How about coincidence? If a trait actually existed such that one could reliably predict or "sense" future events, it would have such high value, natural-selection-wise, that it should become relatively common in a population. I don't see a lot of folks running around with this power. A better explanation, I think, is that every once in a while random "premonitions", worries, or fears do actually happen. Most of the time, they don't, but we only really remember the times they did and we were "right".

Yeah, my mom had a premonition that the man across the street died, and he did. But she wasn't so savvy about her death. Not sure about this stuff.

I think catspa nailed it. Why do some people believe in pyschics? "He told me my friend John would die in the next year and a few months later he did!!"

Yeah, didn't he also tell you that you would find your true love, make a career change, etc? People forget the wrong guesses and remember the right ones.

I can't count the number of times I've been on "yellow alert" and then nothing happened, BECAUSE nothing happened.

Suffice to say, I do not believe in anything paranormal.

I have a friend who has spent thousands of dollars on psychics and I truly believe that it has held her back from experiencing life. She's always waiting for whatever the psychic has told her will happen to happen and of course it never does.

When I read the thread title I thought you were talking about the Bruce Willis movie - now that was an ending with a twist.

Do I believe in sixth sense, no I don't think so. I believe in probabilities of something happening, however and that may vary from person to person.

For eg - my sister just wrote an extremely tough stats exam. She wasn't sure she had passed it however I *knew* she would. But our other sister said no she didn't study enough so she wouldn't pass. She passed it. That wasn't sixth sense on my part but it was based on past experience with my sister and her performance on exams, coupled with the fact that she is extremely bright.

So, sixth sense, optimism vs pessimism, blind faith, glass half-full or half-empty (never have understood this one) , who knows.

I relate the term 6th sense to intuition or that a feeling one can get. I also in a fun way like to say it's a loved one who's passed leading the way.

One night I was reading a magazine, Womens World Weekly. There is always a story about angels in the magazine where someone tells their story. The story was about a woman who lost her father. He had planted irises in his garden. She lived in an old house and was doing wash when she dropped a sock behind an unfinished wall. She reached down to retrieve it and found an old card that had a picture of irises on the front of it, and the word "Father" on the back of it.

At the end of the story, there was a box and it said in it that if you see the number 444, it means that the love of angels is surrounding you. I remember thinking, "I wonder if I will come across that number".

The next morning I woke up before the alarm went off. I looked at the clock and the time was 4:44.

I don't believe in supernatural anything or premonitional anything. I think people who suggest they have such vision are full of bunk. catspa has my vote.

Those who spend their time thinking about "what else might happen to so and so or with thus and such" or "what are all the possiblities" will sometimes have a thought beforehand about something that takes place because occasionally alternatives happen. It's a corrolary to the saying "even a blind squirrel finds an acorn occasionally".

I don't know about the 6th sense but I do get strong feelings about things at times. All I know is that I should trust that feeling. When I didn't in the past, I felt like kicking myself. I know it better now.

Just like the stolen ID incident that I'm going through lately. I sensed that it will all be fine if I do all I can to stop this. I have not been worried about it except for needing to do what I needed to do. My guts have been quite at peace about it.

Conversations about psychics always remind me of a very unique experience I had about 20 years ago.

I had just moved from the beach to a little bungalow under big old Live Oaks in town. This was before the days of cell phones and keeping your phone number forever. After I moved, I had my phone service turned on and was given my new number.

I soon found out that the previous owner of that phone number had been a PSYCHIC and a busy one, at that! She had moved out of town, the number retired for six months, then reissued to me.

Strangers who called me tried to get me to counsel them even after I told them that I was not their phychic. I would get long messages on my answering machine. I even received a call from a writer in NYC who was doing an article on psychics.....we had a great talk for over an hour!

Oddly, I thought, most of the people who called me were men. They sounded perfectly normal in every way.

There is enough evidence for scientists to speculate that the mechanism of a sixth sense feeling is a certain kind of quantum event. The thing is, the most "reliable" info is personal anecdote, and about things of a personal nature such as what Elledi61 related above. Often something with a strong emotional content. The brain in many ways is strongest when there are strong emotions. Memories are encoded much more powerfully, for instance. The thing is we do not yet have the tools to create and replicate demonstrations, so it all remains in the realm of unproven, anecdotal, and untested.

Any kind of experiment that relies on distant reading of those famous five shape cards is ridiculous. Why not 52-54 cards of a regular deck of cards if the person really can picture it? The only reason I can think of is because there would be far fewer random hits, and too easy to prove hooey.

Any "psychic" or "medium" who asks about relatives whose name starts with J or M (the most common initials), or who have common names like James or Maria, are cold reading, which is an old carny trick. If there really were someone there who was really communicating, why wouldn't it ever be, "Does anyone here know a Zoltan? Sultan, maybe? Zola?"

All of these people who are supposedly getting messages from beyond the grave don't seem to know anything about people who are missing and later found to have already have died.

OTOH, while there's a lot of speculation of the cause of déjà vu, including that the brain is more or less hiccuping, or that there really is something familiar in the scene, just not most of it (some experiments have put a known object in an unknown room and tried to measure the amount of déjà vu-ness it causes). Another hypothesis is that it's also caused by quantum particles.

I have a rule I call "If You Think It, Do It". Is it coincidence? Is it psychic? I don't have a clue. There's a certain kind of thought I sometimes have of some little thing that needs to be done. Not the normal kind. A little thing that will pop into my head when I'm not thinking of things to do or of anything related to what pops. I've learned that any thought of doing it when its time comes, doing it when I'm done with what I'm already doing, or otherwise not immediately addressing it, makes me sorry in the end. I'll end up upset or angry or otherwise bothered by that thing not being done later, and in a way that's not a direct logical extension of an undone chore. If I just do it when I think of it, nothing happens. Usually it's just something really small, like put a household item somewhere. Once, I was driving home and had that kind of thought that I should go to my mother's house instead. I found her trapped in the sewing room by a hornet in the house (she's severely allergic). I was able to rescue her. :) It could just be a coincidence, but when I get that feeling and start to ignore it, I tell myself, "If you think it, do it," and I'm never sorry if I do, and often sorry in unpredictable ways if I don't.

Here is one of my theories. I also see it much as Pllog does. But on with my theory.

I believe there is a sixth sense. However I don't see it as anything that I would consider paranormal. I think some people are simply more attuned to their surrounding, environment, life in general and pick up clues that are filed away for the future.

Most people go through life pretty oblivious to anything that isn't directly affecting them in the moment. The are not intuitive because they are simply not the most aware people in general. They are dependent on others to be on watch, be it their friends, God or life's plan or whatever. They are the one's that let life happen to them instead of working to make life what they want it to be. More passive personalities.

Those that are more detail oriented to their surroundings are more likely to have a data bank of information that they are not even aware they have access to until the need arises. All that information is stored deep in their sub conscious to be pulled up on an as needed basis. It may be through dreams or through hunches or what we call premonitions. But really it is simply knowledge that the brain tends to process at the appropriate time. The rest is coincidence but I do believe we have the ability to have gut feeling that are valid and should be trusted.

You have a good point there, Watchmelol. There's something I read about awhile back. Most people, as you say, are quite unaware. Their brains filter out a lot of details. They literally don't see or hear or feel everything because their brains don't want to process it all. This is probably a bit tongue in cheek, but the researchers said that those who do notice it all fall into two groups, ultra high achievers/intellects and mentally ill (maybe psychopaths? I don't remember exactly). The theory was that when the brain perceives all the details but can't process all it perceives, it makes the person cuckoo. Those who can process it all, organize and store it and can call upon it. The theory about the "eureka" moment is that it happens when the neurons involved in two (or more?) thoughts/memories spark at the same time, the combination becomes the aha!

If you read enough of this stuff it seems impossible not to conclude some people have a sensitivity to these things. I do not, and have always thought it is because I am so grounded in REALITY. I do think that leaves me out of some exciting loops!! As I read, it occurred to me once again we have people trying to get a grasp on the spiritual. The USA is swiftly discarding all things God like,and yet people are still connected to a NEED to believe in a world outside our bodies. It saddens me deeply, this discarding. Angels? absolutely..evil lurking--for sure. Those "premonitions" people speak of--hopefully they are responded to with PRAYER. They are an invitation!!

I do have a couple of things I cannot explain. Doesn't mean I'm psychic. I always knew when our phone was going to ring in our dorm room, and if it was for her or for me. Drove her crazy trying to figure out how I was doing it. And she couldn't. I don't know how I was doing it! The other is, the man I work with now, when I first started working with him, every night as I'd drift off to sleep, I'd jolt awake with a vision of having to find him wherever he was and tell him his wife was in the ER. It ended up being his daughter and he was Germany. I had to hook him up with the attending. I quit having the vision. Wasn't his wife, but it was dang close. Explained? Can't be. I'd never had anything like that happen before or since. Still don't think I am psychic. But what does one call it?

Well, all I know is, I just wish for once watching these ghost hunters on tv, a ghost would walk up to one of them and say "Yes, I'm a ghost, what about it?" LOL

i believe in angels, ghosts, all of it. I do not believe in fortune tellers or spiritualists. I don't think it's right for people to make money that way.

I believe we currently lack the capability to understand what the human brain can do. Sixth sense may be a handy term to describe everything we don't understand. It seems foolish in the extreme to discount everything we don't understand by claiming it does not exist.

Ghosts: why do they always catch them speaking English, and the hunters never ask more than if you're here give me a sign. Can you give it to me again? If I were the ghost they're asking over and over, and get fed up and leave. Sure wouldn't want to do parlor tricks. If they're trying to communicate with you, ask some real questions! Find out what they are trying so hard to tell you. Golly!

when my older sister was just 10 years old my mother hAd let her go to a cousins house for the weekend which was about 16 miles away. The first evening my mother was in the kitchen and heard a voice say my sisters name . I don't remember how many times she heard it but within minutes they got word that the kids had been climbing tree's and a limb broke and my sister had fallen and they were taking her to the hospital. She had broke her arm in two places & ended up getting gangerine so she lost her one arm not quite to the shoulder. An angel maybe that alerted her? She said she didn't really want to let her stay there but gave in.....was that maybe sixth sense? I believe so. I was just a baby when that happened. My sister went on , & eventually got married, had 3 kids and was a super role model for anyone with a disability......she didn't think she had one!! :)

I think graywings' point is a very good one and may explain some instances. What we don't understand about how the brain works far outweighs what is known. A recent study (synopsis here) explored the extent to which the brain edits or mediates what we all perceive, whether an "attuned" personality type or not, because otherwise there would be too much information for any of us to cope. In a nutshell, you see far more than you consciously perceive. This was of particular interest to me because I thought it might explain a "sixth sense" event I experienced a while back .

I was carrying out a plant survey on foot in the hilly back ranges of an Army training area when I suddenly had an overwhelming sense that a mountain lion was around. As a field biologist, I am accustomed to working alone in areas where lions are, frequently seeing tracks and fresh kills, and it generally does not bother me, but this time I felt a sense of threat. I carefully examined the area around me, which was fairly open grassland, and did not see a lion, or anything, but also could not shake the strong feeling of unease. So, I immediately left that area and went to work on another. The next day in the local newspaper it was reported that a lion had been seen on a road that was very close by, around the time when I was there. What I believe might have happened is that my eyes may actually have seen the lion but, for whatever reason, my brain did not register it a a conscious thought, leaving me with only my non-explicit "impression" of lion presence.

If I have a very strong, intuitive feeling, I pay attention to it. One day I had to go to Houston to see my daughter, who was in college there. I was already in a town that had a direct access to the freeway, but even though that was the closest, most direct route, something kept telling me not to go that way. It just made sense to go ahead and go that way, but the feeling of dread was such, I turned back and went another way. I had an uneventful trip there and back, although I went the longer route. Would something awful have happened to me if I had gone on the way I originally planned? I don't know. I just knew that I had such a horrible feeling about going on the way I planned. I don't have any issues about driving in traffic or anything like that, and I have never had a feeling like that before, but I went ahead and took that other route, because the feeling was so strong. It could well have been nothing, but it was such a feeling of dread that it turned me back.

I'm torn between believing in spirits and not believing. I just don't know know where the voices come from that they record.

I believe Marilyn_c has "it". I wanted little oriental wooden decorative stands for my orchid pots to sit on. Had the luck to find "1" in a thrift store....no others were showing up. Marilyn said she'd put in a good word for me and suddenly I started finding them at ALL the thrift stores, even the Restore had two HUGE cardboard boxes FULL of them for $1 each! After that never saw another one...it's been at least a year now. :0) I was also looking for a house, she said she was worried I'd buy a terrible one and suddenly after she said that I found the perfect one...made a low ball offer which was immediately accepted and it's been a wonderful rental house!

I believe it could be coincidence....but from famine to feast....I don't know....and twice....it's a big world out there and I'm not gonna say it can't happen. Let's just say I'm open to the possibility of things being pushed in our direction, then it's up to you.....knowledge of an upcoming event is just one of those possibilities....

I believe in ghosts because I once saw one. I was visiting my neighbor, Patti and had a view up her stairs down the hall to the window in the upstairs bathroom. A shadowy figure walked across the open bathroom door, passed the window, and walked down the hall and into a room at the end.

Patti, who's home? "Nobody." Patti! I just saw someone walk down the hall!! "This house has shadows."

When her daughter got home from school, I dragged her upstairs with me to check that room. Nothing was there.

I know what I saw. A shadow can't show across a window.

Go figure! I never went back inside that house again.

I remember seeing my mother's shadow float around the bed a few days after she passed. We moved in with my dad to help raise my 2 younger sisters. He gave us his room and that night I was laying there and watch this mist float around the bed and disappeared. At least I thought it was mom. Also after my first husband passed, I was in bed and my daughter and sister were staying in the next room. I seen the hall light turn on and heard someone walking up the stairs. I went to check and no one was there. Not sure what that was.

I recall something that happened almost 30 years ago, that had everyone in my office talking about the possibility of other worldly intervention. It was reported that a lady and her child were waiting for the light, to cross an intersection. Witnesses nearby confirmed that the woman suddenly appeared to be pushed to the ground, and landed on her behind a few yards away, dragging her son down with her. She turned around and shouted at the closest person to them, accusing a young man of accosting her. They were in a dispute about it when a very heavy advertising sign sailed off the roof of the building on the opposite corner, landing precisely where she had been standing and jutting out into the intersection.

A news station car arrived quickly to the scene, to photograph the huge sign obstructing one side of the intersection. Unfortunately, several cars collided, trying to veer around the fallen sign, but there were no serious injuries. But all the talk centered around the reporter's interview with more than a dozen people, still gathered near the corner. They all verified that the young man had not approached the lady in any way, when they saw her being 'pushed backward by nothing' a few yards or so from where she had been standing, just seconds before the sign fell. The lady was relieved that she and her son had escaped injury, and profusely apologized to the young, who stated he wished her could claim credit for pushing her out of danger. They were photographed together in the news, in front of the sign.

The incident generated a lot of talk the next day at work, as my building was very near this intersection. No matter what brought about her good luck, it's obvious her number just wasn't up that day!

Pillog,

> "Does anyone here know a Zoltan?"

I went to college with a Zoltan, you must be psychic. May I send you some money. :-)

Rather than saying it is foolish to discount everything we don't understand I would say it is foolish to believe anything that is offered as an explanation for something we don't understand, especially if the person offering the explanation has something to gain by your believing their explanation.

I'll happily admit that there are things I don't understand, I'll even accept that there are things that no person understands. But I don't feel a need to concoct an elaborate, unproven and unprovable explanation for something I don't understand, and even less of a need to adopt and believe someone else's cockamamie (and often self-serving) explanation.

Do I believe there is a sixth sense? Absolutely yes. and a seventh and an eighth, and depending on how you count perhaps as many as twenty.

Something over 60 years ago I was a student minister in several little churches in northeastern Saskatchewan where many folk had moved from the drier prairies in the droughty Dirty Thirties with all that they owned carried on a wagon rack and were just getting back on their feet.

They had church only in the summer, with a theological student and a number of us got together to plan a camp for the local kids. The Anglican (Episcopal, to many of you) church, which offered Sunday School programs on the radio for many isolated communities and in summer sent a couple of young women in a van to visit many of the students, agreed to have two of them help with our camp. As we'd had little experience, it was quite a challenging week ... and on the Saturday morning when we were canoeing on the lake, one told a story. World War II had finished four years earlier, and she and her mother had been worried about her father, in the army overseas. One morning her mother came down to breakfast, more at peace than usual, and said that here Dad would not be coming home, that he'd come to her bedside the night before to say, "Good bye".

A few days later they received a message either that he'd been killed in action or was missing.

That's the closest that I can come to such an experience.

ole joyful

Bedside visitations from close loved ones who have just died are a common story. Often, as in OJ's, before the visitee knows that anything has happened.

Another common story is that if you ask one identical twin (I don't know about fraternal) where the other twin is, Twin 1 always knows, even if they're not in the same general area. OTOH, the kind of woo-woo life similarities that you hear of with separated twins, that they marry someone with the same name or have the same job, are statistically no greater than random chance, and are only interesting because it happened to biological twins who didn't know each other. The spouse's name is always something common enough, like Linda or Joe, not Elspeth or Summerville. The job is always something general, like computer programmer or construction worker, not specific and less common like actuary or hydrologist. But those twins, too, sometimes report always having a sense of the other, but not understanding it. That could be a fundamental memory of being two at the beginning, before lucid memories have formed, and the brain filling in the feeling of twinness, or it could be a real connection.

Bob, it only counts if your college acquaintance is dead and would be trying to send you a message. If you think that's the case, I can do a cold reading on you, but it's still a carny trick. I'm not medium!

BTW, all the things we "know" about contacting spirits come from the spiritualism fad of the 1920's. The "only true believers or he won't come", knocking on the table or ceiling, darkened room, holding hands, closing eyes, etc., of the classic séance, were designed to cover parlor tricks. It's a con game.

The way a Ouija board works is through a psychological phenomenon known as unconcious writing. Literate people who write by hand a lot can disengage their conscious thoughts from their pens writing on paper. Usually it's just a jumble of function words and words you're holding in sort of an "on deck circle" in your mind. Some people can, or at least say they can, write whole paragraphs and pages that way that are unrelated to their conscious thoughts. Woo-woo shrinks have been known to use this as a tool as well. What happens with a Ouija board is that even though you don't feel yourself guiding the planchette, you do actually exert unconscious effort on it. Just a little. So does everyone else. It increase as people get anxious for it to do something. Having a group is necessary to get enough non-obvious movement going, and also to provide enough information that's unknown to the asker of the question. If the answers just match the asker's thoughts, they don't seem real. If there's stuff the asker has never heard of, it does seem real.

Speaking of charlatans and shrinks, however, according to a research/academic psychologist I know, the darling of TV fiction, the split personality disorder, doesn't really exist. There have been no documented and confirmed cases of it. Awhile back, a news magazine, maybe 60 Minutes, or one of that ilk, did an exposé of a place that was diagnosing split personality disorder and had hundreds of patients with it -- but they all had comprehensive psychiatric insurance that was paying buckets for long term therapy. It's easy enough for authority figures like doctors to talk fragile patients into things like that.

It is well documented that the feeling of "going toward the light" is caused by hypoxia in the brain. I make no judgments as to the metaphysical aspects that people associate with it, but the light itself, or part of it, is biological.

Oh, and that feeling of can't move that "alien abductees" feel is a well known thing the brain does to keep you still while dreaming. Sleepwalking is what happens when it doesn't work right. Some people have it engaged, at least on an occasion or two, when they're semi-conscious. I have. It could be frightening if you didn't know what was going on. If there's a dream going on in this semi-conscious, unmoving state, it's easy for the mind to populate it with aliens as an explanation.

Still, I find the research into the quantum events very interesting. I'm not claiming that that's the source of "the sense". It's just one of the least ridiculous theories I've heard for something that's too common to just be imagination.

DH & I did a whole house remodel, took us 4 months, nothing unusual to report, we purchased it from the original owner. We had a few things to complete, so we went back weeks later. I started talking to the woman while my DH & hers were elsewhere. She told me she was a ghost chaser, it was a hobby of hers and my house was haunted. I asked her what she'd seen.....

1) Her name was called 3 times and she went to look and no one was there.

2) A knock on her bedroom door...no one was there

3) Her son saw a shadow go around the corner.....nothing there.

4) An object she'd placed was moved to another counter.

She collects antiques, her mother owned an antique store and she inherited tons! I explained this off as her having a haunted object.....you brought the ghost with "you".....:0)

Then DH & I went back to plant the tree 6 months later. She said the old owner had showed up at her door & she had offered to give her a tour. The owner made lots of comments about all the "new" things, an added hallway, an added doorway. The bar had been removed.

My renter asked her what she thought, did she wish she had her house back? She said , "no, it wasn't HER house any more"....and the ghost left with her....not another peep....

split personality disorder

Do you mean dissociative identity disorder? Why do you think it doesn't exist? Not that 100 patients had it. But never any person? I don't know that I agree with that.

Split personality- like we see in movies does not exist.

Dissociative identity disorder IS a known and valid diagnosis but people with it don't act like what you see in movies and TV.

It is incredibly rare, but it does exist. But isn't split personality the lay term for dissociative identity disorder?

Nicole, the only "it" I have is when I joke about the "possum gods". I rehab possums....an animal that most people don't like at all. I say they are like me.....a misunderstood scavenger. When I want something, seems like it always shows up.....I give credit to the "possum gods" because I am kind to, and go out of my way to help orphan and injured possums. For example,

I wanted some big flower pots....nothing fancy...plastic would be okay. I said I want flower pots, and almost immediately, everywhere I looked, lots of big flower pots. Most of them set out by the road by people who put them out with the trash but separate so if someone wanted them, they could take them.

RE Split Personality. A co-worker who's wife was in menopause called her "Sybil" cuz he never knew who would greet him when he got home. LOL!

I believe that there is such a thing as a sixth sense or intuition or whatever you want to call it. Like Rob posted above, when I was a kid I would know about a phone call and who it would be from. I also would just "know" that family members (aunts, uncles, cousins) would soon be coming over. None of it planned or talked about in advance. I don't have that sense any longer. I have a "connection" with my brother. We joke about it and call it our ESPN.

If I have a "gut" feeling about something I "listen" to it. I tell others to do the same. :-)

Yes, the Sybil thing. That book was fiction though it's framed as if it were real. There has been no comprehensively documented case of it. That is, with complete records and outside examiners. The reported cases that have been so examined were demonstrated not to actually be as described. It's not that the subjects didn't have problems, but they fell under more common and well documented diagnoses, and they certainly didn't have "alter" personalities with separate lives, memories, etc. The remainder are the inventions of quacks, charlatans and hack soap opera writers.

pillog, what does your gut tell you? Would be interesting to know. Many times my gut told me to go shopping... and I did and I got the best parking spot, and I knew. Shopping went well. Sale city! My daughter always wants to go shopping when mom has that... "we need to go" thing

Suzi, do you mean when I feel like I have to drop everything and do the thing now? It's never anything fun like going shopping. It's generally not an errand. More like put something in a particular place or fix a little something or maybe stop and make a phone call. Usually just little things around the house. And that time rescuing my mother from the hornet. But I didn't even get the feeling I should go towards her house until I was approaching the turn that would be the primary way to go there from where I was. There's no way to know if that was when she ran for the sewing room (she didn't know how much time had passed). I think, really, seeing the turn place brought her to mind, and then I got the strong feeling that I really should go there. But it could be pure flat out coincidence. The strong feeling was real, and wasn't anything to do with another cause (nothing to drop or pick up, need for a visit, etc.). But it could have just been a random strong feeling.

I wish I could remember specifics for you, but the if you think it do it things are really small. It could be something as simple as filling a water bottle or putting a card on a present, but not those exact things because I don't think the consequences would be emotional enough. Things that are really annoying when undone, especially when one thought about doing them. When I don't get that feeling and make a schedule of when to do things, they get done. When I forget to think about doing those things, I have a normal response, like, "Oh, crap!" and get on with it. When I get the do it feeling, if I think I'll do it when I'm done with what I'm doing, I inevitably forget, and, for whatever reason, I'm really upset when something happens that points out that it wasn't done. But those feelings could just be a sum of experience in memory that knows that I'm going to be so annoyed if they're undone, rather than a specific metaphysical or quantum hint.

Either way, it would be interesting to know how the brain is handling it. (I used to study brains.)

Shopping might be fun... I never get inklings to go shopping... Lucky daughter. :)

I did finally get an explanation for one of the things I asked... if they capture an EVP, they're listening with their language and if it happened to be another language (not English in my example), they'd just right it off as unintelligible.