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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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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.
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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"?)
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.
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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- 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.
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.