll.
If this "sense" does not completely disappear when you've eliminated sight and sound, then retest while wearing a coat with a hood, or something else to completely cover your arms, back, and neck.
I have found myself that during the winter I can navigate around in complete darkness without bumping into things because I "sense" them about half an inch before I'd bump into them. It's not a sixth sense - it's that the static in the air makes the hair on my exposed legs stand up when I approach most objects. A pair of longjohns kills this "sense" completely.
You also can't say 'hey, look at the inside of my eyelids... they're so dark. It is very tempting to lump all 'feeling' sensory perception together under the banner of 'kinesthetic' or somesuch, but just because the stimulus is internal rather than external, doesn't mean it isn't a 'sense'. Without such a sense, you would not be able to walk in the dark. I think the reason such things aren't accepted as 'sense', is that they're taken for granted. You never have to look at your feet to ensure that you're walking properly, at least, not since you were very very young, so you don't pay it any attention.
Actually, I thought this is the best evidence for a sixth-sense in humans.
At the risk of sowing pearls before the swine...
Humanity is multi-dimensional. There are those individuals who can quiet the mind totally and in so doing raise their consciousness to tune into the higher realms. The bible and other religious doctrines talk about this a great deal.
Information coming from the higher realms is based in love and not in fear.
Before you flame this post reflect carefully upon this:
"Can you quiet your mind where not a single thought occurs for 15 minutes? 5 minutes? 1 minute? 10 seconds? Try it and see.
The small still voice that guides from the higher realms is like a soft playing flute compared to the ego which is like a brass marching band. When the mind is active then the flute is inaudible. When the mind is still then the flute can be heard.
Those individuals living close to Mother Earth follow the small still voice that guides them in ways they might not understand while it is occurring but later reveals the reason for the guidance. The tsunami is an example. All humans were given the message, only a few were capable of hearing and following it for only a few had minds quiet enough to comprehend.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
The part you did not quote, of course:
It just stating (and this is in TFA) that not all the patterns we recognize we're aware of. But according to all credible reports, the people in question consciously noticed that the sea had receded significantly, and consciously recalled stories passed down about what happens after that.
Are you adequate?
I would have to disagree with your assessment. I think this "sixth sense" is how Bush almost lost. Too many people sensed that the invasion was wrong, that no WMDs would ever be found, that Bush's friends in the oil and weapons industries were the sole beneficiaries. You must remember that Bush won by only the narrowest of margins while no other wartime president has ever been re-elected by anything but a landslide. But Karl Rove cleverly created an issue out of homosexuality that drew to the poll some of the people who would not otherwise have voted due to their uncertainty over the justness of Bush's war.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
From James Randi for proving the paranormal. Once and forever, anecdotal evidence ain't science. It's how politics and other such scams are done, not science.
Vote Quimby!
For over 35 years I've been able to pick the willing chicks out of a crowd using that portion of sixth sense known as, "the randy chicks move there knees together and apart, subconsciously, while talking to you".
You won't read this in any psikicks book and Xtals won't give you the power but careful attention to ones surroundings will always offer a sharper view of reality than the TeeVee numbed masses experience...
and get you a lot more pusi too!
I find it fascinating how many posts are down on this idea. There seems to be a tendency among the "learned" that that which we already have learned is gospel but that which challenges it is fantasy. Yet, in order to move forward, you have to challenge and evidence of new ideas and theories have to taken seriously enough to be challenged objectively. This idea that "we've already discovered enough senses and receptors in the human anatomy, let's move on" is quite silly. Hell, we've only in the last 24 months cracked the g-nome.
global warming front?
are they all migrating N?
Da** it! I knew they would moderate that post as redundant!
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I think this article means a seventh sense. There's already a sixth sense, called "proprioception". Essentially, it lets us know where our body parts are. But because it's less demonstrable than the other five senses, it's often ignored.
Its like playing X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter. There are a dozen ships whirling around, yet you know instinctively what to do to avoid being clobbered. The curious thing is that you dont think of the ships as positioned in x-y-z axis (the 'logical' way according to old scifi flics). Instead, you think instinctively in semantic terms ("the A-Wing is behind the second TF to my right, the first TF is below me"), which for humans is far more efficient. A bit like the way chess players plan their moves without considering 10^6 variations.
Really I'm trying to avoid the whole semantic argument of what a "sense" is and merely trying to distiguish something that says something that tells you about the outside world with something that tells you about your own body. Define the word "sense" however you like, but there is a difference between the source of information. The 5 traditional senses have a data source of the outside world. Really, when it comes down to it why not consider you own emotional state a sense?
AccountKiller
An absence of input is also input.
Because 'how I feel emotionally about the fact that I just witnessed my girlfriend in bed with my brother' is subjective. Whereas 'where my left leg is in relation to my right' is not.
They were not forwarned. They actually can speak. Yes: They have a language! And according to the norwegian press, they told interviewers that they have for generations talked about the dangers of the earthquakes. About how - when they occur - the forefathers always insisted they must flee up into the mountains - o be safe. So the quake came, they went up into the mountain - and survived the tsunami. Simple, really. No 6th sense mumbo-jumbo. Just ordinary mumbo-jumbo, if you like.
I read the article, and all I see is a bunch of text proving that humans really do possess intuition. What's so special about calling it a "sixth sense"?
Obviously :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The cingulate cortex is the fruit of the alien breeding program for humans. Our bizarre, threatening world is just a way to evolve and exercise this organ. While aliens are too different from humans to explain "why" they "want" it, let's say it's somewhere between the vastly efficient computational power of such a "signal processor", and "tasty".
--
make install -not war
Over the last year, I have convinced myself that I can predict adn anticipate speed traps at least 30 seconds to 1 minute before I reach it.
Whenever I am driving and let my mind wander. If I get a random thought that is related to police in any way, I slow down.
It works for me at least 9.5 times out of 10.
But a different mode of processing data.
I grew up on a farm, and know exactly what they are talking about. It is sort of a 'gestalt' of the environment, so that if something changes, you 'sense' it, by combining 'subconsciously' a number of cues.
Likewise, living in a different ecosystem produces a sense of unease, because the cues are "off".
This isn't paranormal, just a different mode of processing a large amount of data.
Intuition might be another word for this or a similar phenomenon.
This sense indeed does seem to exist, there are people who felt something was wrong days before the tsunami hit and left the area before anything could be seen or otherwise felt. A famous couple from Serbia, Lepa Brena (a popular folk singer) and her husband Boba Zivojinovic (a former tennis player and a good friend of Boris Becker's) cut their vacation in Thailand short because they felt something was very wrong. They left hours before the tsunami hit, you can read about it here (http://www.politika.co.yu/ilustro/2399/1.htm - the magazine article is in Serbian). The translation of the relevant paragraph follows:
"I was nervous from the day we landed. The hot and humid weather did not agree with me. My latest bloodwork test results were also not the best," said Brena, now resting from all the vacation excitement in her home in Belgrade. "Boba and I agreed that we should just pack up and leave. On the 7th day we finally managed to get tickets to Singpore, where we stayed another 3 days. At the Singapore airport we found out that the resort we had left just a few hours earlier was totally destroyed by the tsunami, it was washed away as if it never existed. I have had so much stress in the last year that if I were to start thinking about what could have happened if I did not trust my intuition I think I would find it hard to keep my sanity."
I see dead people...
MadOgre.com
No, science doesn't explain everything. There are way too many things so far away from ever being fully described and explained by science that we are better off (and many people have been for a long time) using other methods to understand these "unexplained" things: intuition, art, philosophy or religion. Science is a very useful thing, but let's not get fanatical here. There is no pseudoscience here, even if journalists decide to sue the term "sixth sense". It makes you want to read an article describing pretty boring cientific stuff.
...And just because you are a paranoid schizophrenic doesn't mean they aren't after both of you.
I'm not that surprised at this. Animals definatly have a "sixth sense". I live in California, and before a big earthquake happens, animals start getting really jittery and wierd. Humans probably have the same thing, but simply try to shrug it off as feeling sick or bad or something.
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
Anytime something like this comes up, with the Sixth Senses and the subconcious and the flaven, I feel the urge to plug this book:
The Einstein Factor
Great book, interesting subjects. Some a bit more far-fetched than others, but a lot of it deals with training your brain so your concious and subconcious, right and left all work together. A lot of the topics on Slashdot and other sites that deal with the subconcious ("Scientists found today that X") are stuff that are covered in the book.
They knew to flee to higher ground because the animals did... when all the animals start running the same direction, common sense tells you to follow them, even though they know what's going on and you don't. Plus, if any of the tribal persons had seen the wave coming, they wouldn't have stood there gawking at it like some did in other places. They would have fled.
All your searching needs (and free money!) - 4Lancer.net
What this says to me is that we were too busy with our eyes glued to our cellphones to notice that the sea and the earth were....
Hold on, my RSS feed says there's a new article up... I'll get back to you shortly.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
that your 6th sense was your pheremone(sp?) receptor...
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
In other words, intuition is real? You know it's funny, I've been relying on intuition for years, and somehow I intuited without scientific proof that this was okay!
Interestingly, an article in the Washington Post (can't find it now) mentioned that one particularly old tribe of fisherman also fled, but only after the waters receded (the ultra "low tide" effect that occurs before the tsunami hits). Apparently, folk stories passed generation-to-generation included references to ancestors who experienced tsunami. Armed with this cultural folklore, they fled while others gawked at the strange sight of the sea leaving the shore.
I have at least 21 senses!
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I read this damn website every day. Any more of this sutff (black boxes, sixth senses, what's next, UFOs?) and I'm gone for good. This isn't exactly the only tech blog on the web any more...
EDITORS: STOP IT
Yes, I know this story had some sortof science involved. But it was presented as psychic bull.
Enough!
Equilibrium is the 6th, so this other one should be 7th.
Cheers,
Adolfo
But how come you don't know that you don't use a freaking apostrophe to make a plural? Are you illiterate or retarded?
How many times have aboriginal tribesman / animals fled to high ground when there wasn't an impending tsunami? This I would like to know before I start believing in a sixth sense.
I have a in-law, who knows which direction is which unless he flies. Upon landing, he has to know orientation quickly. After that, no matter where he is, he always knows which way is north.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If I looked out my window, past my tv, and saw every cat/dog/squirrel/bird in the neighborhood split at once, I would be starting the car.
Standard American English is just one of many varieties of the English language. In some colloquial varieties, the past participial usage of saw is correct! If you study linguistics, you will find that Ebonics and the creoles of the Caribbean are real languages with regular grammatical rules. They are merely nonstandard.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
I see dead people.
Join Tor today!
If anyone checks the primary source at Science, Vol 307, Issue 5712, 1118-1121, 18 February 2005, you might note that the original authors of the study don't even mention the Tsunami and the possibility that the anterior cingulate cortex provided the error-likelihood of it occurring to the indigenous people living there.
Nor do they use the term "sixth sense."
The authors are suggesting several things:
1) a "general error-likelihood theory" of ACC function based on reinforcement learning, of which conflict and error detection are special cases;
2) "the benefits of tightly integrating neuroimaging studies with computational modeling, because the two methods together provide a strong basis for hypothesis generation and theory testing regarding the neural mechanisms of cognition."
The survival of indigenous peoples on the various islands affected by the tsunami has cultural and anthropological explanations, but an anterior cingulate cortex explanation is probably reaching a bit further into Brown and Braver's research.
The animals have a sixth sense.
Join Tor today!
The deep-sea fish story was a hoax.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Dude, your user id is "I be hatin'."
If we were to have told Columbus, 'I can see events on the other side of the world through my peace of hollowed glass.' we might have been burned at the stake, or blown off quite similarly as we blow off efforts of paranormal studies. Scientifically, hundreds of years later, we have the television set.
People who look down on psuedoscience are those that think Man understands everything there is to understand. The fact is, there is a great deal of concepts left untouch, and information undiscovered. One day, we might very well realize that there are people that have on occassion witnessed premonition and other paranormal feats. But, we'll have an explanation for it, or enough information to deem it factual and plausible. The sad thing is, something doesn't come to be only when a human has discovered it, so stop looking down on what you are quick to label as psuedoscience. There are universities that have paranormal psychology departments, their track record might vary as to whether their are of value, but I argue that they wouldn't exist in acadamia if there wasn't SOMETHING convincing that there is a undiscovered frontier of the human mind.
Besides, 90% of the world is religious in some form or fashion. Even Darwin broke down on his death bed in hopes that there is a paranormal realm. Is it very comforting to you, to know that when you die, it's simply lights out?
Whenever you hear half the symphony orchestra join those jagged dissonant minor chords, you know there's something deadly just around the corner. How hard can it be?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
I see dead people
I've always felt those "five senses" were an overgeneralization. I mean, taste and smell are basically the same thing, aren't they? As I understand it, smell is basically your nose "tasting" molecules captured from the air. Your sense of taste, meanwhile, is pretty hampered when you plug your nose.
;)
Isn't hearing basically a type of interpreted "feeling"-- your inner ear contains small hairs that feel the compression of air, which are then experienced as sound.
Since people are talking about phantom-limb, I think one might also mention the reverse-- the sense that your body extends beyond its normal self-- ie, that weird feeling that you've 'fused' with a car/game/musical instrument so that they feel like an attachment or extension to you-- that you become so comfortable with them that you don't think of the interface between you and that object.
When I'm driving for long periods of time, I do sometimes feel as though the car has become to some effect an extension of my body. To move the car, I don't conciously think that I need to use my arms to turn the wheel, I just kind of will the car to turn, and my arms do what's necessary. I've had this experience with video games as well. In a way, your brain accepts that you've become part OF that object. Another example-- once I learned to type, I no longer needed to think about the mechanics of typing, the words just kind of flow to the screen as I think them.
I guess one's brain just adapts itself to your physical "hookup" and tries to streamline the input and output streams so that they are as efficient as possible.
So, yeah, I agree that the 5 senses idea seems kind of over-simplified. I suspect that whatever your nerves are wired to, after along enough your brain will adapt enough to accept it as a source of "input". I'm sure this has been tried. Does anyone know of an experiment like this one where a person's senses were "extended" via hardware?
And what about that creepy-- and often annoying-- feeling that someone's reading over your shoulder? That "feeling" that you're being watched? What's that all about? Which of the five senses is used to describe THAT?
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
They're using the term "sixth sense" because that's what many people call this ability - and attribute it to psychic, mystical phenomena. They're using the colloquial name for it, but demonstrating what it really is - an ability to subconsciously process subtle clues that you're not even consciously aware of, and use them to determine when danger is coming. The article makes no claims of psychic powers or mysticism or paranormal activity - if anything it's the opposite. It's like showing that people don't get sick because a bad spirit infested them, but because germs infested them. They're still getting sick, but for a real reason.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
If the five senses where introduced by the ancient greeks, schools never cared to update those concepts. I have as most people a limited sense of balance. The sensor is located in the ear, but has nothing tot do with hearing.
Anonymous
Please tell me why the article link goes to Science Blog when the entire entry is simply a copy & paste of an original article from the Washington University in St. Louis University News? Were the extra two clicks too much work for CowboyNeal before approving the post? Pretty sad, IMO, since the submitter BenSullivan is the same Ben Sullivan who produces the attempt at moneymaking blog.
That is just comparing sensory data to yield unexpected decisions. A sense is raw data gathered from the environment. If you were going to count every hidden ability of the mind as a sense then we have millions of senses. Language would be a sense. And obtaining 3d information from the retinal inputs of each eye would be a sense. If there were some kind of danger waves that something in the environment produced and we could detect and compare those, then it would be a sense. The new study the article describes basically re-discovered some pretty well understood decision making processes in the cingulate cortex.
"Aboriginal tribesmen somehow sensed the impending danger of December's tsunami in time to flee to higher ground before the first sign of water." "
Or maybe the common sense of all the Animals getting the hell out of dodge a day before the Tsunami hit had something to do with it. Geez.
Someone whitewashed the original unconscious racist article...
7 .h tml
Brain region learns to anticipate risk, provides early warnings, suggests new study in Science
http://news-info.wustl.edu/news/page/normal/476
"Following the Asian tsunami, scientists struggled to explain reports that primitive aboriginal tribesmen had somehow sensed the impending danger in time to join wild animals in a life-saving flight to higher ground."
The author (a migaloo) unconsciously implied that aboriginal tribesmen and wild animals are the same. If you post an article post the original so everyone can see it for what it is.
the sixth sense was our vestibular sense. You know, the one that tells us which way we are oriented.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
New Scientist magazine ran an article examining the rather more than 5 senses we all have. I think, at last count, there were about 20...
Senses special: Doors of perception
And they love "sixth sense" stuff. Knowledge without having to work for it.
RTFA.
This is not hoodoo, it's fast subconscious prediction from patterns in normal 5-sense clues.
Doesn't M Night Shyalaman already have prior art on this one?
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I agree with you, both in the claim that this phenomenon is not psudoscience, and that calling it a "sixth sense" is somewhat sensational.
The article spells out the test methodology in detail, and it seems solid.
But I have personal experience with this.
I have had extensive navigation training, first as a pilot, and then later in a military career. The Army in particular had very high standards for needing to know exactly where you were at all times (to within 100m) without the aid of something like a GPS.
So you learn to keep a visualization of your surroundings in your head, and to cross-reference that visualization against whatever tools you have (like a map, compass, or odometer) at regular intervals to keep the internal representation in sync with the real world. After some practice, this becomes second nature - muscle memory stuff.
But there's an odd side-effect, at least there is with me. If I make a wrong turn, miss an exit, or make some sort of navigational mistake, something in my subconscious will pick up on it well before I'm ever consciously aware of it (especially if my conscious is somehow distracted away from navigation) It's hard to put into words... but I will get a profound sense of "wrongness", like an inaudible alarm bell. The more I ignore it, the worse it gets.
I have learned not to ignore it. If that alarm goes off, I'll immediately make navigation the highest-priority mental task - and without fail, I will have just goofed somehow.
Unfortunately, this ability does not convey any other information other than "you are no longer on the planned course". There is a recognition function in there, but no follow-on advisory function. It's still up to conciousness to correct the problem once discovered.
When it happens though... it's really a very odd feeling, and it's quite strong.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
i have been seen dead people for years.
It's called proprioception. Links:
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro02/webhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/music/dancersbody/body/propr
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
Remember the old days, when OMNI magazine was about science? Then it started turning into a persistent hawker of crackpottery. Even the fiction lost its edge and got lugubriously spooky.
And the Sci-Fi channel. About sci-fi, before it became All Vampires, All the Time. It's pulled back a bit, maybe.
To me, this story, along with this one. are the tip of the Slashdot woo-woo iceberg.
But hey. Anything for click-through, huh?
No, we should all sense it's full of crap.
...says the AC.
I wonder if this has any relation to synaesthesia. It appears that those who see auras are in general those with synaesthesia, in this case sensory information about the person is transformed into an aura.
There may be subtle signs that a big earthquake is coming, and maybe even signs that there was an earthquake thousands of miles away which results in a tsunami, but it's nothing so obvious.
Actually, you've just seen one of the first Mallu jokes on slashdot. "Mallu" is the colloqial Indian name of the people from the state of Kerela (who speak Malayalam, hence Mallu as a contraction). In jokes in the South, they frequently take the role of the "morons" in jokes - like Surds (Sardarjis, or Sikhs) do in the North.
:-S.
That said, I really, really couldn't get GP's joke either
I disagree with the sexuality issue being the deciding factor in the very close election. I see the manipulation of the voting machines and their talleys as the source of the extra votes needed to grease Bush back into the White House. Although, some bizarre media maniupulation may have assisted.
Which, incidentally, is a verb tense in Black American English that Standard English lacks. It comes down to us from certain West African languages, and indicates a state of continuance. We have past, present, future, and moods indicating completion or incompletion (which is subtly different).
Really.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No one axed you.
I read the original reports about that tribe. They came out of the jungle to let rescuers know they were fine. They simply followed nature like they've always done.
- The deep fish story is a hoax.
- So what are these red-tailed deep water fish turning up off the coast of Kerela?
- The tsunami took place in the morning, and took about three hours to get to the coast of Kerela. Did the fisherman have enough time to go out, find "unusual numbers of rare red-tailed deep-water fishes" and report back to the government offices?
I'm very skeptical.Tell that to Johnson. Seems he thought his chances were so slim he didn't even bother. Being a war-time president is no guarantee, esp. in a war such as this which does not enjoy the support of an overwhelming majority of the people.
I highly doubt this is a "sixth sense" but rather a means of subconciously processing the data already available. In the case of the tsunamis, the aboriginals may have been reacting to the reactions of animals, or a slight or not-so-slight variation in the behavior of the ocean waves, or something else entirely.
It may interest you to know that our "5 senses" do more than we give them credit for.
We all know that the sense of "touch" also gives us the sense of air movement, temperature, and other qualities, but not everyone knows that some people who are blind but who still have eyes can subconciously detect enough light to trigger day/night biological clock synchronization. Who knows what other qualities our 5 basic senses give us.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I though it was something you dudes did to sell more records. But you mean thurr is hactually a system to it?
Really.
You mean the aboriginals have the ability to sense changes in the oceanic plates? Wow, now that is some sixth-sense I'd like to have.
> Aboriginal tribesmen somehow sensed the impending danger of December's tsunami in time to flee to higher ground before the first sign of water.
This is another example of how exceptionally poor most people are at even basic statistical reasoning.
Of the millions of people along the tsunami coast, one small group decided to evacuate prior to the tsunami. The fact that 99.9999% of all the other people did not evacuate must be counted against the fact that 0.0001% of them did. Most people forget (or deliberately refuse) to take this into account.
Given the fact that an earthquake had occurred prior to the tsunami, and that it has been know since antiquity that there is a correlation between earthquakes and tsunamis, I actually find it astonishing that such a small number of people evacuated to higher ground.
This amazing 99.9999% failure of people to heed the earthquake's warning is actually compelling evidence that people DON'T have a so-called "6th sense".
And I ignore it, I suffer If I act on it, I benefit tremendously. One of my life's projects is to learn to listen to and act on it more often.
Or maybe they just felt the earthquake, and knew they should probably get to high ground, just in case.
First of all, "Black American English" is not a language. It's a dialect marked by (usually) incorrect usage.
But for the sake of whacking your argument upside it's head, let's use this guy's name as an example here. "I be hatin'" could more easily be expressed as "I hate." The subject is the same (I) but the verb is pacified ("be" vs. "hate") in the incorrect case. To properly use a passive ("being") verb in this sentence, you would need the word "am" instead of "be". "I am hatin'."
However, the duration of this act (which is how you justify the use of the incorrect English) can be assumed to be the same. How? If there's a TV show that I hate continuously (every time it's on), then "I be hatin' this TV show" would be no more descriptive than "I hate this TV show". Both convey the meaning that you dislike this show strongly no matter what time or place you are exposed to it, and that you'll continue to feel this way into the indefinite future.
English does not lack the verb tense you speak of. There is no need to make excuses for people that refuse to learn to speak or write properly, or who for social reasons pretend that they know less than they really do.
"Aboriginal tribesmen somehow sensed the impending danger of December's tsunami in time to flee to higher ground before the first sign of water."
Uh, what about the big fucking earthquake as the sign? These tribesmen were relatively close to the epicenter and a 9.0 would have certainly gotten their attention. Their generational history would have at least two other major tsunamis stemming from major earthquakes within the last hundred and fifty years.
I live 4 miles from the ocean on a fault line, my first thoughts after a big earthquake are: gas line, water line, structural damage, tsunami. I don't consider it a sixth sense to move away from the shore after an earthquake provided that earthquake=tsunami is somewhere in your knowledge base.
Fo' shizzy mah nizzy.
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
I can't work out if this is just a particularly nasty troll or if you have just completely missed the point.
Mention the Lord of the Rings one more time and I'll more than likely kill you.
There's nothing linguistically wrong with "I Be Hatin'", and ebonics worth as much study as any other dialect of English.
It's pretty lame for you to crazily go around swinging your grammar book here. Most of the rules you scream about have been invented anyways. We're studying the evolution and structure of language, not what pedagogues claim is "right".
Also, I forgot: Ebonics does have a grammar just as complicated as any other language or dialect.
Go back to pedagogically screaming about latin, you putz.
I can't believe this wasn't modded as Funny. Somebody actually bought that?
Wtf? "Black" American English? As opposed to what? "White" American English? "Asian" American Engrish? Mexican American Spanglish? Absurd.
Sorry, we just speak ENGLISH here. No need to drag ethnicity into it. Ebonics is distracting and useless.
Finally some common sense being used here. It's proposterous to say that we have some kind of sixth sense because Aboriginal people escaped the Tsunami. What a joke. The fact of the matter is that the above poster has hit it right on the head: a smart tribesman will see every other freakin' creature than humans making a run for higher ground, and unlike us so-called 'civilized' folk, they get the clue.
-Vendal Thornheart
Studying the brain is not science to you?
The article is not about anything paranormal, merely subconscious. The point was that even without reasoning out what was about to happen, people could get a sense that something bad was about to happen. Even if the aboriginals did, I doubt most of the animals deduced a tidal wave was coming.
Besides, this was a minor point. As for 'uninformed discourse', did you read the article?
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
Being able to interpret input and make a logical and reasonable descision is all this article is about. All the scientists have done is find an area that specialises in determining what input indicates a potential hazard to our lives.
In other words...another sense? Which would be a sixth sense, seeing as we have five others?
Sixth sense doesn't automatically mean "psychic." If they find a part of the brain that senses danger which didn't previously know about, then that's another sense that we have; a sixth one.
I want to see more studies on this, of course. Just playing devil's advocate here.
A guy get a bag over his head and he tries to guess when he gets a bucket of icewater poured over him.
Scientists already know there are more than the traditional "5 senses." People always forget about two well-known senses, the Vestibular sense (balance) and proprioception.
Background processing isn't a "sense".
If this is a "sixth sense", then I claim my "sense of outrage" and "sense of fair play" as seven and eight.
I beleive that in English it's from the Elizibethan period (and earlier) and was called subjunctive I, as opposed to the currently live subjunctive II form (now normally just called subjunctive, or hypothetical subjunctive, when it's recognized at all).
Your argument may say WHY such a form survived in certain groups, but it didn't originate with them (in English), or at least I don't believe it did.
The marker of this kind of subjunctive tense was the use of present infinitive form (without the leading to) frequently accompanied by, e.g., let, as in:
Let it be so.
or
If that be so....
(The second form is confusing because it is too similar to the subjunctive II form, If that were so...)
I must admit that I'm not really familiar with the exact meaning that this form has in antiquity, but it's the form used by the Giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk", when he says:
Be he alive,
Or be he dead
I'll grind his bones...
Note that this is NOT a contrary to fact supposition (If he were alive...).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Which, incidentally, is a verb tense in Black American English that Standard English lacks. It comes down to us from certain West African languages, and indicates a state of continuance.
No, that's called aspect, not tense. Aspect describes the internal temporal qualities of an event; tense relates one event to a deixis (such as the time of speech or another event).
That having been said, what you're describing is habitual aspect: the habitual "be" in AAVE. Apparently, you picked this up somewhere in some freshman seminar or, worse, off the television, but you really shouldn't go around lecturing folks on linguistics until your knowledge is more than Powerpoint deep.
We have past, present, future, and moods indicating completion or incompletion (which is subtly different).
No. English has past and nonpast tenses, a future mood (among others), and various aspects; aspect, mood and tense can interact, but each is separate.
Your 'incorrect usage' and 'people that refuse to learn to speak or write properly' comments are actually fairly ugly, and display the kind of unthinking prejudice that will take a long time to die out.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
"It's idiomatic, beotch."
We have multiple ways of perceiving things from our senses - huge amounts of work has been done on this on a variety of animals that even an interested outsider like me can pick up.
The subject is the same (I) but the verb is pacified ("be" vs. "hate") in the incorrect case. To properly use a passive ("being") verb in this sentence, you would need the word "am" instead of "be". "I am hatin'."
"Pacified" is not a linguistic term. Perhaps you meand "passivized," but there is nothing passive about "I be hatin'" or "I am hating." English passivizes a verb phrase in two steps: change the "main verb" (or whatever your system of grammar wants to call the most semantic portion of the VP) into the passive participle (third principal part), and insert a form of "to be" immediately before the "main verb."
Perhaps you confused that second step, the insertion of a form of "to be," with the similar step of inserting a form of "to be" in constructing a progressive (or in this case habitual) aspect. For example, there is nothing passive about the phrase "she is running," as opposed to "she runs." Both are present active constructions; one simply is progressive and the other simple.
"I be hating" is an AAVE habitual aspect form, characterized by an uninflected form of "be," and denoting a characterization of the subject rather than a specific instantiation of an action. Nothing here deals with voice.
These are not the auxiliary verbs you're looking for... move along.
While not "contrary to fact," I suspect there is an epistemic modality at work: the giant does not know (or care) whether the possessor of the bones is alive or dead. The lack of knowledge opens up the possibility of non-factuality, similar to the contrary-to-fact conditions that require non-factuality.
Pseudoscientific "sixth-sense" garbage aside, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a very fascinating brain area. I find the area interesting because it's the location of spindle neurons, which seem to be unique to humans and great apes. The concentration of spindle neurons is greatest in humans and decreases with evolutionary distance, indicating that these neurons may play a crucial role in what distinguishes human behavior from other animals. However, we still really have no idea about what their functional role is.
c ells.htm
Wikipedia link
Here are some quotes from a page on them:
http://www.allmanlab.caltech.edu/research/spindle
Recently, we have identified a class of neurons that are unique to humans and our closest relatives, the great apes. These are large spindle-shaped cells located in anterior cingulate cortex. Anterior cingulate cortex is reduced in both size and metabolic activity in autistic patients versus control subjects . The activity of the area is also reduced in patients with attention deficit disorder and depression. The activity in this area is increased in patients with obsessive-compulsive, phobic, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety disorders.
Area 24 appears to be an interface between emotion and cognition. The bottom part of area 24 controls autonomic functions such as heart rate and blood pressure, and is involved in the production and recognition of facial expressions. The experience of virtually any intense emotion whether it be anger, love, fear, or happiness is associated with the activation of the bottom part of area 24. By contrast, the top part of area 24 is activated whenever the subject is engaged in a cognitively demanding task. In EEG studies, a signal arises from this area when the subject is engaged in problem solving and the amplitude of this signal increases with task difficulty. When the subject makes an error there is a deflection of this signal, which is termed "error-related negativity". The anterior cingulate cortex monitors negative outcomes and initiates corrective behavior so as to achieve more optimal results. The spindle cells are a phylogenetically recent specialization in hominoids that relay information from area 24 to other parts of the brain during focused problem solving.
We believe that the spindle cells may be co-ordinating the activity of other brain areas during intense mental activity. Based on our examination of the ontogenetic series of human brains at the National Museum of Health and Science, the spindle cells are not discernable at birth, but rather appear to migrate into anterior cingulate cortex beginning about 4 months after birth. The emergence of the spindle cells in four month old human infants coincides with the infant's capacity to hold its head steady, track a object visually and reach for that object. The late development of the spindle cells could be important since there is evidence that other populations of post-natally generated neurons are heavily influenced by environmental factors. For example, the post-natally generated neurons in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus are very vulnerable to many stress-related events and their survival can be enhanced by enriched environments, physical activity and serotonin. If the survival of the spindle cells were similarly influenced by environmental conditions during infancy, it is conceivable that the resulting changes in circuitry could either enhance or degrade mental functioning as exemplified in problem-solving ability or vulnerability to psychiatric or learning disorders.
For more on this, read Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink . It mentions the same kind of subconscious (he calls it unconscious) mental processing which surreptitiously informs your conscious mind, but from a social point-of-view.
Absolutely not. This isn't the evolution of a language but the bastardisation of a language for social reasons, i.e. being intelligent and speaking correctly isn't cool/rad/street/whatever street-credibility is called this week.
As a lot of people have said here this does not really sound like a 'sixth sense'. That usually implies some sort of paranormal ability.
I would have to agree. Instead I would call this a 'sick sense'. You get an uncomfortable almost sick feeling when you know something is wrong, but consciously you cannot always understand why.
A gut feeling is another phrase I would use.
You're a pompous ass.
Of course everyone should learn to speak and write "properly," as you say, if for no other reason than the next pompous ass could be someone with the power to hire and fire, instead of some random Slashdot pajama warrior.
Science?
Humans have more than 5 senses without having to resort to hocus-pocus. There was actually a new scientist article about it a few months ago.
Examples:
Motion sense, body temperature sense, pain sense, sense of your body position without looking, etc...
Tom
Absolutely not. This isn't the evolution of a language but the bastardisation of a language for social reasons, i.e. being intelligent and speaking correctly isn't cool/rad/street/whatever street-credibility is called this week.
Exactly. It is like saying "do you have" instead of "have you got".
So I clicked on the link in the main story, rolled my mouse wheel down a couple of time and BANG, my first popup since I started using Firefox. What gives??
This is the URL.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/7036
Maybe it's hardcoded into our ACC (the "oh sh**" center) by genetic selection. How? For countless centuries the Greek philosophers had a monopoly on truth. If you had balls to challenge that, your friendly neighborhood clergyman sent you to a session where they removed them with an instrument specifically designed for that.
... that after a fu(king quake that magnitude, you should head to higher ground! I call that knowledge, not a sixth sense.
The tribesmen in India didn't have a "6th sense". They had a folk history that told them that when the water went down, it would soon some back in a much larger quantity and that it was a good idea to head for the hills. This was talked about in the news.
I imagine this "6th sense" might be so allusive to westerners because we as a whole don't pay attention to our surroundings. We're distracted. I personally enjoy just sitting somewhere (a park, etc.) and watching people. Or on a bench on a busy street where people are walking. They'll have dozens of people walking aorund them, and yet they're painfully preoccupied with themselves: they don't even notice when people steal their wallets, bump into them, or anything like that.
Or take the behavior of your average westerner if he or she is out in the woods. They're not "aware" of their surroundings, even though they're uncommon surroundings for them. They'll hear birds, but they won't notice things like the moss on the southern exposure of a tree or rock outcropping, animal tracks, the sudden hushing of animals (birds, etc.) as a person approaches, and various other things that people that spend time in the outdoors with nature notice almost without thinking about it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...swimming fishily around bubbling the piscene equivalent of "Stercus, stercus, stercus, morturi est!"*, they bubble "Surf's up, boys, quick, grab your boards and let's do some touristing?"
* ObPratchettRef
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Several people were killed in Australia due to unusually large waves from the 'quake - only a couple of meters, but they did arrive.
Sorry, almost forgot: you insensitive clod!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yes, I know the PP left the tags off. Mod it up anyway!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Read "The Gift of Fear" for the studies on this that were done 20 years ago!
Andy Out!
That snopes article is completely unrelated to what he was talking about. Just FYI.
I'm not entirely sure what the original guy was talking about, but there WAS an article on CNN about a group (known rather oddly as the "sea gypsies," totally unrelated to regular gypsies) who had as one of their bits of hereditary lore that "if the sea receeds, it always comes back doubled." When the water suddenly rushed out, as preceeds tsunamis, they immediately headed to higher ground, and were safe.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I had a feeling you were going to post this.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
Keep in mind that while things like group consciousness, absolute intuition, "sixth sense" etc have not been scientifically proven, they have not been scientifically disproven either. You can say that they have been disproven for certain individuals, but not in general. Science would have a hard time with non-repeatable phenomena, or phenomena that violate causality. There's no conclusive proof against the existence of such phenomena. In fact we're just now seeing that at the limits our physical studies, time and cauality *can* break down.
Many of the ideas we take for granted today were once thought to be so unlikely as to be laughable. For example: the idea that all matter is composed of tiny particles called atoms. Or that disease is transmitted by invisibly small creatures called germs. Or that communication faster than light is possible.
I'm unwilling to write things like this off yet. At the least it's plausible that our bodies collect and our brains analyze far more (and more subtle) stimuli than we are consciously aware of. Perhaps the ancients were on to something with meditation--not necessarily as a way to access a "higher realm," but to access a mental state that feels like a higher realm.
I've participated in risk sports for most of my life, including rock climbing, mountaineering, and whitewater kayaking. In those communities, intuitive guidance is not taken lightly. A big part of maturing and learning to manage risk safely is learning to hear your "inner voice," which provides quiet guidance to your conscious decisions.
It may be useful to consider that English is a bastardization of Norman (Pre-French), Saxon (Germanic), Gaelic, and Celtic (Anglican languages). It was long considered the mark of an uneducated and uncivilized individual to speak English, and all of the nobility spoke French. And now you call ebonics the bastardization of a bastard language.
Ebonics and redneck are both looked down upon by the current power structure, but I expect we could have said much the same about French, Spanish, and Italian when they were budding dialects of Latin.
pyjama.
Need I remind the poster that Lion-o got his sixth sense from the Sword of Omens, not something innate. sight-beyond...agh. I quit. Not funny. POST ABORTED.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
"I am hating."
Now, what other fake ebonics would you like to justify?
Clarence Carter - Strokin'
When I start makin love
I dont just make love...
I be strokin
Thats what I be doin, huh
I be strokin
I stroke it to the east
And I stroke it to the west
And I stroke it to the woman that I love the best
I be strokin
Let me ask you somethin...
What time of the day do you like to make love
Have you ever made love just before breakfast
Have you ever made love while you watched the late, late show
Well, let me ask you this
Have you ever made love on a couch
Well, let me ask you this
Have you ever made love on the back seat of a car
I remember one time I made love on the back seat of a car
And the police came and shined his light on me, and I said:
Im strokin, thats what Im doin, I be strokin
I stroke it to the east
And I stroke it to the west
And I stroke it to the woman that I love the best
I be strokin
Let me ask you something...
How long has it been since you made love, huh?
Did you make love yesterday
Did you make love last week
Did you make love last year
Or maybe it might be that you plannin on makin love tonight
But just remember, when you start making love
You make it hard, long, soft, short
And be strokin
I be strokin
I stroke it to the east
And I stroke it to the west
And I stroke it to the woman that I love the best, huh
I be strokin
Now when I start making love to my woman
I dont stop until I know shes sas-ified
And I can always tell when she gets sas-ified
Cause when she gets sas-fied she start calling my name
Shed say: Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter
Clarence Carter, ooooh shit, Clarence Carter
The other night I was strokin my woman
And it got so good to her, you know what she told me
Let me tell you what she told me, she said:
Stroke it Clarence Carter, but dont stroke so fast
If my stuff aint tight enough, you can stick it up my... WOO!
ohhhh baby :)
select * from base where originalOwner = 'you' and currentOwner != 'us'.
0 rows returned.
I have something similar, I get the feeling of "something needs my attention" e.g. when I have something cooking in the kitchen, something is on TV that I wanted to see, or when it's approximately 10 minutes since I pored boiling water on the tea leaves.
While this is probably just associative learning, I've had the feeling for different things, and when the feeling hits, I rarely remember what it is that I need to attend to.
The feeling gets stronger if I don't act on it.
There is no need to make excuses for people that refuse to learn to speak or write properly, or who for social reasons pretend that they know less than they really do.
Whutcha talkin' bout, Willis?
dunno.... some masochists feel whip lashes differently from other people... and some people enjoy sharing their girlfriends.... both seem subjective.
So, what you're saying is people should ignore the rules of grammar they are taught in school, right? We shouldn't have to worry about being able to correctly communicate our ideas to others. Rather, they should have to infer them through whatever word or phrase of the week is cool on the streets?
No thank you. I would much rather be understood by the 90% of English speakers that actually took the time to learn the language. I would also much rather not pay any attention to those people that didn't bother.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
A friend of mine points out that gravity detection is definitely one of our senses - we've even got a sense organ for it, located in the inner ear.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No, I'm not saying that. I was irritated that his condescending and racist message was being modded up, and posted a reply addressing that without actually making a point. What I believe is that BAE is not ungrammatical SAE, children grow up immersed in a dialect with different grammatical rules. The post I replied to had undertones of "lazy blacks won't learn proper English". Obviously children have to learn SAE in school since so much of social status is tied to language, but recognizing that BAE has different rules is a totally different thing than thinking of it as street slang with no rules.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
His post never used, or implied, the word "lazy". You have chosen to read it that way. He simply pointed out the fallacy of the previous poster's assertion that BAE has grammar constructs which are required because "proper" English is lacking it. In fact proper English does have the constructs required, and the addition of the new constructs in BAE are simply redundancies.
Most likely these redundancies are intentional, either subconsciously or consciously, on the part of the people speaking this way, probably because it's just another way to identify with a particular group. I personally dislike BAE because I think it's simply a way for some people to try to be exclusionary (i.e. create a group within which they identify and others who do not talk/act/dress/etc like them do not), and I don't like that.
On the other hand, those people probably want to belong to such a group because there has been so much exclusion practiced against them historically. Which I hate equally, if not more.
By the way, calling someone else racist without them actually saying anything racist is really rude and uncalled for.
So are you saying that there is or isn't a difference between "I be hating" and "I am hating"?
There is no need to make excuses for people that refuse to learn to speak or write properly, or who for social reasons pretend that they know less than they really do.
I can't read such statements in the OP without seeing some very racist undertones. "Refuse to learn to speak or write properly" is especially distasteful. When I was very young a black family in my church was refused housing in our town until government action settled the matter, I wound up being friends with their youngest and heard teachers make comments to this effect about his speech and writing. Other experiences throughout my life have led me to see a strong supposition of superiority in anyone making comments like that, often by people who would never admit to actually being racist.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
amazing surf ride, but the few-meter surges did hospitalise a number of Aussies in Western Australia and Christmas Island by dragging them out to sea or pounding them on the beaches.
There were actually two sets of surges hitting WA that day, one from a Richter 8 earthquake near Tasmania which may have triggered the later, larger earthquake, and another from said later quake.
There were also a family drowned by ocean surges in Victoria about a week after the big quake.
So, OK, maybe not 100% wrong.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
So clearly you read comments such as the O.P.'s with a biased viewpoint, you have just admitted it.
He said that they "refuse to learn", not that they are too lazy to learn. There is a difference.
Just like someone who DOESN'T speak BAE isn't "too lazy" to learn how to speak it, they just "refuse to". Of course using the term "refusing to" does imply that they make a conscious effort and I think that's wrong; I don't think that people who speak BAE make some kind of conscious choice, the way they speak is a natural consequence of their surroundings as they were brought up and learned to speak whatever language was around them.
But I do think that there is a collective sense of an exclusive group that comes along with speaking a minority language (and I'm using "minority" here in the numerative sense, not in the racial sense, so don't get too worked up here) that contributes *immensely* to the preservation of this dialect of English for those who are in that group.
I really think it's unfortunate that people such as yourself choose to label other people as racist right away. It doesn't add anything to the discussion and it's inflammatory. It's not useful to not be able to discuss points of views such as the O.P.'s without playing the "racist" card right off the bat.
I honestly think by the way that you jumped to that conclusion so quickly that you *want* to believe that people are racist, because it probably fits in with some kind of self-justification that you want to have.
Seriously, if you base your conclusions about people that you have never even met based on one bad experience that *you* have had with a completely unrelated set of people, I think that you should really re-examine your motives.
Not trying to be overly critical here, just trying to get you to think about this.
Okay, that is the way I should have put it - because you are right that my approach was a bit inflammatory. I think racism is such an important issue for America that a little hypersensitivity is called for and the issue of BAE seems to be one of those issues which is a natural starting point. Many people seem so angered and offended by the notion that BAE is a natural dialect of English that I have to wonder at their motivation.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]