Should we trust the sixth sense or not?

Let me talk about myself first. My sixth sense was accurate enough to scare me three times.

I still remember that I went to college at that time, which should be the end of my junior year. That night, I went to bed at about 10 on time as before, but I couldn't sleep over and over again that day, and I was in a panic. I'm sure it's not because of academic or personal emotional conflicts. During that time, my life was as calm as flowing water.

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

Then my subconscious flashed that I should call home, but it was really late at that time. Making a phone call will scare family members, who have a regular schedule. At that time, my parents and grandpa fell asleep at eight or nine in the evening.

That night, I lost sleep. I called home in the morning and my grandmother answered. After talking with her, I asked, "Where's my grandfather? Put him on the phone. I haven't talked to him for a long time. . . "Then she faltered for a long time, and I felt something was wrong. I put my mother on the phone because my mother is the worst liar. As a result, my mother answered the phone and told me "nothing". 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 I didn't see him for the last time.

I am the boss of my family, and I am spoiled by my elders. I am very close to my grandparents. Later, I grew up slowly, came out to work and left home. Later, my grandma and grandma died one after another. Every time, without any warning or warning, I feel that I want to get angry inexplicably on the night when my grandmother died. It is really a nameless fire, because the mood is extremely inexplicable.

Later, the week after my grandmother died, I had a dream. In my dream, my grandmother is very kind and warm. I felt guilty when I woke up. I have been away for a long time and seldom see her. Besides, since grandma was ill, I don't like to communicate with people.

Since then, whenever I have some feelings, I am a little neurotic and my sixth sense has been inaccurate. Obviously some empiricism.

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

Below, we can also explain and explain from some so-called scientific angles:

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

Physics and psychology probably originated 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

He liked horses very much when he was a child, so he finished high school and served in the army. Once in riding training, the horse was frightened. He was thrown into the air and then fell to the ground. At this time, on the road, a group of people were pulling cannons 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 car found the situation and stopped the horse. Hans was frightened, but fortunately he was not hurt. Strange things have happened. My sister, who was hundreds of kilometers away, suddenly had a bad feeling. 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 fears at that time.

This experience greatly influenced Hans. After serving, he went to college, studied medicine hard, tried to find this "spiritual power", and tried to figure out what transmitted the sensing 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 subjective mentality, which laid the foundation for the establishment of modern neuroscience. Unfortunately, he failed to solve the mystery. Finally, I couldn't stand the pain and committed suicide.

That is, 25 years after his death, the EEG experiment of 1965 and the extrasensory EEG induction of identical twins opened a new chapter in exploring the knowledge of psychic power. The experiment is to illuminate one of the twins with strong light, and then observe the brain waves of the other, and I was surprised to find that there is a ghostly brain wave correspondence.

The word "tangled thoughts" was born. This verifies the "action at a distance" called entanglement by Schrodinger, the founder of quantum theory predicted by Einstein. This project was approved by American Association for the Advancement of Science 1969. At this moment, the human mind and the universe, the two most mysterious subjects, met.

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

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

On the other hand, it shows the limitations of human scientific argumentation. At the quantum level, any observation and experiment of human beings are uncertain because of interaction, and quantum entanglement plays a role all the time.

Intuition and transcendence dwarf any instrument, because psychology and spirit can only be experienced, 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.

But there are many popular science articles against telepathy and the sixth sense, and it seems more reasonable:

Not scientifically proven.

Telepathy is a distant feeling, and it is the "sixth sense" besides the five conventional senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Telepathy mainly includes direct communication between people and hearts, knowing the past and future, and remote observation. The most mysterious statement is "Perception of omniscient information hidden in 1 1 dimensional space, which vibrates at the junction of 10 dimensional space and 12 dimensional space". 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 in the hope of gaining military superiority through telepathy; There are also many folk "psychology lovers" who are keen to participate in various spiritual and physical and mental training and try to cultivate the "sixth sense".

However, after decades, telepathy has not been scientifically confirmed. On the contrary, there are a large number of Jianghu scams and academic fraud, and the "spiritual lessons" exposed by the media involve 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 fraud.

There is often some tacit understanding between lovers, relatives and acquaintances, which is regarded as telepathy. For example, someone dreamed of his first girlfriend and then received her letter by phone. However, there are various channels of information communication between people who are closely related, and their living habits are similar, so it is not magical to produce individual and accidental tacit understanding. In order to prove the existence of telepathy, we need rigorous scientific evidence.

As early as the 65438+80s in 2009, 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 1 maid-they claimed that they could communicate telepathically. The research method is to guess cards with names or household items. If you are blind, the probability of guessing five cards in a row is 65.438+one in 42 million, and the probability of guessing eight cards in a row is astronomical. In the witness of the notary, all the girls guessed right. However, after six years of experiments, it is finally found that girls cheat in code words, and the methods are not clever.

Douglas Blackburn is a telepathic person. He performed telepathy with a juggler and was recognized by the Psychic Research Association. Blackburn became the general secretary of the association. However, Blackburn later couldn't help but publish a series of articles to expose how he deceived researchers.

People pretend to have telepathy for some reason, so they use nonverbal codes, such as looking up and down, looking left and right, representing different meanings, or coughing, sighing, yawning, making noises with shoes, etc. To reveal the contents of the experimental card, and even use coins to knock out the sound to send Morse code! In order to prevent fraud, researchers have to hire magicians, casino swindlers and other experts to detect fraud.

On the other hand, telepathic researchers often cheat. Laing, an American psychologist, found that his student and assistant Levi forged data in the experiment. Laing himself ignored the data that did not support telepathy and thought that the participants deliberately did not cooperate.

But the phenomenon of telepathy does not exist after the experimental fraud is ruled out. Some people sophistry that telepathy is "sincerity is spiritual", and strict anti-deception means destroy the trust between people, so telepathy is invalid.

1988, the National Academy of Sciences announced a conclusion: "After 130 years of research on the phenomenon of spiritual science, there is no scientific evidence to confirm its existence."

Know the past: it is not uncommon to guess the truth.

Being able to know the past and the future is a magical manifestation of telepathy. Among them, "knowing the past" means realizing the perception of what has happened simply by spiritual strength. For example, the following 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 thought that the two children might have been killed 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 early to watch the children drown.

So the audience thought they had telepathic ability and could know the truth of the case. In fact, the crime of a mother killing a child occurs from time to time, and its probability is much higher than that of a black kidnapping a white child. So many viewers in front of the TV suspected that the mother was committing perjury-not because of their telepathic ability, but because of their understanding of human nature and human behavior. In fact, the most suspicious is the experienced police. As long as someone follows this line of thinking, the truth is not difficult to get out.

Robert Carroll, an American philosopher, once saw a woman claiming to have been raped on TV, but he thought the woman was lying, which was later proved to be true. Others feel the same way after reading it. Is this telepathy? Not exactly. People just judge things by feeling, sometimes right and sometimes wrong. Occasionally, once or twice, 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

Human beings often make predictions about the future, and when making predictions, they often use their own knowledge and experience and consider environmental factors, so predictions do not depend on mysterious supernatural forces. A premonition is 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 concept of "quantum entanglement" in quantum mechanics, but what is the relationship between the activity of a single microscopic particle and the neural activity of the brain? This is not clear. Psychologists admit that the biggest difficulty they face is that these mental phenomena are difficult to be compatible with physics and biology.

For this reason, some psychologists use functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) to measure brain activity, as well as the corresponding skin conductivity and heart rate, trying to prove that the human body has a hunch 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 psychological experiments are full of defects in design, such as the lack of a reasonable experimental control group, 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 paranormal premonition can be explained more simply and reasonably. For example, there is something wrong with experimental instruments-precision instruments are easily affected by temperature, humidity and electromagnetic fields; There are errors in the recording and calculation of experimental data; Some researchers want to prove the existence of mental phenomena too much, falsify them intentionally or unintentionally, and only see the data that is beneficial to mental phenomena. Carol said: "As long as you find someone who can predict the game champion, lottery winning number or terrorist attack every time, then the skeptics will be really convinced."

Self-deception will hook the willing.

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

For example, although the objective evidence clearly shows that the child is lying, his parents still firmly believe that the child is telling the truth, which is the result of the 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 due to 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 themselves, so there is reason to trust them more. This is a simple cognitive disorder, which has nothing to do with motivation and morality.

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

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

Remote observation: no military value.

Remote observation refers to seeing places beyond the visual range through telepathy and perceiving who is there and what they are doing without the help of any other technical means.

Psychics with this telepathic ability claim to find oil fields, mountains on Jupiter, missing children, abducted hostages, buried bodies, secret meetings held by enemy defense departments and so on. They have successfully persuaded the US government to fund research, so there was the "Stargate Project" which cost millions of dollars by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At most, 16 telepathic masters participated in this project. Some people have unusual experiences, such as David Mohouse being shot in the head, and often seeing "things" after taking out the bullet.

The Stargate project tried to find out Gaddafi's position in Libya by telepathy, so as to achieve "targeted removal". At that time, the media also reported on the stargate project, and did not express any doubts. However, after 24 years of tossing, the plan was finally stopped because the government thought that remote observation was too unreliable and had no military value, even if it was not completely false. According to the report of the Central Intelligence Agency, spiritual masters provided various, irrelevant, unrepeatable and full of mistakes and omissions.

In order to verify remote observation, one person must run to a remote location and another person must receive information from that location. Carol believes that the information obtained by remote observers may come from personal experience or just personal fiction. A survey in the United States found that only 65% of the results of remote observation were correct, while others were either ambiguous or based on books.

Outside the United States, telepathy research in two other big countries in the world is not far behind-the Bioinformatics Laboratory in the former Soviet Union and the research on human specific functions in China have both lost a lot of resources for the masters of specific functions, and ended in vain. In fact, scientists have been studying remote observation since the middle of last century, and have obtained a lot of research data so far, which shows that this telepathy does not exist. One of the most interesting findings is: "neither practice nor training can reliably improve the ability of remote observation."

Carol analyzed that people can visually imagine things beyond their own visual range, and subjectively feel that "seeing" does not mean telepathy. No one in history has ever been able to observe from a distance repeatedly and accurately, and even if there is, it is a mythical and exaggerated legend. Occasionally, the spiritual master said something far away, saying it was useful, but most of the time, when it was useless, he began to quibble and even insisted that it was a "symbol", leaving a huge space for subjective imagination.

Confirmation bias makes people ignore negative evidence.

Confirmatory prejudice refers to a kind of selective thinking of human beings, which tends to pay attention to and find evidence to support their own views, while ignoring and underestimating evidence that does not conform to their own views. If you work in the emergency room of a hospital, you believe that there are more patients on the full moon night, so you will pay attention to the people who come to see the doctor on the full moon night and pay less attention to the patients on other nights. Over time, you become more and more convinced that the full moon will lead to an increase in accidents. When the confirmation deviation becomes more and more serious and you turn a blind eye to the negative and negative evidence, you will completely lose your rationality and completely block your mind.

Many studies show that people generally think that confirmed evidence is more valuable, that is, positive, positive and supportive data. Thomas Gilou Jilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University in the United States, suggested that this is probably because it is easier for the brain to cognize and process confirmatory information. The evidence supporting a certain point of view is more acceptable and easier to remember than the evidence opposing it. Negative and negative evidence is not naturally accepted, so people will be biased if they don't pay attention.

In the experiment of telepathy, the evidence supporting the existence of telepathy is often ambiguous, and psychologists get a treasure; Evidence that does not support telepathy cannot be seen at once and needs some brain analysis, so it is often ignored. Psychologists also selectively set the beginning and end of the experiment, so as to get the results that are conducive to confirming the existence of telepathy. Dr James alcock, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, criticized them for "refusing to believe that telepathy does not exist".

Finally, just like survivor bias, some telepathy and sixth sense are based on some details of empirical judgment, sometimes accurate, but sometimes wrong.

But at least, this kind of person has better observation ability, and some sensibility is more sensitive than ordinary people.