Sixth Sense

Sorry for my hiatus! It's summer time and I having been making such lame excuses to go out and forget about this blog.

This time we have a guest writer-Mr LapHung Chung, who shares his opinion on the power of sixth sense.

Have you heard of the term “sixth sense”? Have you ever wondered if sixth sense actually exists? What exactly is sixth sense?

Vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are the five commonly known senses. To scientific researchers, immune sensing, where your immune system detects unfriendly microbes, is the technical explanation behind the existence of the sixth sense.

To most people, however, sixth sense is related to an intuitive emotion – often known as a gut feeling or simply a hunch that is often beyond explanation. Have you encountered a personal experience where you had an uneasy feeling while seeing a man in the distance staring at you? Or have you experienced a situation where you paused yourself at a critical decision juncture, with no particular reason for an uneasy cloud hanging over your head?

When you had such moments, how did you react and what were your actions?

Unfortunately, at the current juncture, research in cognitive neuroscience has yet to shed light on this aspect. Much are still in the stages of presumptive research and hypotheses testing. Here, I’ll try to provide a rational explanation which I hope is worth a pause for some thoughts.

It is, however, important to have a similar understanding of the adaptive learning ability of human brains. Sixth sense is actually an incomplete recollection of your real-time senses in cognitive processing with memory. In another words, your brain is in the midst of processing inputs from your five senses and matching them with your previous experiences. For instance, when you type a search criterion on your computer, you may not always have a 100% match result. In fact, if there is truly a 100% match, you should have been able to recall the event or person that jogged your memory. This means that there is a direct link between your senses and your experiences. Even if the matching is imperfect, fortunately, our brain would still be able to form weak associations based on some similar experiences.  This ability to form associations due to adaptive learning is what governs the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). At present times, AI technology is still at a rudimentary stage where computers can only respond within known programmed parameters. On the contrary, once human brains learn the basis of card games, we can improvise moves that we have never been taught before. The extent of adaptive modification, however, may depend on the individual’s creativity. We call this talent because the degree of improvisation ability often varies between individuals. Nonetheless, most of anyone’s experience can be attributed to secondary experience. Fortunately, one does not have to jump-off the cliff to learn that this is a dangerous act but rather one can learn by association from the experiences of other unfortunate victims.

Back to the example of the unidentified man in the distance who posed as a danger to you. Unknown to you, your brain is already rapidly processing various visual sensory images such as his dressing and his behaviour. Your sense of hearing picks up sounds that he may be making. Your sense of touch becomes heightened to be aware of your surroundings. Your sense of smell may already be attuned to the olfactory sensation from your environment.

Chances are that although you have never experienced this specific scenario before, your brain is already subconsciously processing all the sensory inputs based on information provided by the other five known senses. Once the assimilation process is completed, your brain begins to search for association. At times the connection could be instantaneous; because of near-identical past experience to the current situation. At other times, your brain may have to depend on inferences drawn from dissimilar sources. This can be in the form of personal or secondary experience from adaptive learning such as communications with previous victims or via mass media. The frequency of sixth sense encounters is therefore proportional to the amount of relevant experience your brain can draw upon. As such, the more personal and secondary experiences, the more frequent you might feel an overwhelming sixth sense.

What this really means is that one can hone your sixth sense, through either personal experiences or secondary experiences, learning vicariously in the latter. Still, you may doubt whether we should trust our sixth sense. Of course, there could be mis-perceptions in each of your five senses and due to the weak associations between sensing and your memory. As a result, basing your sixth sense on those perceptions may not present an accurate picture or be completely reliable.

During one of my university summer laboratory internships, I was performing a routine procedure according to standard protocols when I suddenly had a very strong hunch that something was wrong. At that moment, there were no visible or apparent signs of mistakes to support my suspicion. Nonetheless, I paused as I chose to lean toward my inherent sixth sense and stopped to revisit all my prior procedures. Painstakingly, I reviewed all the prior steps through my notes systematically for the next two hours. To my surprise,  I discovered that I mistakenly doubled the amount of a chemical. Upon recognising this fact, the unusual smell and colour of the solution then became very apparent to me. Thankfully for my sixth sense, I had avoided wasting a large batch of bacteria culture and saved myself tons of hours of work down the road. Perhaps it was the subconscious awareness of the unusual smell and colour of the culture that had awoken my sixth sense.

So the next time you feel a strong intuition, rather than quickly dismissing it, why not pause and trust your inherent sixth sense for once!   

Next two topics will be on two new books: The Power of Habit- Why we do what we do in life and in business, by Charless Duhigg and the Linchpin, by Seth Godin. Coming back soon!