Oops, my gut feel is we've just lost an engine

Conscious visual perception, or "mindsight" may
confirm the existense of a "sixth sense."
Or maybe it doesn't

UBC's Ronald Rensink thinks he's on to something. He's got a hunch that his latest experiment proves the existence of the so-called "sixth sense" as a distinct subsystem of visual perception that, he argues, serves as a warning system. He dubs this newly discovered mode of conscious visual perception "mindsight." It occurs when people have a gut feeling that something has changed before they actually notice the change.

In the study, 40 participants were shown a series of flickering photographs on a computer screen of a common object — a jet plane, for example. Each image was shown for about a quarter of a second, followed by a brief blank grey screen. Sometimes the image would remain the same throughout the trail, in other cases, after a time the image would be changed to a subtly different one — the same airplane missing an engine, for example. About a third of the people felt there had been a change before they were able to identify what the change was. The study appeared in the February issue of New Scientist.

The doctor says the findings suggest that the two distinct modes of conscious visual perception are conscious and non-conscious and speculates that the non-conscious subsystem may be used to warn individuals about their surroundings. "When something changes, emotions are affected, which causes a feeling of apprehension. Instead of ignoring our instincts, we need to trust our gut feelings," says the assistant professor of psychology and adds, "We may be able to develop these intuitions."

"In the past, people believed that if light came into your eyes, it must result in a picture, but light can come into your eyes and affect other perceptual systems." The researcher postulates that the findings may lead to a redefining of vision and perhaps to describing a more general group of "mindsenses".

Dan Simons, a vision researcher at the University of Illinois, says the study "suggests the existence of an interesting and previously unknown attention mechanism," though he cautions that sometimes people believe they've perceived something when they clearly have not. He cites those in the study who said they'd felt a change in an image when there hadn't been one.

With regard to the two-thirds of the subjects who did not pick up a change until they actually saw it, Dr Rensink postulates that these subjects were less in tune with their instincts than those who did sense a change before it occurred. He is exploring why some people show the effect more than others and how the phenomenon can be more accurately calibrated.