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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."
...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?
"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.
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!
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.
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I suggest you RTFA.
I did - expecting to read exactly what you expressed. I was pleasantly surprised.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
"...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.
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.
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?
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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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...
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> "hey, do you feel that hunger over their?" No, you couldn't, or you'd get slaughtered by the slashdot spelling nazis! :)
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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.
...be used to make peril sensitive sunglasses?
I wish to remain anomalous
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
...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"?)
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.
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
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.
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.
BS. What are you doing on Slashdot then?
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.
Dude, your user id is "I be hatin'."
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
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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.
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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
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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.