there is it sixth sense?

What is the role of sixth sense in the development of intuitions? How the insights they occur? How science is she compared to psi phenomena? Have you ever had a hunch, an instinct or intuition? Dean Radin, PhD and parapsychologist, claims that certain sensations may predict the future. Ray Hyman, Ph.D. in psychology, too, is not certain. A summary in French of an article originally published in Psychology Today, which offers an interesting discussion around the recent experiences in the field of presentiment.


Intervention by cheapskate Dean:

Alex, a fellow University, was cleaning his revolver six shots in preparation for a hunting party that would unfold in the month. In this gun when the trigger is pulled, the hammer back, the cylinder rotates and the hammer falls on the room in a well-oiled movement. For security reasons, Alex keeps five bullets in the revolver with the hammer on the sixth, empty room. Before cleaning the weapon, he told me later that he had removed five bullets and had set aside. When he finished cleaning, he began to put the bullets in the cylinder. When he reached the fifth and last ball, he had a sense of awe. Sentiment that had a link with that ball.

Alex was annoyed about this weird feeling because nothing like it never happened. He decided to follow his instincts, put the ball aside and positioned him the hammer of the gun room on the 6th. The room which is next, which normally contains the fifth ball was now empty.

Two weeks later, Alex was at the hunting lodge with his fiancee and his parents. This afternoon, unexpectedly, a dispute arose between his parents. Alex wanted to calm them down but the father, enraged, took the pistol from Alex who was in a drawer and pointed it at his wife.

Alex tried to intervene arise between the gun and the woman but it was too late, the trigger was pressed. For a scary split second, Alex knew he was about to be touched. But instead of a sudden and horrible death, the gun has sounded a "click". The cylinder turned on an empty chamber, the chamber that would have contained the fifth bullet if Alex had not left out two weeks ago.

Alex did really predict the future, or was it just an extraordinary coincidence? There are several possible explanations for such forebodings sometimes arise. One explanation is that, at the subconscious level, some thoughts are "stored" in some way conscious level without us realizing it. Another explanation is that we perceive certain body language, sounds or visions devices without consciously realizing it. A third explanation is that for every amazing coincidence we remember, we forget all the times we had a hunch and it did not materialize. A final explanation is that we change our memory our own convenience, creating links that should not exist. And so on. These sorts of prosaic explanations probably account for many présentiments. But they do not explain them all.

As with the intuition of Alex, a series of case studies carefully documented increase the likelihood that some intuitions are due to a genuine sixth sense. But, to confirm that these stories are what they appear to be, we must turn to controlled tests performed under laboratory conditions.

In a preliminary study and in three subsequent experiments, I observed that many people unconsciously react to something bad, even before this thing happens.

Consider the typical case of an editor of a popular magazine. When she asked me the question: "Is there a sixth sense?" I do not answer him directly. I asked her if she agreed to participate in an experiment that uses images randomly selected by computer. She accepted.

So I did sit at a computer screen. Everything I said was that she would see a series of photographs. Some will be calm as a lake, and others will be more emotionally demanding, like a spider. On two fingers of his left hand, I attach two electrodes that measure tiny changes in skin resistance. On a third finger, I place an electrode that measures the blood flow. I explain that all she has to do is press the mouse button when ready, and look at the pictures.

I leave the room. It relaxes and press the button. For 5 seconds, the screen goes blank, then the computer selects an image from a large database, some calm and other provocative. The image is displayed for 3 seconds then the screen goes black for 8 seconds. Finally, a message announcing that she can begin the next test when Ready.

She repeated this sequence 40 times. At the end of the experiment, I analyze the data recorded by the electrodes and I prepare two summary charts. Each graph shows the mean changes in skin resistance and blood flow before, during, and after she saw the pictures. I showed him the charts. She immediately noticed is that after she saw pictures of emotionally charged, the strength of his skin and blood flow fingertip changed dramatically. And after she had watched the calm pictures, its physiology has hardly changed.

"So I responded emotionally when I saw pictures of emotionally charged and I remained calm when I saw pictures of calm," she told me. "How can this show a sixth sense?"

I directed his attention to the segments of the graph showing its physiological responses before the computer does not select the images. "This bump shows that your body responded to emotional pictures even before the computer selects them. And this flat line" I said pointing to the other line, "shows that your body does not react before images is presented to you not quiet. See? Your body has responded to your future emotion before the computer did randomly selected images calm or emotionally charged. "

I added "We can now demonstrate in the laboratory at some level: some people have literally an instinctive presentiment before something bad happens. Our viscera warn us of danger even if our conscious mind does not always pick up the message. "

Editor's body showed signs of what I call the presentiment, a form of unconscious perception "psi". Psi is a neutral term denoting a psychic experience, and although this seems straight out of an episode of "X-Files", scientists worldwide have studied the subject in the laboratory for over a century. The scientific evidence is now stronger than ever experiences such as telepathy (mind to mind communication), clairvoyance (information received from a remote location) and precognition (information received from a distant time). These studies suggest that we have the means to obtain information by way of common sense. The sixth sense and similar terms, like second sight and extrasensory perception (ESP), refer to the perceptual experiences that transcend the usual boundaries of time and space.

Trying to go a little further, I realized that we had to dig deeper than what is detectable at the conscious level. While ESP and psi generally refer to conscious psychic experiences, I have always thought that asking people to consciously bring their subtle impressions in psi was shot into space. What would happen if we rounded the defense mechanisms that filter our perceptions and censor our waking consciousness? Can we find psi experiences that people are not aware?

A handful of colleagues have paved the way for this type of investigation. In the mid-1960s, Dr. Charles Tart in psychology from the University of California at Davis, has measured the skin conductance, blood volume, heart beat, and verbal reports between two people (called a transmitter and receiver pair). As an issuer, he received random electrical shocks to see if the remote receivers could detect these events. Tart found that they were not consciously aware of anything unusual, registration of the physiology of remote receivers showed significant responses to shocks he had undergone.

In independent experiments, engineer Douglas Dean at Newark College of Engineering, Dr. John Barry in psychology in France, and Dr. Erlendur Haraldsson in Psychology at the University of Utrecht, have all observed significant changes in blood volume fingers when a transmitter receptors located thousands of miles to emotional thoughts directed toward them. Also in the journal Science published a study of two physiologists who reported significant correlations in brain waves between isolated identical twins. Such studies are known as Distant Mental Intention on Living Systems or DMILS (distant mental intentions on living systems).

The idea of ​​studying the intuitions came to me in 1993, while I was research assistant at the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I was researching the feeling of being watched. In the laboratory, I separated two people by placing them in rooms that were within 100 feet of each other. I monitored the electro-dermal activity of the person while the # 1 person # 2 was watching the person # 1 on a closed circuit video system. Despite the fact that the person observed could not have a conscious idea of ​​when the observer looked at her, because parts were distant from one another and that the observation is made at random, I have observed small changes in the resistance of the skin of the person observed.

Thinking about these results, I realized that (for reasons relativistic) this kind of connection "nonlocal" through space implied a complementary connection through time. If we saw a real effect in distant space between people, then the same should work as a remote effect of time within a person. I called this effect "presentiment" because the term suggests a response to an emotional event future.

I quickly discovered that even the most convinced skeptics, those willing to swear on a stack of journals that psi phenomena are impossible, were slightly less critical with respect to the intuitive hunches. This is perhaps because most people have had at least once.

I myself hardly believed the results of these studies I have conducted on this writer and others. But I did not find errors in the experimental study or analysis of results. A few months later, Dr. Dick Bierman (Ph.D), professor at the University of Amsterdam, became aware of my studies and did not believe him either. He then repeated the experiment in his laboratory and obtained the same results. Since then, two students from Robert Morris Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Edinburgh have also repeated the experiment and have also obtained similar results. Several attempts at replication are now underway in several other laboratories.

Our experiments prove beyond doubt that the sixth sense exists? Not yet. What we know is that three independent laboratories have reported similar effects, based on data on more than 200 participants. The proof will remain on hold until a larger number of laboratories have not recorded the same results. Although our studies, combined with the results of several other types of tests made by dozens of investigators on precognition and other classes of psi phenomena, were particularly skeptical that scientists have relativized what was previously unthinkable: the possibility a genuine sixth sense.

In 1995, for example, as a skeptical astronomer Carl Sagan had the opinion, all throughout his life, that psi phenomena are impossible. But in one of his last books, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, he wrote "When I write, there are three claims in the field of extrasensory phenomena which, in my opinion , deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers; (2) that people under sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images that they are "projected", and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which are verified to be accurate and they could not have known any other way than reincarnation. "

If scientists eventually accepted a sixth sense exists, how could it change society? On the one hand, it could not change anything, we can learn that genuine psi abilities are rare and only weakly predictive, and thus inconsequential for most practical applications. On the other hand, it is possible that the study of sixth sense will revolutionize our understanding of causality and applications will be radically new. For example, in the January issue of the journal Alternative Therapies, Dr. William Braud psychology professor and research director at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and co-director of the Institute William James Center for Consciousness Studies, discusses the concept of retroactive intentional influence as a curative application.

Braud is well aware of the nature of this assumption particularly amazing, but it is not purely fanciful. In his article, he reviewed hundreds of experiments examining a wide range of phenomena rétrocausaux, the influence of mind on the random numbers generated by electronic circuits, to divination images selected targets in the future, studies examining the "feeling of being watched" to presentiment experiments. He concludes that some form of retroactive intentional influence is possible, and may have important implications for healing.

An application may be less drastic for early detection systems. Imagine that in a future aircraft, all crew members are connected to an onboard computer system. The system is designed to continuously monitor the heart rate, the electrical activity of the skin, and blood flow. Before the crew aboard, every person is calibrated to see how he or she responds before, during, and after different types of events or emotional calm. Each of those idiosyncratic response would be used to create a unique medium of emotional response to be inserted into the computer system.

While the aircraft is in the air, the computer monitor the body of each crew member to assess their emotional level. If the computer detects that all crew members are about to have an emotional response (and the aircraft is operating properly) so the computer could alert the driver. In some cases, the few precious seconds that could be earned and could save the lives of everyone on board.

Similarly, some intuitive feelings may indicate the presence of a sixth sense. But for whom? Probably everyone, at some level. But as some people have poor eyesight, this is roughly the same for psi phenomena: except that in this case, most people are "psi-blind". I suspect that in the future, with a little assistance from specialized technology, the same way a hearing aid may improve listening low, it will be possible to boost our weak sixth sense.