Should we trust the sixth sense or not?

Let's talk about myself first. I was scared by my sixth sense three times.

I still remember that I went to college at that time, which should be at the end of the semester of junior year. I went to bed at about 1: 3 on time that night as before, but I couldn't sleep over and over again that day, and I was in a panic. I'm sure it wasn't because of my studies or personal emotional conflicts. During that time, my days were as calm as flowing clouds.

Why am I so flustered? My heart seems to be caught by something.

Then my subconscious thought told me that I should call home, but it was really late. Calling would scare my family, and their work and rest were very regular. At that time, my parents and grandpa went to sleep at 8 or 9 in the evening.

That night, I was baffled by trouble sleeping. In the morning, my grandmother answered the phone. After talking to her, I asked, "Where is my grandfather? Let him answer the phone. I haven't talked to him for a long time. . 。” Then she prevaricated for a long time, and I felt something was wrong. I asked my mother to answer the phone, because my mother was the worst liar. As a result, my mother answered the phone and said "nothing" to me. At my insistence, she told my grandfather that he had a sudden cerebral hemorrhage and was hospitalized last night. I put down the phone and asked for leave to book a plane ticket to fly home, but in the end I failed to see him for the last time.

I was the first-born child in my family, and I was spoiled by my elders. I was very close to my grandparents and grandparents. Later, I grew up slowly, came out to work and left home. Later, my grandmother and grandmother passed away one after another. Every time, without any warning or warning, I could feel that on the night of my grandmother's death, I wanted to get angry inexplicably. It was really a nameless fire, because my mood was extremely inexplicable.

Later, in the week when my grandmother died, I had a dream. In the dream, my grandmother was very kind and warm. When I woke up, I felt guilty for a long time. I seldom saw her, and I didn't like to communicate with people since my grandmother was ill.

from then on, whenever I have some feelings, I feel a little nervous, and my sixth sense has been inaccurate. Obviously there is some empiricism.

If the above is more like telepathy with relatives, most people with a strong sixth sense are women, and this feeling lacks rational and scientific explanation and is often misunderstood and misinterpreted.

Next, we can also explain it from some so-called scientific angles:

There is a book called Entangled Ideas, which tells the wonderful reaction of psychology when it meets quantum mechanics.

Physics and psychology probably come from the same ancestor.

There is a very interesting story about telepathy in the book. The hero of the story is Hans, the inventor of EEG in our hospital and a German psychiatrist. Berger

When he was a child, he liked horses very much, so he finished high school and served in the army. During a riding training, the horse was frightened. He was thrown into the air and then fell to the ground. At this time, on the road, there is a group of people pulling the cannon and marching fast. He realized in horror that he was about to be trampled to death by a horse. At this time, the driver of the battery found out the situation and stopped the horse. Hans was frightened but fortunately he was not injured. Strange things happened. My sister, who was hundreds of kilometers away from him, suddenly felt an ominous premonition. She felt that Hans must have found something bad and was extremely anxious. She asked her father to send a telegram to Hans. Hans reported his terrible fear at that time.

This experience greatly influenced Hans. After his service, he went to college, studied medicine hard, tried to find this "spiritual power", and tried to find out what transmitted the inductive information to his sister. Later, he finally discovered human brain waves, which is our current electrocardiogram.

He found that brain wave activity is related to the subjective state of mind, which laid the foundation for the establishment of modern neuroscience. Unfortunately, he failed to uncover this mystery. Finally, I couldn't bear the pain and committed suicide.

that is, 25 years after his death, in 1965, the EEG experiment "extrasensory EEG induction of identical twins" opened a new chapter in exploring the knowledge of "spiritual power". The experiment was to irradiate one of the twins with strong light, and then observe the brainwaves of the other, and was surprised to find that there was a ghostly EEG correspondence.

The term "entangled thoughts" was born. This verifies Einstein's prediction of "ghost action at a distance", which Schrodinger, the founder of quantum theory, called entanglement. This subject was recognized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1969. At this moment, the human mind and the universe, the two most mysterious disciplines, meet.

On the road to understanding entanglement, science has just started, and our psychology has only studied what we can study. We often use scientific means to study materiality, resulting in the extinction of the original perception of life.

people generally can't accept uncertainty, so quantum mechanics opens up a new direction and provides strong evidence for people to receive spiritual information.

On the other hand, it indicates the limitations of human scientific demonstration. At the quantum level, any observation and experiment of human beings are uncertain due to mutual influence, and quantum entanglement plays a role all the time.

Intuition and transcendentalism dwarf any instrument, because psychology and spirit can only be experienced rather than empirical, and the quantum space-time connection it constructs does not belong to the category of three-dimensional space-time, so people can't know it according to the routine.

However, there are many popular science articles against telepathy and the sixth sense, which seem to be more reasonable:

It has not been scientifically proved

Telepathy is a kind of remote feeling, which is called the "sixth sense" besides the five conventional senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Telepathy mainly includes direct communication between people's minds, knowing the past and the future, remote observation, etc. The most mysterious statement is "Perceiving omniscient information hidden in the 11th dimension, which vibrates at the junction of the 1th and 12th dimensions". In order to develop and utilize this special function, a large number of scholars devote themselves to the study of mind; Some countries have invested heavily, hoping to gain military advantage by telepathy; There are also many folk "psychology lovers" who are keen to participate in various kinds of "spiritual practice" and "body and mind" training, trying to cultivate the "sixth sense".

However, after several decades, telepathy has not been scientifically confirmed yet. On the contrary, there are a lot of quacks and academic frauds, and the "spiritual course" has been exposed by the media, which involves cult spread and collective fornication. Some scholars believe that people who believe in telepathy are deceiving themselves, only seeing the results they want to see, and turning a blind eye to the evidence that does not support telepathy.

It is inseparable from deception and forgery

Lovers, relatives and acquaintances often have some kind of tacit understanding, which is regarded as telepathy. For example, someone dreams of his first girlfriend and then receives a letter from her by phone. However, the information communication channels between people who are closely related are various, and their living habits are similar, so it is not magical to produce individual and accidental tacit understanding. To prove the existence of telepathy, we need rigorous scientific evidence.

As early as the 198s, Sir William Fletcher Barrett, professor of experimental physics at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Dublin, and a group of scholars formed a "Mind Research Society" to conduct scientific research on a priest's four daughters and a maid-they claimed that they could communicate telepathically. The research method is to guess the cards with names or household items. If it is blind, the probability of guessing five consecutive cards is one in 142 million, and the probability of guessing eight consecutive cards is astronomical. Under the witness of the notary, all these girls guessed right. However, after six years of experiment, it was finally discovered that girls used code words to cheat, and the technique was not too clever.

Douglas Blackburn, a telepathic person, collaborated with a juggler to perform telepathy, which was recognized by the Psychic Research Association, and Blackburn became the general secretary of the association. However, Blackburn couldn't help but publish a series of articles later, revealing how he cheated the researchers.

People pretend to be telepathic for some reasons, so they use nonverbal code words, such as looking up, down, left and right to represent different meanings, or coughing, sighing, yawning, making noises with shoes, etc. to reveal the contents of the experimental card, and even using coins to knock out the voice to send Morse code! In order to prevent fraud, researchers have to hire magicians, casino cheats and other experts to detect fraud.

On the other hand, telepathic researchers often cheat. American psychologist Laing found that his student and assistant Levi forged data in the experiment, and Laing himself ignored the data that did not support telepathy, thinking that it was caused by the participants' deliberate uncooperative.

However, the phenomenon of telepathy does not exist after the experimental fraud is ruled out. Some people sophistry that telepathy is "sincere is spiritual", and strict anti-cheating means destroy the trust between people, so telepathy is ineffective.

In 1988, the National Academy of Sciences published a conclusion: "After 13 years' research on psychosomatic phenomena, there is no scientific evidence to prove its existence."

knowing the past: it is not unusual to guess the truth

knowing the past and the future is a magical manifestation of telepathy. Among them, "being able to know the past" means to realize the perception of what has happened simply by spiritual strength. For example, an American audience watched a TV news: Susan Smith, a white mother in Southern California, claimed that a black man hijacked herself and her two sons into a car, drove her out of the car after driving to a lake area, and then drove away with her two sons. The audience immediately felt that the two children might have been killed and died in the lake. A week later, the police found out the truth of the case: it turned out that the mother cruelly locked her two sons in the back seat of the car, then started the car and rushed into the lake, and got off the bus early and watched the children drown.

So this viewer thinks that he has telepathic ability and can know the truth of the case. In fact, the crime of a mother killing a child happens from time to time, and its probability is much higher than that of a black kidnapping a white child. Therefore, many viewers in front of the TV suspect that the mother is making false testimony-this is not because they have telepathic ability, but because of their understanding of human nature and human behavior. In fact, the most suspicious thing is the experienced police. As long as someone follows this line of thinking, it is not difficult to get the truth out.

Robert Carroll, an American philosopher, once saw a woman claiming to be raped on TV, but he felt that the woman was lying, which was later proved to be true. Others feel the same way after reading it. Is this telepathy? Not really. People just judge things by their feelings, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Once or twice in a while, people will be surprised by their hunches and intuitive abilities and begin to believe in telepathy.

A hunch about the future: the experiment failed to convince people

People often predict the future, and they often apply their own knowledge and experience to the prediction, and consider the environmental factors, so the prediction does not depend on mysterious supernatural forces. A hunch is more mysterious, which means that a person feels that something unusual is going to happen, and there is no convincing explanation so far. Some people try to explain telepathy with the concepts of "quantum entanglement" in quantum mechanics, but what is the relationship between the activities of individual microscopic particles and the neural activities of the brain? This is not clear. Psychologist Ben admits that the biggest difficulty they face is that these spiritual phenomena are difficult to be compatible with physics and biology.

For this reason, some psychologists use functional magnetic resonance vibration (fMRI) to measure brain activity, skin conductivity and heart rate, trying to prove that the human body has a premonition or "subconscious effect" before the real stimulus occurs. For example, the body has reacted before seeing a picture, which can explain the existence of telepathy. Sure enough, some experiments have found that people will have physiological activities such as adrenaline secretion before anxiety. However, this does not mean that people can foresee the future. After all, anxiety does not appear before things happen.

Carol pointed out that these psychographic experiments are full of defects in design, such as the lack of reasonable experimental control groups, and the researchers' interpretation of the data is far-fetched, and they often confuse people with statistical tricks. Repeatability is an important requirement for scientific experiments, but when other scholars repeatedly verify the so-called psychic premonition, they can't get the same result.

The phenomenon of psychic premonition can be explained more simply and reasonably. For example, there is something wrong with the experimental instrument-the precise instrument is easily affected by temperature, humidity, electromagnetic field, etc. There are errors in the recording and calculation of experimental data; Some researchers want to prove the existence of mental phenomena so much that they intentionally or unintentionally falsify them and only see the data that is beneficial to mental phenomena. Carol said: "As long as you find someone who can predict the champion of the game, the winning number of the lottery or the terrorist attack every time, then the doubters will be truly convinced."

Self-deception makes the willing take the bait

Self-deception is that we mislead ourselves into believing something false. Psychologists believe that self-deception has various intentional or unintentional motives, such as self-interest, or psychological factors such as prejudice, desire and insecurity.

For example, although objective evidence clearly shows that a child is lying, his parents still firmly believe that the child is telling the truth, which is the result of parents' desire to tell the truth. Carol believes that self-deception is a moral defect of dishonesty and a manifestation of lack of rationality. Sometimes self-deception is caused by the lack of ability to judge evidence, which is a natural lack of ability. For example, parents think they are close to their children, and people who accuse their children of lying don't know their children as well as themselves, so there is reason to trust their children more. This is a simple cognitive disorder, which has nothing to do with motivation and morality.

many people believe that as long as they are not as wishful as their parents, they will not deceive themselves, but in fact, self-deception keeps happening. For example, many people spend money on all kinds of fake products, believing that there is a perpetual motion machine in the world, thinking that it is very economical, environmentally friendly and can save the world. As a result, the money is cheated and the face is lost.

Although scientific research has repeatedly shown that telepathy, horoscope, crystal ball divination and touch therapy are deceptive, there are always people who believe that on the one hand, they are driven by interests, such as fortune tellers and psychological counselors engaged in touch therapy, on the other hand, they are ignorant, lazy and have low cognitive ability. For example, telepathic believers often do not have scientific literacy.

remote observation: it does not have any military value

remote observation refers to telepathy to see places beyond the range of vision and perceive who is there and what they are doing without the help of any other technical means.

The psychic with this telepathic ability claims to find oil fields, mountains on Jupiter, missing children, abducted hostages, buried bodies, secret meetings held by the enemy's defense department, and so on. They once succeeded in persuading the US government to allocate funds for research, so there was the "Stargate Project" that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spent millions of dollars on. At most, 16 telepathic masters participated in the project, and some people had unusual experiences.