Sixth sense: mysterious borderland

All normal human beings are gifted with five sensory organs - eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin - with which we experience sight, sounds, smell, taste and touch.

However, in addition to these five senses, there seems to be a mysterious borderland usually referred to as the sixth sense.

As we know, there is no sensory organ for the sixth sense. Sometimes, detectives are gifted with it more than others. For instance, a detective can sense who is at the bottom of a crime even without any evidence.

As the French saying goes, "Cherchez la femme" (Look for the woman), the detective will have a hunch an ordinary person may not have.

While in school I had a friend who could find lost or misplaced items very quickly but he could not explain how he did it. I still do not know whether he ended up as a detective. This unusual ability is nothing but the sixth sense that still baffles many.

Closely related to the sixth sense is the intuition. It is the ability to understand or know something immediately without having to think about it, learn it or discover it by using reason.

Sometimes we base our judgements using intuition. Very often we hear people say that they had intuition that something would happen to them or to someone dear to them. Very often a mother gets a queer feeling that her child would meet with an accident on a particular day.

Celebrated philosopher Spinoza

In addition to the five sensory organs, human beings seem to have some interior receivers which pick up certain messages from the environment.

For instance, even a child might feel an impending danger such as a speeding vehicle coming in his direction. On one of our school trips, students were asked to walk into a room where ice was made. But nobody wanted to walk into the room because they sensed there would not be enough oxygen to breathe.

Scientists tell us that this type of sense is produced by a separate system of nerves centred in the spinal cord. They also say that we have a weight sense which helps us to adjust ourselves to weights of things we are compelled to carry.

Although we are two-legged animals, we balance our bodies quite well.

The sense of balance gives us what is called our posture. When we approach an obstacle, another interior receiver makes us aware of it.

This happens even before we see it. Even blind people can be seen walking in railway stations and other crowded places without knocking against other people or objects.

At a higher level, intuition is immediate awareness, either of the truth of some proposition, or of an object of apprehension such as a concept. Awareness of the passage of time, or of the ineffable nature of God, has been claimed as intuitions.

Whether you call it sixth sense or intuition, scientific research shows that there may be some hitherto undiscovered "receptors" where it is located. More than human beings, animals are gifted with the sixth sense.

It is said that not a single animal was killed by the tsunami that devastated the coastal areas of Sri Lanka a few years ago. This is because animals have well-developed hearing and seeing faculties than human beings.

We use dogs as watchers because their sense of hearing is great. It is said that a dog can hear the supersonic whistle which is inaudible to the human ears. The cat is another animal gifted with extraordinary sight. It can clearly see in the dark the movement of mice and other creatures.

An owl sitting on the branch of a tall tree can see a mouse moving stealthily in the grass even at night. Meanwhile, a dog can find the way home even if it gets stranded some kilometres away. Science has not been able to explain this phenomenon satisfactorily.

Have you ever thought of bees and butterflies finding flowers to taste their nectar? A German zoologist Karl von Frisch discovered in 1950 how bees fly looking for flowers, even from far away places.

Strangely, they return to their hive without any difficulty. According to Frisch the bee used the plane of polarised light which allows their eyes to follow the sun rays which shine in a fixed direction.

Most of us have observed fish swim in tanks, rivers, and ponds without colliding with each other even in the dark. According to scientists, the flanks of many fish are sensory organs which register extremely slight changes in the flow of water. Scientists also have discovered that animals can sense electro-magnetism, radar waves, and infrared rays quite easily.

In philosophy, however, intuition is a form of knowledge independent of experience or reason. The intuitive faculty is generally regarded as inherent qualities of the mind. Intuition played a major role in early Greek philosophy.

The concept also had much significance in Christian philosophy as one of the basic ways in which a person could come to know God. Celebrated philosophers such as Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and Henri Bergson relied most on the idea of intuition.

According to Spinoza, intuition is the highest form of knowledge, surpassing both empirical knowledge derived from the senses and scientific knowledge derived from reasoning. He says that intuitive knowledge gives an individual the ability to understand the universe better.

Bergson says that intuition is the purest form of instinct. He defined intuition as an instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, and capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely.

With all such scientific and philosophical explanations, sixth sense or intuition still baffles human beings.