Beyond the Sixth Sense

Sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell, and that "ability to see dead people thanks to that 1999 movie starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment" - these are the senses we are most familiar with. It's interesting to note that after all of these years in existence mankind can only come up with five senses that are found in textbooks. After all, we all have a sense of humor, a sense of reason, a sense of romance, and so on. Some of us make no sense at all.

Why do we only acknowledge five? The short answer is because sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell have three qualities. First, they can be measured by scientists. Yes, each of those sense have some unit of measurement. Second, they are repeatable - scientists can reliably give a stimulus for the sense and get a response. Third, they require no effort on your part; they just happen automatically. If a sense has those three qualities then it becomes an official sense. This why your sense of humor didn't make the cut: there isn't a unit of measure for it, not all jokes are funny, and if a joke requires too much thinking then it probably wasn't funny anyway.

Is this fair? We've all had that sense of foreboding, that sense that we shouldn't go somewhere or open a door. We've all had a sense of connecting with someone inexplicably. None of these senses require effort; they just happen. Reproducing that sense scientifically is nigh impossible (so far) and coming up with a unit of measure seems just as impossible - however, we all still have this sense. This sense does exist and it isn't acknowledged because science can't wrap its hands around it. Science has more homework to do.

Déjà Vu is for the Blind, Too

Most of us have experienced déjà vu within the past year. It's generally described as seeing a small set of events unfold that you swear you've seen before. The events are usually insignificant, somewhat difficult to describe, and are very fleeting. It has been a long-standing belief that déjà vu is caused by a delay between the eyes and the brain - in other words, déjà vu hinges on being able to see.

Several years ago it was reported that the blind experience déjà vu as well: http://www.livescience.com/1160-blind-man-deja-vu-busting-myth.html

This effectively reset all previous research in déjà vu, causing it to start from scratch again. Quite literally years of research went out the door. What makes déjà vu interesting from a research point of view is that it's commonplace, but it's also very random. Researchers can't catch that moment when it happens. It makes one wonder that if the researchers themselves didn't experience déjà vu then they would probably label it as a minor psychotic episode.

Take that last sentence in for a moment. Real research on déjà vu exists solely because the researchers will experience it, too. The next time something amazing happens - that only you experience - don't write it off as something random or something that didn't happen. There are too many abilities that we have that no one fully understands.

One in Nine Million

I was recently on travel to New York City to attend a conference. Determined to keep focus on my work, I vowed to keep to the conference and my hotel room. I kept to fast food to keep within my budget and to, well, make it fast.

At the end of a long day I stepped into a McDonald's to get a bite to eat. The line was hideously long so I went to the diner next door. I was seated in a small booth and perused the menu. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a man standing nearby, looking down at me. I looked up and instantly recognized him: a childhood friend that I hadn't seen in at least twelve years. I knew he had moved to New York at some time in the past but that's about all I knew.

We spent the next few hours catching up. He revealed to me some tough times he was going through. Out of respect for his privacy I won't provide details. He needed to make some changes and he wasn't sure how to start. I recommended that he just simply... start; don't let the "cancer" grow another day. He did exactly that and turned his life around.

New York City has roughly nine million people living in its confines. To think that I randomly came across my friend among all of these people at a seemingly random point in time is astounding comforting.

The (Near) Deadly Drive

A short time ago I was visiting friends in Orlando, Florida. One morning we decided to make a quick drive to Tampa - about 90 minutes on Interstate 4. As we were getting in the car to leave, a friend noticed a nickel on the ground. He swiped it up and joked about how rich it would make him. We all laughed for a few seconds and finally got in the car. We never thought that the nickel would save our lives.

Interstate 4 has three lanes in each direction. Traffic during this time of day was generally manageable and speeds would easily hit the 70 mph speed limit. We kept in the middle lane - we didn't want to speed in the left lane and we didn't want to go too slow in the right lane. Suddenly the left lane came to a stop.

"There's gonna be an accident," we all said in unison.

A minivan in the left lane slammed on its brakes, barely missing the car in front of it. A truck behind the minivan wasn't as fortunate; it slammed its brakes and turned hard to the left to miss the minivan in front of it. It ended up clipping the far left bumper of the minivan. This caused the minivan to shoot across the middle lane - literally right in front of us as we drove by - and into the far right lane. As soon as it made it to the right lane, it was broadsided by a tractor trailer. As we drove by I could see the face of the poor woman driving the minivan. Luckily the tractor trailer hit the back half of it. We didn't see any other passengers and no child seats.

If the nickel was not found then we wouldn't have paused to laugh for a couple of seconds. If the nickel was not found then the minivan would have collided with us and pushed us into the right lane where we would have been broad-sided. Our car would have been crushed.

The chains of events that occur around us, however small, are all important.