I definitely believe in it. I feel we have built in antennas that can tell us if we're in danger, if someone is welcoming or loving towards us,etc. I think this extends beyond the five senses (sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound). And you?
...Proprioception.
A link: Humans have a lot more than five senses — here are 18.
What you’re describing sounds a lot more like our brains interpreting information from our senses and coming to conclusions based on that information than a separate sense in its own right. EG subtle things about the way someone is behaving that make us think they’re a source of danger or are fine to be around but in a way we might not actively/consciously pick up on.
@DaringSprinter Cool! I'll check out the link.
@Zundar That could be the case in some social circumstances ...from facial expressions to body language, etc.
But, that doesn't explain instances for example when I was hanging out with a high school friend at 2 in the morning once behind a elementary school- we were just talking and hanging out. Had a sudden feeling of an overwhelming presence or malignant force or person watching over us. I told her and after we talked about it, she said she felt it too and we briskly walked out of there as soon as possible and drove home.
There lots of accounts of folks being stalked in the woods in national parks, and before they ever saw or heard them, they usually have a feeling of being watched before they were able to physically confirm it.
About 10 years ago, I remember looking intently at a young woman at the supermarket as she was walking away from me to the opposite side of the store. I was at the self-checkout aisle and I leaned over the counter to press the buttons on the screen. The next thing I knew , I looked to the left and she was so close to me that her belly button was in my face! Not only did she sense that I was looking at her, but she responded by being very forward with her body language (breaching personal space, making her presence known , etc.). It kind of really opened my eyes to what kind of intuition many women have.
Some of those types or experiences combined with things I've learned in meditation and martial arts have helped me to better understand myself and my intuition and all my various senses.
@Zundar's right: We have a lot of sensory equipment, and sometimes our subconscious brain interprets the data all that equipment is pouring in all by itself and doesn't bother to give our conscious brain anything more than the conclusion.
Saves on energy.
I believe it exists but that is a completely different question than “do all people have it”?
I (and the vast majority of people I know) can drink milk and eat peanuts, but that doesn’t mean people who claim to be lactose intolerant or to have peanut allergies are making it up. It simply means their bodies are sensitive to things my body is not sensitive to.
I know two people who appear to be able to sense “energy” / intent (for lack of a better word) from other nearby people even if they cannot see or hear them at the time.
@JohnR1972: Do they also get that feeling when nobody's nearby? They might have a more active failsafe than average (this sentence is a link).
Some people have pitch perception or the ability to name notes of the scale by listening with no visual indicators. I knew a guy that could transcribe notes to music manuscript that coincided with music being played. I knew another who could name any pitch to within 2 1/2 cents (2 1/2 one-hundredths of a half step). It's most common amongst people who resonate tones in their skull like singers, horn players, etc.
No , I don't believe in a sixth sense . I do believe some people might have more control and understanding of how their brain works and are able to tap into certain things. And I don't promote drug use, however I have heard of some interesting things re hallucinogens.
I agree with @Zundar and @DaringSprinter . I believe my profiling and vetting skills aren't so much intuition as my brain processing all available information, no matter how seemingly insignificant, and instantly giving me the conclusion. Same with when I meet someone in person and take an immediate like or dislike. The information is all there, whether I choose to analyze it or not, and provides me with the final answer. I've learned to trust that instant answer, because it's almost always right.
@zundar, @DaringSprinter, @pmvines and @BlueIris I agree with all. Much of what is referred to as a sixth sense is nothing more than sheer data picked up along the way, like subliminal messages, where the seed is planted and the mind processes and produces its interpretation of it when needed. Sometimes we receive information from our brain involuntarily, which is usually a good thing—like breathing—or it can be distorted horribly—like panic attacks—and sometimes it comes out as common sense we weren’t aware of and we attribute this to a sixth sense, when it is subconscious data processing.
@cylee1180 your examples are interesting and could maybe be indicative of something more, but you also need to factor in other potential causes or explanations for those kinds of feelings/events. Infrasound (sounds at a frequency below what we can actually hear but that still interact with our bodies physically) has been linked to similar events in the past as it can make people feel uncomfortable among other things. People are also pretty susceptible to suggestion and sensitive to how people around them are acting, one person could feel scared for example and another notices and reacts with fear as well.
Something else to consider is consistency. If you hear or see or touch or taste something then that's generally pretty consistent. If you can't sense something that's there then that's moreso an issue with the sensory organs than with the thing being sensed.
But presumably at least, the majority of the time that people are being stared at they don't realise. They aren't sensing it. Even the most paranoid and observant person in the world isn't going to notice every look they get from others. And also the same applies for uneasy feelings - do you and the friend you mentioned always feel uneasy like that when there's something dodgy around? or are you sometimes feeling completely fine. And similarly when you feel uneasy is there always a good reason to feel that way? or is it sometimes fine.
As for people being followed and knowing without hearing or seeing them, that sounds like a mix of paranoia from being out in the woods with nobody else around (I've personally felt like I was being watched when out in the open numerous times before, and it was usually nothing as far as I could tell, just a survival thing as I was on my own and anxious) and possibly hearing something without really being consciously aware of it. Small sounds that they didn't attribute to the presence of a person like the snapping of a twig far off for example, that heightened their existing fear, and that this time happened to also correspond to someone that was genuinely following them.
If people feel things with this "sixth sense" that don't always / don't reliably reflect reality in the sense that they sometimes feel it when there's nothing there, and sometimes don't feel it when there's something there, then it's a lot harder to call it a sense.
It seems far more likely that it's a combination of evolved paranoia, brains mixing up signals or sending us information that we then make up reasoning for as @DaringSprinter said, and how easily influenced we can be by our surroundings both in terms of environment and other people as @FunCartel touched on.
But when we're experiencing those things we our brains don't provide us with an explanation for what we're feeling or why we're feeling, and naturally we then try to come up with one for what we're experiencing. But just because it can be explained that way doesn't mean it's the reasonable conclusion or the correct explanation. Won't claim for sure there is no extrasensory perception or anything like that but the evidence for alternate explanations seems greater.
Yeah... there's a reason the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge ran for something like 50 years and didn't turn up a single winner in all that time.
We can argue a bit about time but all the 18 senses are in animals too. So what makes us human? Process of thought? I have seen all my pets to have distinct personalities like us and likes/dislikes. And animals are good judge of human character too in my experience. But still there is some difference … there are other ‘pseudo senses’ such as complex communication (some whales are not far from humans) then there is esthetic sense that some animals have and some humans don’t … Hahahah … what really makes us human? … I do not think we have proof of ‘sixth’ sense but there is something I cannot put my finger on … is it the subjective ‘sense’ of right or wrong? … where I agree with almost everything on here … but the fact remains we have a ‘sense’ there is something more that we don’t know
@HUGGGGGG I don't think humans are any more special than animals.
~ Sunset Snuggles
@HUGGGGGG: Sensory equipment and brainpower are two different things. Humans have bigger brains. That's it. That's the difference between us and the other animals. Nothing to do with senses, supernatural or otherwise.
@SunsetSnuggles i don’t want to sound mean or negative but honestly it has crossed my mind that some humans are worse than animals. But we have seen in history that some human as better too.
@DaringSprinter by bigger brain I assume you mean more connections per unit volume (talking in layman terms) … there are whales who have roughly 5 times the brainpower by this standard (hope I remember this correctly, can check later in the day)
@HUGGGGGG Not mean at all. Humans do wretched things. Most animals do not.
@HUGGGGGG: You assume correctly... assuming you're also taking proportions, neocortical development, and so on into account
I've had a few experiences of predicting things in my life that made me believe maybe just a bit.
But I also think a couple of different interesting ideas can either be mistaken for or explain sixth sense.
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, that's the idea where if you're thinking about buying a blue Chevy SUV, you'll start seeing that particular car everywhere because your awareness of it has increased. They were always there, you just didn't notice before.
But then there's the idea that things could exist around us that we either can't see or we perceive differently because we are 3 dimensional creatures. Like for example, if we were two dimensional creatures living on a table top (like living cartoon characters on a sheet of paper), we would at most perceive things in the third dimension differently - like the remote sitting in the table we would just see as a flat black line - 2 dimensionally.
So there could be things that exist that we can't see beyond the 3rd dimension, but maybe we can sense something's there. Or even think about an ant in the grass not noticing our giant bodies walking over it as our feet fall *miles from where the ant is. I wonder if the ants are aware of us.
The universe is so vast and our understanding of it is so limited, imagine we are each kind of like a gut bacteria - a gut bacteria with no idea there's more out there than just the gut of this one animal and it doesn't even know it's inside an animal or even in a gut. 🧐🤔
*ant miles
I do believe we are capable of perceiving beyond what we believe is possible, but that we can attribute it to our incomplete knowledge of how our brain works.
@DaringSprinter Thank you for those links! The mention of magnetic implants affecting the sensitivity of someone's Magnetoreception is very interesting. There were cases of 'Transhumanist body modders' (biohackers) who implanted gold-plated neodymium magnets into their fingertips, so that they could hold small hardware (screws and such) more easily. Many of them noticed, after the tissue and nerves around the implant began to heal, that they were able to strongly sense electromagnetic waves, though technically by augmenting their sense of touch. They could tell if power was getting to a wall outlet, they could even sense nearby power-lines and electromotors.
Regarding the power of subconscious perception, one of our most underestimated senses is our olfactory sense. We've typically down-played our sense of smell in comparison to other animals, but through evolution there are smells that we can detect far better. Petrichor (smell of rain), for instance... We can detect the geosmin aerosols that olfactory receptors recognize as Petrichor with 200,000 times the sensitivity of a shark's ability to sense blood in water --and most people don't put much though into it. There are other compounds that we may be hypersensitive to that served greater purpose when we were lower on the food chain, such as 'predation pheromones' that the detection would trigger the 'fight or flight' response in the amygdala (like in herbivores). We wouldn't even necessarily even have conscious thought about it.
@HUGGGGGG and @SunsetSnuggles Absolutely agree, the human capacity for wretchedness is unmatched --and while we've seen the ability in other animals to 'do good and evil', no other animal does it with our efficiency or magnitude.
Thanks @cylee1180 for this thought-provoking thread! 🤔😁
Really interesting thread. I don't have anything to add but am enjoying the comments. Thanks everyone.
@Btown Ditto.
I agree, very interesting thread.
@DaringSprinter - I can’t say for sure. What I know about both of them is purely anecdotal, that is why I said they appeared to have a sixth sense but I certainly could not rule out the idea that they were piecing together information from their 5 common physical senses.
The details of the events I am aware of with them seemed like there was more to it than that but it was not anything repeatable that could be scientifically validated.
It is pretty to think so, but the truth is that there is no actual evidence to suggest such things exist.
Anecdotal and personal experiences aside, scientific methodology and research have shown time and time again that the "supernatural" and "paranormal" are not reality.
What I find most fascinating is that, in a world that is so filled with mind boggling factual wonders (flowers, galaxies, the fact that we are made of mobile and sentient meat...) humans continually persist in making up things as boring as ghosts, and gods, and sixth senses...
Humans have WAY more than six senses.
Upwards for a dozen, and some of us mutants have even more than that...
No one has mentioned common sense which I believe some people have and some don't. For those of you who have it maybe you can let the rest of us know how/where to obtain it.
I believe we have genuine intuition that guide us …. I don’t know if that’s to be considered a 6th sense, or if intuition is more tied into experiences rather than an internal guide.
@Zundar I will say that is the one and only time I've ever felt that in the woods or anywhere. I was used to being out in the woods and being outside at night. I used to go for runs at 4 or 5am after getting off work at the diner or hung out near the woods during in 2004 when the cicadas last re-emerged.
As far as pple staring, I think many pple can't fell if someone glances at them, but if someone is staring intently, I think most pple can sense eventually.
Personally, I think the logic and the intellect of the left brain wants to try really hard to understand or explain or deny experiences that might be a function of the intuition and different levels of consciousness of the right brain .
I think there are many things and phenomenon that can't be explained by neurons, joint triggers , and signs of fear. While it is easy to dismiss phenomenon as anecdotal experience, pple also need to note the flaw and inherent bias in scientific research ...what was seen as impossible or fake once upon time can and has been later disproven (sun revolves around the earth, quantum physics and metaphysics ). Yoga is an exercise thats thousands of years old and Tai Chi is at least several hundred years old, and modern science has only recently begin to uncover its benefits in the last 20 or 30 years despite the fact that they're built on aryvedic and traditional Chinese medical theory in regards to energy and transforming consciousness.
While some things that have not been proven by modern science doesn't always mean they dont exist , there are many far fetched ideas that are 1000% off. I happen to think things like dreams ,visions, intuitions, premonitions , unknown triggers , near death experiences, out of body experiences, etc do exist.
Have a good day!
Reported, reviewed, and removed. CC values everyone's private religious and spiritual beliefs, but does not advocate nor encourage the sharing thereof, @soullover - be mindful that such posts are not allowed per the forum rules. [-Sid]
Just an FYI but religion is one of the topics we're supposed to avoid on the forums, and the same for preaching @soullover
Somehow, I just knew this topic would come up.