University of Melbourne found that people can notice change or predict something is different from the usual without them having a "sixth sense", scientifically known as extrasensory perception.
For most people there are only five senses - sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. At least that's what we're taught in school. The Bruce Willis starrer "Sixth Sense" is probably responsible for popularizing the concept of a "sixth sense" which researchers refer to as extrasensory perception (ESP). Does this concept actually exist on not has been a debatable topic, with many people thinking otherwise.
University of Melbourne researchers conducted a recent study which debunks the existence of this additional sense.
"There is a common belief that observers can experience changes directly with their mind, without needing to rely on the traditional physical senses such as vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch to identify it. This alleged ability is sometimes referred to as a sixth sense or ESP," lead researcher Dr. Piers Howe from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, said in a press statement. "We were able to show that while observers could reliably sense changes that they could not visually identify, this ability was not due to extrasensory perception or a sixth sense."
For the study, participants were shown two colored photographs of a woman in the same position. However, some participants were given photographs where the woman looked slightly different in both the pictures. The photos were presented to the participants for 1.5 seconds with a one second interval between both pictures. They were then asked to identify whether the pictures were same or different. And if different, they had to identify the difference from a list of nine possibilities.
Researchers found that most people were able to tell when the pictures were different even if they weren't able to pin-point the difference. The discovery led researchers to conclude that many people can "feel" and "sense" a change without visualizing the change and this they can do without a sixth sense.
Howe and colleague Margaret Webb are not the first scientists to have tried to debunk this psychic concept. In 2008, Harvard scientists tried to look for the existence of ESP using a brain scanning experiment. Participants were directly shown some photographs while they were inside an MRI scanner, but other photographs were presented in ways designed to be sensed only through ESP. Photographs were either shown to another person -- the participant's friend, relative, or significant other -- or on a computer outside the participants' field of vision. Other pictures were shown to the participant much later. If the participants really were able to read minds, see things outside of their normal field of vision, or perceive the future, the brain scan should have shown different patterns between those ESP-based stimuli and the direct visual stimuli. But the researchers basically found no change in the brain.
"We didn't find anything, but we didn't find anything in an interesting way," researcher Samuel Moulton told the Harvard Crimson at the time
Similarly, a group of researchers found that neurons in the brain and not a "sixth sense" was responsible for how people could estimate groups of numbers like how many pages in a book or how many apples in a basket.
"For seeing, there are more neurons that process the center of the field vision, where you have very sharp vision. For touch, you have huge hands mapped onto the brain, but smaller ones for legs," NPR quoted Ben Harvey, of Utrecht University as saying. "The same strategy gets applied to numbers. More neurons are devoted to sensing smaller quantities than larger ones. That's probably why most people can't count 246 toothpicks on the floor in a flash but can quickly do it for five toothpicks."
Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine first used the term "sixth sense" to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairaudience, and clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retro-cognition.
