Sometimes we have experiences that don’t fit our expectations or that contradict everything science has taught us. When we try to find an explanation for these phenomena we start to believe in the paranormal or the sixth sense.
Sensing danger in the street before someone walking next to you gets robbed, or suddenly “knowing” that a partner is cheating or that a friend is pregnant are examples of how we sometimes know things without having any logical proof.
One of the most common inexplicable experiences is the feeling of being stared at. If you feel uncomfortable and check to see if someone is actually staring at you, your movement may draw someone’s attention and thus your eyes meet and your suspicion would be confirmed. It is then that you think that you have a sixth sense.
What research says about the sixth sense
In an experiment the researcher asked the participant to sit in front of a black computer screen and all he told her was that she was about to see a series of pictures. Some will be calm like a lake and some will be emotional like a lion.
On her fingers the researcher placed electrodes to measure changes in her skin resistance and blood flow. After she presses the button to see a picture the screen remains blank for five seconds and then the computer randomly chooses a picture.
It was found that her body responded to emotional pictures before the computer selected them but didn’t respond to calm pictures before they were shown. In other words, her body responded to her future emotion before the computer randomly selected an emotional or calm picture. This is called “presentiment” and the term suggests a response to a future emotional event.
In previous article, what intuition really how the subconscious mind learns things before the conscious mind becomes aware of them and as a result you might get an intuitive feeling about something before your conscious mind understands it. So this could explain how the people in the previous study responded to the pictures before they saw them (by guessing the pattern).
But could there be some kind of explanation for more strange events?
There are some studies that raise the possibility that intuitions are due to a real sixth sense. In a study that investigated “the feeling of being stared at” two people were separated and placed in rooms that were 100 feet away from each other.
Although person number 1 had no conscious idea that person number 2 was staring at him at random times through a video system, small changes in person number 1’s skin resistance were noticed whenever he was being stared at.
Can We Rely On A Sixth Sense?
Psychologist Dean Radin asks, “Do our experiments prove without question that the sixth sense exists?” He then answers, “Not yet” because we need more successful experiments before we can be sure.
The other question is, “If we suppose that a sixth sense does exist, can we rely on it?” The answer to this is a definite “No”.
Despite these studies you should know that a sixth sense, if it really exists, is rare and weakly predictive and thus is unreliable for any practical purposes.
Imagine that all the members of a flight crew were connected to an on-board computer system that can monitor their emotional responses before different kinds of emotional events. This system is supposed to make use of the crew’s “presentiments” to predict any problem that may occur during the flight.
If the computer detects that all crew members are about to have an emotional response, then the computer could alert the pilot because sometimes even a few seconds of advance warning in an aircraft can save the lives of everyone on board.
There is no way that such predictions can be accurate because just as some people have defective eye-sight, some people are “psychically blind”. Their presentiments regarding upcoming events are incorrect.
The Truth About The Sixth Sense
Believing in the paranormal does not mean that your reasoning abilities are poor but rather that you are trying to make sense of weird situations where we know things through unknown ways. But the paranormal may be a lot more normal than you think.
If you are trying to find an explanation, this is a one that works in some cases.
We may think we have a sixth sense because we usually pick up hints from body language, sound and vision without being consciously aware of doing so. Our subconscious minds put these pieces of information or small events together and cause us to come up with a conclusion. But the suddenness with which this conclusion appears to our consciousness makes it seem like an intuition.
For example, your subconscious may register the fact that your friend looks and acts differently from the usual. Then suddenly you come to think that your friend is pregnant. You wouldn’t be aware of the things that made you think so and thus you say it’s the sixth sense.
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