Sixth sense and intuition

[BrokenQuill92]

What do you guys think about six sense and intuition? That creepy feeling on the back of your neck when meeting a what seems to be a perfectly nice person, but they rub you wrong? Or a new house that feels spooky? Or just even a feeling that something is about to happen?

[ErGingerbreadMandude]

Yes.I've had that feeling,it all usually goes away after you poop.

[Homeless Nutter]

Tricks mind plays on itself.

[Ben Davis]

I think such phenomena are our instinctive, subconscious recognition/communication tools kicking in and providing our conscious self with extra information. We all have subconscious tools, of varying levels of effectiveness, that developed when we were primarily instinctive creatures. There are people like Derren Brown who have a particular talent at consciously deploying those tools (e.g. recognising the tiniest physical responses to stimuli in his 'mind reading' techniques, using specific communication methods to provoke predicted behaviour) but there are also people who do the same without realising what they're doing (which is what I think is happening when people are sincerely convinced that they have 'psychic' powers). IMO sixth senses and 'infallable' intuition fall in to the same category.

[BrokenQuill92]

I've always taken it as a signal from my brain as "hey stop twiddling your thumbs! Pay attention!"

[Aoi Magi]

Our brain is dealing with loads of info which we don't realize consciously. For example, in an experiment it was seen that people can normally tell the difference between a hot and cold beverage being poured in to the cup, by just hearing the sound. Martial artists, and people with physical disabilities often show heightened senses which amazes us mere mortals. We all have these senses, we just don't use them properly, but that doesn't mean they are not doing their jobs. They do collect all the info and push it all to our brain to process, and the brain uses these additional info to infer things, which seem like intuition or the sixth sense to us.

Also in other situations, 6th sense is pretty much the outcome of a confirmation bias. Let's say personA has a loved one, personB, who gets into an accident. And personA claims they had felt that personB was in danger, though they might've been on the other side of the planet. The thing that happens generally in this situation is, personA is always worried about their loved one, but until something actually happens, they'll subconsciously discard these worries. Now personA might consciously or subconsciously know some traits of personB which causes the worry, like maybe, personB is a bit sick recently? or perhaps is a bad driver but is going on a road trip? So when the incident does occur, in their own mind they associate it with the worry at that moment and attribute it a special meaning, the 6th sense.

[Clueless Morgan]

On the one hand, I accept that humans have definitely developed something that, for lack of a better word, I would call intuition. We have evolved a keen sense of how to "read" our fellow humans because it can impart an evolutionary advantage - being able to detect the subtleties of when someone is deceiving us can save our lives, especially in the past when encounter people you're not familiar with often, literally, a matter of life and death. We also use this ability in other ways that might have helped our ancestors survive more readily than others.

As far as a person being able to tell hot from cold water merely by the sound of it being poured, I could see an evolutionary advantage to a skill like that being developed, so I don't have a huge reason to call bullshit on a claim like that. (Although now I kind of want to test it out on the water dispenser here at my office... )

I, personally, wouldn't call it a sixth sense because that implies that it's something supernatural, merely because of the connotations that have come to be attached to that term.

I also agree with Aoi that there is a huge element of confirmation bias that comes into play whenever we say that we have successfully deduced something through our intuition. Yes, you may have correctly deduced that your employee was lying about how long it took to complete that project last week, but did you didn't have a clue that your other employee has been embezzling money from your company and has been getting away with it for three years. In the first case you'd call yourself a whiz at identifying problem employees. But you're not even aware of the second case.

[BrokenQuill92]

I agree Clueless I'm sure what we'd call the "else" either.

[Exian]

I always relate this to that feeling of keeping time in a song. When you play with musicians, you're bound to mess up, and when you're a novice, you'll likely stop everything and start from the beginning, whereas a seasoned player will jump back on, because the song is playing in their head. But that's not even the feeling I'm talking about, that's still the player actively keeping time. There's a point when it becomes so intuitive that you no longer have to actively keep time. It just becomes a notion.

*Anecdote Alert!* The other day in the lab walking from room to room. One room had a radio on and I started humming along. I walked into another room while completing some task including running through some calculations and weighing a few things. Every now and then, I'd focus back on to humming that song. When I walked back into the room with the radio, I was right on time with the song.

I think this could explain how sometimes we know exactly when someone might call us on the phone and other "weird" things. We subconsciously keep time with the pattern in our lives. Now, obviously this is just as much of an assertion as a supernatural explanation, but at least it moves it away from the supernatural.

[downbeatplumb]

What do you guys think about six sense and intuition? That creepy feeling on the back of your neck when meeting a what seems to be a perfectly nice person, but they rub you wrong? Or a new house that feels spooky? Or just even a feeling that something is about to happen?

There are many more than six senses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUn7zy8Ya20