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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although it does seem that aboriginal people were forewarned, this is more responsibly attributed to their tradition of paying close attention to wildlife. While it is not well understood, animals seem to be more sensitive to the subtle environmental changes that precede events like earthquakes and tsunamis, and it's very smart of these people to take notice when the animals all flee to higher ground. BBC News article about this subject: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4144405.stm
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
No, they recognised the signs, there was even an interview with some of the tribesmen on TV where they explained this. In a similar vein there was a story about a young girl of who noticed that the sea had gone "all funny", realised that it might be what her geography teacher had told them about tsunami the previous term and got her family to flee. 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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
You could have grabbed it. It would not have shocked you. Unless you touched another one of the wires or you were grounded some how. Asphalt shingles or or clay tiles will insulate you enough that you can hold onto that wire. I do it all the time when I clean my gutters out.
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
One of them I remember seeing interviewed on CNN said that their ascestors, in stories handed down, told them to flee from the beach if the water runs away.
Looks like their educational system saved them.
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
I'm not using the part that lets me recognise someone's mood from their expression because I'm alone in this room right now. I'm not using the parts that let me plan my route through a location that I have a mental map of in memory as I would when walking to the shop, since I'm ust sitting still.
The brain is composed of many interacting parts with quite specific jobs. We use the parts we need to use at any time. It's a myth to think that we could be more productive if we could somehow harness the unused "brain power" and use 100% of our brains at once. In fact we're more productive when we use only the parts that are directly relevant to the task at hand. There are people who tend to use more of their brains at any one time than the rest of us. We call that phenomenon ADD, attention deficit disorder.
Why is anything anything?
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.
Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
Well, gravity detection and rotational motion detection are more commonly called the vestibular system. We have 5 organs dedicated to vestibular detection (other animals can have a couple more). Two of them are linear accelerometers (an inertial weight (calcium crystals + sticky stuff) on inner ear hair cells) that detect gravity, and linear motion of the head. Three of them are rotational accelerometers and are oriented to detect the three ways you can rotate your head. These are fluid filled tubes (semicircular canals) where the fluid acts as the inertial substance that rushes by the sensory hair cells when you rotate your head (and when you stop spinning around, the fluid keeps going making you feel dizzy). While these are all grouped together as vestibular, the outputs are not completely the same. For example, some of the output of the rotational detectors (technically, ampullae) goes directly to a reflex of your eye muscles to keep your gaze stable while you rotate your head. (As a demo of this, take a piece of paper and try to read it while you move it around quickly. You can't. Now hold the paper still but move your head around at the same rate. Your gaze is held stable while you move your head. Similarly, when you spin around in circles as a kid and stop, the world continues to spin (that is, your eyes continue to move as if you were still spinning as the fluid in the canals is moving but your head is not)). In fact the sensory cells that underlie this are virtually identical to the cells responsible for your auditory input (and for fish to detect water flow or electrical sense along the side of their body), and uses ion channels similar to those that detect extreme temperature, hot chili peppers, wasabi, menthol, and touch.
Equilibrium is the 6th, so this other one should be 7th.
Cheers,
Adolfo
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
Elephants can hear sounds at much lower frequencies than humans - infrasound. They use it to communicate within the herd.
This is probably what caused elephants to "sense" the tsunami before it hit - they picked up a huge blast of infrasound, which is produced by (among other natural disasters) earthquakes.
Google it, there are many places where infrasound is used to monitor natural disasters, but also other more exciting things, such as nuke tests.
this topic is going to generate a lot of flames.
You are more than right. I'm going to talk about firefighter.
There is a firefighter who survived from a burning house which was just about to collapse, without any clear signs about it going to happen.
The mind of this person recogniced several different signs from which none was anything to be scared of. For example more smoke than usual or less smoke than usual, the temperature was not what it is normally. The noise fire makes sounded a little different etc. Several different unnormal events together triggered the danger sence in his mind and he came out from the house. There were other firefighters with him, who senced nothing. (Luckily the person was able to convince the other to leave the building also.)
You could call that the sixth sence, but it is normal brainwork. We are scared of new things like computers and robots for a good reason. New things can kill us. On the other hand, new things like computers and robots can bring us much good, so part of the population like them instead of being scared of them.
About tsunami survivors:
If they didn't see the stunami from waterlevels, they might have noticed it from running animals, strange bird behaviour, or anything like that.
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
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.
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.
The tiles might insulate you, they might not.
For instances, they might be wet, or have moss growing on them.
Never touch power lines unless you're trained to do so and have taken the appropriate safety precautions.
You're just asking for trouble - well, death, actually.
-- You can't give it, you can't even buy it, and you just don't get it!