There`s science behind the sixth sense!

Washington, Feb 05: The next time you experience an unexplained eerie feeling at an awkward moment, you may be going through a phenomenon identified by researchers as "Mindsight".

Mindsight is a newly discovered mode of conscious visual perception.

"Our visual system can produce a strong gut feeling that something has changed, even if we cannot visualise that change in our minds and can't say what was altered or where the alteration occurred," claims Ronald Rensink, a researcher with the University of British Columbia in Canada.

In the study that involved the participation of 40 people, a series of photographic images flickered on a computer screen. Each of the participants was shown the image for about 15 seconds that was followed by a brief blank grey screen. At times, the image was kept on for the whole trial or it was alternated with a slightly different one.

In trials where the image was changed, around a third of the people said the image had changed before they could identify what the change was. In control trials, however, the same people were confident that no change had occurred. Therefore, Rensick surmised that the response to a change in image and control trials was reliably different.

"I think this effect explains a lot of the belief in a sixth sense," he said, adding that he believed that it was possible to confirm that physical processes generate mindsight using brain scanners.

Corroborating Rensink's study yet offering a different point of view was Dan Simons, a vision researcher at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

He said that Rensink's finding "suggests the existence of an interesting and previously unknown attentional mechanism."

He, however, cautioned that people could sometimes believe they have perceived something when they clearly have not, pointing out that Rensink's volunteers sometimes reported seeing a change in the image when in fact it remained consistent.

Rensink also accepts that not everyone senses something, and that the experimental setting might encourage people to simply guess. But he also thinks that people who don't experience mindsight may be screening out what appear to be gut feelings in favour of what appears to be more rational information, while those who do are happy to trust their instincts.

"It could well be an alerting system. There is no reason the effect shouldn't operate with other senses too," he concludes. Bureau Report