01.10.2014 change 01.10.2014

The sixth sense - the mysterious work of the mind beyond our consciousness

Premonition tells you that you are in danger? The answer to a difficult problem came in a dream? There is nothing paranormal about that, it is intuition, ability of the mind to solve problems outside of consciousness. This phenomenon is being investigated by psychologist from Wrocław.

Firefighter in a burning house suddenly has a strange feeling that he should immediately leave the room. When he is running out of the room, the ceiling collapses behind him. You could think it was a miracle: intuition saved his life. It turns out, however, that such feeling does not have to be a "miracle" and it can be reasonably explained. Maybe, for example, the firefighter had found himself in a similar situation before and knew the sounds of the moment preceding the collapse of the ceiling, the temperature at this point, the appearance of the flames. His mind could contain an unconscious pattern of the situation. This pattern told the firefighter that he was in mortal danger.

"Very often, especially in popular opinion, intuition is seen as something parascientific, something intangible. I, on the other hand, prepare a study based on scientific theories that will allow to measure human intuition with scientific methods" - said in an interview with PAP Agata Sobków of the Wrocław branch of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. She explained that the term intuition could be used to describe the ability of the mind to unconsciously, spontaneously learn various patterns that occur in the environment. "If you unintentionally learn certain relationships, you can then use such knowledge without expecting to have it" - said the psychologist.

She acknowledged, however, that intuition gives us hints, but they are not always optimal solutions. "It is best to reasonably consider such hint. Intuition is based on generalized patterns, which we know from the past. A new situation in which we find ourselves does not have to match the patterns that we already know" - emphasized the researcher.

Sobków wants to find out, what exactly intuition is, and explore who and what situations has better intuition. "My research is among the first that approach to intuition as the ability in such a wide manner" - said the researcher.

In her experiment, the psychologist asked the subjects to memorize sequences of letters that appeared chaotic, for example XVRTVM. Then the subjects were informed that there were some rules, according to which those sequences had been created, and asked to guess whether the new strings that they would see were formed according to the same pattern. "Most people declared that they had no idea what rule connected the letters. Nevertheless, the subjects were selecting the correct answers more often than if they were actually choosing the answer randomly. Which means that the subjects did learn something, even though it seemed to them that they didn’t. Intuition helped them to choose the responses" - noted the psychologist.

In the next task, subjects were asked to react to the appearance of dots, which appeared in different places on the screen. Subsequent locations of dots were consistent with a complicated rule, which the respondent did not know. It turned out, however, that the time of reaction to the appearance of the dot shortened as the experiment continued. According to Sobków, the subjects learned some algorithm without understanding it.

The results did not indicate a link between intuition and gender. Women\'s intuition is not more accurate than intuition for men in any way. Agata Sobków did observe, however, that in another intuition test, so-called distant words test, there was a group of people who showed greater intuition. These were the people who could be described as "open" - those who like new challenges and ambiguities, nondogmatic, eager to learn. In this experiment, subjects were given three words that were associated in a fairly non-obvious (for example "hair", "root", "tear"). The subjects had to connect those words with only one association (in this case, the solution was the word "onion"). "This type of task is difficult to solve analytically, the search for solutions must be intuitive" - explained the psychologist and noted that open-minded people solved these problems with more ease than other participants in the experiment.

The researcher explained that intuitive solutions are sometimes accompanied by so-called revelation, "aha! effect", which in turn is often accompanied by positive emotions. Sobków gives an example of a situation where we are unable to solve a problem (for example, remember a person\'s name), and then, for example before bedtime, when we are relaxed, we suddenly find the solution.

There are already some theories explaining what happens in our brain. The researcher said that when we are solving a problem, semantic networks spontaneously activate in the mind, so-called constructs that connect different concepts (e.g. when we think of the word "bench", we might think of other associated words, for example "school" or "board"; it is a fragment of a semantic network). Such networks can be activated even when it seems that we are not thinking about the problem at all. The brain can thus search and combine different networks "in the background", without the participation of consciousness. It happens that when the brain finds a solution, it still must get through to consciousness. Sobków gives an example of a situation when we think that we have a solution on the tip of the tongue. It is a sign that our brain already knows the answer, but we do not.

Agata Sobków carries out her research as part of a Prelude grant funded by the National Science Centre.

PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland, Ludwika Tomala

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