'Sixth Sense' Can Be Explained by Science

What a bunch of BS. When my wife's dog got killed, the dog in another town it had been with for a few years stopped eating, and died about a week later.

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"She claimed that she could sense things that she couldn't see," such as when a friend was recently in an accident, Howe told LiveScience.

Howe was skeptical, so he and University of Melbourne psychology graduate student Margaret Webb decided to test this sense.

Webb had friends dress up to pose in a pair of pictures, with slight appearance changes. For instance, his friends would wear glasses in one photo but not in the other, or put on lipstick in one photo and not in the other.

The team then showed 48 undergraduate students the first photo for 1.5 seconds, followed by a 1-second pause, before revealing the other photo. Participants then had to indicate if there were any differences between the photos and, if so, what those differences were. (The students could pick possible changes from a list.)

Participants often accurately detected there were changes in the photos. But the students weren't very good at identifying what had changed, even with big alterations, such as the removal of a large Mexican hat.

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"Something about you looks different.... but I can't quite put my finger on it....Hmmm.... maybe..were you in an accident? No, I've got it! You stopped wearing that big Mexican hat!"

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It is amazing that the authors of this study believe that their experiment confirming people are better at noticing something is different than they are at knowing exactly what is different helps to explain peoples' superstitions and funny ideas about coincidence and causality.

I think it's been pretty well established that the signal from the eyes not only travels to the visual cortex where we physically "see" but other parts of the brain. Patients with brain damage to the visual cortex have been shown to be able to sense objects even though they cannot see them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

Certainly. But how does that knowledge or anything in this 'research' do what the article claims, i.e., establish that people's belief in ESP is merely that non-conscious processing of visual stimulus?

You're right, it doesn't prove that. What it shows is that non-conscious visual processing could lead people to believe in ESP. There are other factors, like having selective memory and not accurately calculating the odds of certain events happening that also contribute to this belief. One graphic coincidence will stay in your mind for a long time.

I don't care what they say. Back in 1984, I got slammed to the ground in one of these lifts...almost.

I was working in the air on a new construction site, and the top of an unmarked septic tank, (that was buried under the base of the lift), caved in. I was fully boomed out on one side, and when the septic tank caved, I went up and over in an arc, with the basket getting slammed against the ground, and bouncing.

Anyway, I had dreamt about that fall for well over a year, but it wasn't a JLG lift; it was always me on a platform on top of a pole, and the base of the pole snapping. Each time, I waited until the platform almost reached the ground, jumped off of it, pushing upward, and landed on my feet.

When that lift fell, I instinctively knew what to do, and exactly when to do it, from so many practice runs in my dreams, I cleared the basket, landed on my feet, and it probably saved my life.

I just ended up with a broken tail bone, cracked sternum, and a couple of compacted vertebrae. Staying in that basket, likely would have killed me.

After the incident, I never had the falling dream again.

Glad you made it out alive.

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So which part of that do you find to be unusual or suggesting a sense not generally recognized:

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1. Regularly dreaming about the occurrence of an accident involving the threat to life (a very overt threat using the primitive fear of falling) which you faced at work.

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or

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2. The idea that repeatedly practicing something mentally allowed you to prepare and possibly perform better than otherwise on some action in the real world.

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or

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3. That once you had faced your fear and survived that it ceased to be the profound threat it had been, and your dreaming mind either stopped dreaming about it, or stopped alerting you to that fact.

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or...some combination of the above?

I didn't have any fear of falling. I was so used to being in that basket, that I would drive the machine around while up in the air, and bounce the basket if I got stuck. Going up in the air was a regular part of my job, whether in a machine, or climbing.

The unusual part, was that that particular recurring dream, dealt very specifically with that exact fall. I knew when to leap out of that basket...which was actually a dive, since the opening was facing sideways instead of up, and I knew exactly how to swing my legs under me, so that I would land on my feet. All of this transpired within the seconds during the fall; there wasn't time to think about what I was doing...I just knew, and each time I had the falling dream, that was the move that I employed in the dream. It transferred over perfectly to the actual fall.

I suspect your lack of fear was limited to the conscious part of your head, and that the other part was screaming, hence the recurring dream.
Regardless of which part of your mind did the necessary practice so that you wre up to the task, good job.

Well, I continue to think there was more to it than that. There are lots of ways to fall, and the dreams started well before I was using this particular machine...but each dream dealt specifically on what to do in the particular instance of falling while in that basket.

I can't explain what caused them, but if not for the dreams, my instinct would have been to clutch the rails of the basket, and ride it to the ground, since we're only talking about a few seconds from start to finish.

I also had been in the air well before that incident, and went back to it after I healed up...in fact, when I went back to work after about 6 months, I climbed back in that same machine, on a different job, but never again had any falling dreams.

Whatever you attribute it to, the cessation of the dream makes sense. Fear of the unknown is usually far more unsettling than an actual occurrence.

I guess. I didn't fear falling before the fall, and I didn't fear falling after the fall.

I do now that I'm old though.

I had to get on my 32 foot ladder a few weeks ago, and it was scary as hell.

Fear of heights is instinctual. We rapidly learn to function without focusing on it, pushing it out of our intentional realm, but it never truly leaves us.

I guess a lot of things are instinctual, that we don't recognize.

I know another guy that got drunk at a party, fell from a second floor deck, and landed on his head on the concrete driveway below.

He was in a coma for almost a year, and when he emerged from the coma, he understood things that he had no idea about before the fall.

He now works from home for a major tech company, and gets paid for figuring out problems that their in house people can't get figured out.

To this day, he doesn't have a clue as to how he came upon this skill, but he's glad that he has it, and he makes good money. He wasn't computer savvy before the fall.

That is really strange.

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I wonder if he was popping out of his coma to attend online classes in the middle of the night?

Nope. It's an odd story, although, consider child prodigies.

I think there's a lot more to being human than meets the eye. I have no idea how some are able to tap into things that others can't...but they can.

That story differs from that of a child prodigy in more important ways than just age of the subject.

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'... when he emerged from the coma, he understood things that he had no idea about before the fall....'

'....He wasn't computer savvy before the fall....'

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This is tantamount to a newborn grabbing a guitar and producing a recognizable rendition of Master of Puppets then having the doctor confirm that no guitar came out or remains in the mother.

Yep...or a kid that has an intimate knowledge of aviation and plane design. Ever hear of this one?

http://www.mindpowernews.com/PastLifeBoy.htm

I don't find that reference very believable. Something fishy is going on with some parts of that whole description.

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Consider for example that the WWII pilot is described as Lt. Hudson, who on his 50th mission (his last prior to returning home) was shot down. Yet his sister claims he enlisted.... which would not make him an officer. I'll grant some people confuse 'enlist' and 'commission', but the sister says he did that after one year of college. With one year of college, she is right, he enlisted....meaning he wasn't a lieutenant. I suspect there is also a probability problem with flying 50 missions and remaining a lieutenant, though it certainly isn't impossible.

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The kid had a traumatic experience at a museum that focused on WWII aircraft combat.

I think I saw one of those TV shows that interviewed the kid, and it was pretty uncanny how he could describe in detail a lot of the stuff that the pilot experienced.

It's was less believable that they would be able to train the kid to pull off that big of a hoax.

Less believable?

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That the kid could have learned to respond in that way from known processes that we all have experienced is less believable to you than the memories of a pilot being trained into the kids brain by some unknown phenomena?

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Or, did you mean it is less believable that a child can become a believable actor than someone being commissioned an enlisted lieutenant US Navy pilot?

Who knows?

I suppose it's possible that the parents spent hundreds of hours training the kid to answer questions correctly, so they could get on a TV show and get their 15 minutes of fame.

Do you suppose that all of the evidence that the University of Virginia has collected since 1961, is also part of some elaborate hoax?

Maybe it's a massive scam to get grant money.

Is this believable?

http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=1423

This goes into a little more detail.

https://talkingaboutpeople.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/is-there-life-before-life/

If it's all a hoax, the parents sure did put a lot of effort into it.

Jim Tucker has uncovered some interesting stuff.

I used to do quite a bit of reading about things like this, but quit, because the best there will ever be, is evidence...never proof.

http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/home-page

I've been looking around the web. It seems that oddities associated with comas, are not unheard of.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/croatia/7583971/Croatian-teenager-wakes-from-coma-speaking-fluent-German.html

Just going up in one of those things is my worst nightmare!

You get used to it.

Another time I was in one, about 10 years after the fall, boomed up in the air, all by myself on a job, and the pin that holds the big arm to the base broke.

The basket listed over to the side, hanging by the other half of the pin. I was working inside a big building, no cellphone or communication, and climbed up into the rafters of the ceiling I was working on.

After sitting up there for about a half hour, I realized that nobody was going to come and check on me, so I had to climb back into the listing basket and ease it back down to the ground. That was a scary one. I was just waiting for something to snap, and have the entire arm and basket drop like a rock. I made it though.

A guy came the next day, hammered the pin back through the arm, welded a plate on it, and back to work I went.