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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."
Did the aboriginal tribemen ever go to higher ground when there wasn't a tsunami, or was this the first time they went there?
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!
the ones that headed for the coast at the first sign of danger.
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Real scientific results are reported in scientific venues like professional conferences and peer-reviewed journals. Not press releases.
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.
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.
Last week black box project (or global conscientious), now the "six sense", shouldn't a PSEUDOSCIENCIE icon needed in Slashdot?
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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...
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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.
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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.
All IMHO, the brain is a humongous pattern matching system. It learns by ways of emotional or genetic reinforcment. It might very well be that in fact seeing animals flee, even if they're just walking uphill might trigger a dormant pattern and pop up a completely irrational thought that maybe it's time to go up too.
But this is the equivalent of software. Not an additional hardware function that perceives stuff (the sixth sense). That would be like calling intelligence your 7th sense.
...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.
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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"?)
There are several 'senses' that are really just reprocessing of information gathered from other senses. When something is right in front of you, the sound around you changes - there is a dead spot where you were previously hearing things. Similar 'dead spot' effects can be caused by a shadow over your eyes or the hairs on your skin being protected from whatever air currents were previously there. I personally find that passive echo location works well for me when I'm in a dark room. I don't squeek like a bat or anything... just hearing the changes in ambient sound can tell you when you're near a wall or something.
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.
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.
True, but I always felt that the "5 senses" were intended to be pretty general. Therefore, I'd group a sense of touch/feel as encompassing all those "internal senses" anyway. (You can "feel" that your bladder is full, just as you can "feel" pain or "feel" hunger.)
It still seems like a very valid point that it's flawed when it comes to not mentioning our sense of "balance" though. The sense of body position is an interesting one... Amputees often report having sensations that their missing appendage is still there, so this "sense" appears to be rather "hard-wired" to provide "static" feedback to the brain, which may not be accurate at all if the "givens" of having all of one's body parts in place isn't met.
From TFA: What they have found is not a sense, but a cognitive module within the brain. Senses provide INPUT to these modules. This module isn't gathering input from external sources, but is processing input from our input detectors (touch, sight, sound, taste, smell).
As the article points out, the aboriginals fled when the animals did. This is not surprising -- they long ago learned that animals may "sense" danger, and flee their habitat. They have identified that when this happens, it's probably in their best interest to flee as well.
When the tsunami hit, there were dozens of news reports saying how the animals left the area. The first thing I said in response to that, was, "Why didn't the people leave as well? Especially if this is a warning sign for danger?"
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. I won't knock them for this, but it's certainly not a sixth sense.
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.
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.
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And they love "sixth sense" stuff. Knowledge without having to work for it.
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?
- 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.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.
I can't believe this wasn't modded as Funny. Somebody actually bought that?
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.