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By Ai
Lin Choo The ideas behind Star Wars, The X-Files and an assortment of other psychic films and shows may not be so far-fetched after all. According to a new study on visual perception, the "force" is possibly inherent in all of us, although we can't see it. For the many who sometimes walk into a room and feel that something is not quite right, the answer may lie in a sub-system of our visual experience, says Ronald Rensink, University of B.C. associate professor in psychology and computer science. "Basically visual perception then is two parts. It's got the sort of pictures we all know and love, and then we've got this other thing, this feeling, this using the force, this sensing stream, and they work in parallel, I think. They both operate at the same time," he said. While you may not see anything, Rensink says the "sixth sense" or as he calls it, "mindsight," is basically another kind of vision where people can sense a change and have a visual experience of it. He explains that "mindsight" differs from our usual concept of psychic phenomena because people have to keep their eyes open to employ this mode of visual perception. "The point of this is that these kinds of feelings are often correct. People should really pay attention if they feel something's not right. It's probably because part of their brain, or that part of their perceptual system, is telling them something that's actually useful," said Rensink, whose findings appear in the January issue of Psychological Science. The professor explained that his findings were initially accidental and added that his preliminary experiments were designed to test attention -- where participants were asked to hit a button when they noticed a change in an image they were asked to look at. "What happened during some of the experiments I did initially was that some people started reporting being able to feel the change, but they couldn't see it," he explained. New experiments were designed to test if people could indeed feel change and a different set of participants were instead asked to hit a button as soon as they felt the image was changing and a second time for when they actually saw the change. Rensink explained that the experiment was designed with images that were constantly changing -- the image presented to participants would constantly alternate two similar real-life pictures with a grey flash in between. "It looks like some people have the ability after a while to feel that the change is happening. So they'd look at it after four or five seconds and know they feel something happening," he said. "So it's like a gut feeling. It's like using the force." The controlled experiment included about 80 participants, mostly UBC students picked at random, and while about one third of the group reported feeling a change or sensing that a change was occurring, about half felt nothing. "My primary concern was just to show that it existed. So maybe it's only students who get this. I don't think so, but if that's true, then I can at least say that students have it." Rensink hopes his new findings will spur more research into the area and hopes that science can begin to map out how this distinct perceptual system works. "Practically speaking, what I hope to do is have people believe that they should try to trust their intuitions more. Again it's like anything else, it's not perfect, but on the other hand, it's probably right more often than not, and so people should definitely pay attention to it" Although
he's intrigued and excited by his findings, the professor acknowledges
that his research could produce a lot of skepticism. He said that in the
long run, he hopes his findings can lead people to develop their intuitions
and help them learn to employ them. Source: The Vancouver Sun More headlines at www.mindpowernews.com
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