Are You Sceptical About 'sixth Sense'?

[Hypognosis]

I already am sceptical about it. But that doesn't stop me being interested in other people's unusual experiences or finding out why they believe in it.

This article by no means fully debunks the phenomenon but covers an interesting aspect of human perception - we can "sense change" in a scene even though, under controlled experimental conditions, we can't put into words what the nature of the change was.

http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/debunking-sixth-sense.html

[LazyGun]

I thought it an interesting article - The understanding that humans experience a kind of peripheral recognition of change, without being able to state exactly what that change might be.

[beso]

Despite basically being a scientific person I have had way too many really weird things happen in my life to believe that we know so close to everything about the Universe that we can rule out interactions at a distance between what we currently assume are completely isolated entities.

My favourite bumper sticker:

"What is the whole thing is conscious?"

We still don't really understand consciousness so how can we say that it isn't?

[LazyGun]

Beso - you want to offer up that bumper sticker again? Cannot make head nor tail of it, but that might be down to lack of coffee or whatever :)

[China Doll]

'What if the whole thing is conscious' perhaps?

I'm only on half a cup of coffee though.

[LazyGun]

@CD Ahh yes, thanks for that :) Probably not coffee then ,but encroaching senility ;)

It is still not a bumper sticker I would want on my car though, partly because I would be very sceptical about the notion...

[beso]

Some notions, although unproved can be very good for one's way of life.

Like karma. It does not need to be true for someone to benefit from the belief.

[Hypognosis]

My own particular manifestation of wierdness is with dreams. Some of them contain people I don't know, or locations I don't recognise. They mean nothing and I forget about them.

'File away' would be a better description. Years down the line, the 'scene' will play out in reality, sometimes only a few seconds in length. Even the "uh oh, deja vu again" reaction to experiencing this 'action replay' is incorporated into the original dream.

Speaking as someone of the scientific persuasion, it is a completely illogical phenomonon and, frankly, embarassing to have to admit to it. It has taken me many years to gather, from similarliy guarded individuals letting slip, that this is actually quite a common experience.

Also, I have little or no control over it; I lay no claims to having a 'magical power' or any guff like that. Being uncontrollable means it seems to have no earthly purpose.

What it has given me is an unusual concept of the nature of time and think about how 'information' could pass from one point in time back to somewhere in the past (dreams) or the future (eg ghosts). I described this, in a private conversation as time being like a tangled up ball of string, which has points of contact from temporally distant locations.

Could be complete drivel but you need to come up with creative ideas sometimes so as to open up fresh lines of scientific enquiry.

The Dr Who scriptwriters came up with "Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey" and I was highly amused by the similarity.

So, I need to do five more impossible things before breakfast before I try a trip to Milliways...

[woofgang]

there's an intersting book called "Blink" about intuition.

[dunnitall]

No I'm not sceptical about it as that would be to dismiss it out of hand. I'm certainly open to hearing about it and people's experiences. My other half has over the years been known to mention things totally out of the blue that has come true to the letter, but what that process is I don't know and have guessed it as having sixth sense. Even animals show this phenomena I think.

[pixie373]

Yes. It's a mixture of all your other senses, imagination and intelligence put together. So, i suppose it depends on the definition of "sixth sense". Psychic-ness (?) doesn't exist.

[gness]

I once refused to get into a car with some friends, no sensible reason, just a strong feeling.
The friends went off without me....there was an accident and the one in the front seat where I would have been was killed.

One morning as we were getting into the car to drive my daughter to school I had another feeling about an accident.
I decided she could be late and waited til the traffic had died down.
Part way there a car drove into the back of my car. A distraught woman got out saying she couldn't believe it....she'd had what she called a premonition that there would be an accident this morning so had decided to delay her journey to avoid it....☺

Perhaps it's just me and cars.

[Hypognosis]

@dunnitall

I don't wish to sidetrack my own thread but..

//No I'm not sceptical about it as that would be to dismiss it out of hand. //

..I dislike the notion that scepticism involves out of hand dismissal of ideas.

Scepticism just means "questioning". Not accepting things at face value.

When a person encounters something new which doesn't sit with their "worldview" (in my case due to prior enjoyment of science education) there is a natural tendency to ask questions so as to reconcile the new information with the existing level of understanding of the world.

The new idea cannot be dismissed until experiments are conducted (and repeated if necessary) which actively refute its existence, or merely one or more aspects which people commonly attribute to it.

For all we know, the reasearch effort might, rather than do away with the concept entirely just get as far as demonstrating that nobody previously understood what was going on to give the illusion of 'foreknowledge', 'thought transferance' and so on. We may, nevertheless gain fresh knowledge of human behaviour, perception, how the brain works or, if we're exceptionally lucky, open up a whole new unexplored branch of physics.

Cars and driving was a topic I was planning to bring up but I'll save that for later. :-)

Also plan to touch on memetic behaviour transfer in animals sometime later.

[jim360]

I'm inclined to believe that a mixture of selection and confirmation bias explains a sixth sense. Not that many people will pay attention to a time when they expected something bad to happen, but it didn't, or when any "sixth sense" led them astray. So we only hear of the cases where something did match up to our intuitions or perceptions, which makes things exaggerated.

That said, we already are known to have more than the five traditional senses, and also perhaps the human brain can pick up things faster than we ourselves realise. I think that is what this article is about -- more than a completely new sense it's possible (indeed, likely) that our current senses work better than we thought.

[Mosaic]

I too am a sceptic and an atheist, and I don't believe in anything that can't be revisited, measured and analysed. But like You Hypo, what draws me is the fact that the results of (belief, intuition, prophesy, premonition) can in many cases be analysed and measured.
So maybe our long evolutionary development allows us to work out and rehearse 'what if's' in the blinking of an eye. Sometimes the what-if's come to pass in a future reality, and we remember our mental rehearsal of them. Its still completely brilliant, whether it's spookery, time travel or whatever.
An unusual periodically recurring dream that I have is disposing of a dead person, often in my current building works project. I'm totally aware that what I'm doing is wrong but my only vague concern is that any alterations done in the future will reveal the crime.
So perhaps this is saying something disturbing about what I might do......

[naomi24]

No, I’m not sceptical about the ‘sixth sense’. I think it exists. (I left my car in a car park the other day, and upon returning to it, got in and suddenly ‘felt’ someone looking at me. I looked around, and there was a creepy man in the next car making rude gestures at me. That’s ‘sixth sense’).

[LazyGun]

People have done studies on this kind of thing. People often comment that something told them they were being stared at, that they could sense when this was happening - but evidence for this remains poor.

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/can_we_tell_when_someone_is_staring_at_us/

[jomifl]

^He wasn't an asian gentleman by any chance>

[naomi24]

Jom, :o)

LG, evidence for a lot of things remains poor, perhaps because methods of examining that evidence are not up to the job.

[jomifl]

The results of the above experiment seem to agree with how visual memory appears to work. We don't remember images as such but they appear to be converted to a compressed 'code' that remembers the qualities of the image but not the spacial information. This explains why it is possible to recognise someone that you have only seen once some time ago even though you wouldn't be able to describe them.