Every attempt to prove that humans have some kind of telepathic sixth sense has failed. But we still shouldn’t sell ourselves short — we have all sorts of “extra” senses that we either never use or don’t notice when we do. And some of them come pretty close to mind reading. For instance…
We can smell people’s personalities
and emotions
In a perfect world, you’d never judge someone until you got to know their personality inside and out — you know, the whole thing about judging a book by its cover. This is not a perfect world, however — this is a world where sometimes we need to judge the intentions of a stranger in a split second. Thankfully, evolution has given us all sorts of tools for doing it, whether we know it or not.
See, there is a reason you can get a feel for some people before they even say a word: Part of it is the way they smell. We’re talking about subconscious signals you didn’t even know were coming from your nose. Researchers actually conducted a study where they asked participants to wear the same shirt every night for three consecutive nights, and during the study they weren’t allowed to use soap, deodorant or anything that could mask their natural smell. Afterward, they made another group smell these shirts, and then asked them to guess which personality traits its wearers had most: dominance, neuroticism or extroversion.
Incredibly, the accuracy rate was just as high as when the same participants were asked to gauge people’s personalities from watching a video of them. That’s right — your body odour is just as indicative of who you are as your speech or mannerisms. But it goes further than that. Researchers are discovering that each person’s individual smell is so unique that it’s almost like a fingerprint, unique enough that it could serve as a really unpleasant alternative to DNA analysis.
Or maybe we could just sniff the suspects and see which one seems the most nervous. Yeah, your nose can do that, too — researchers did another study where they strapped a bunch of gauze pads to participants’ armpits to collect their sweat while they watched horror movies. Then they taped the fear-sweat-soaked gauze under the noses of a second set of participants. Those subjects were then shown pictures of faces with completely blank expressions, and scientists found that people exposed to the “fear” sweat were more likely to guess that the expressionless faces were fearful.
Some of us can see impossible colours
Here’s a challenge for you: Try to imagine a new colour. One that you’ve never seen before. Just straight invent one. Can’t do it, right? You probably figure it’s because you’ve already seen all the colours that are possible. Well, prepare to have your mind blown — there are lots of new colours out there, we just don’t ordinarily have the ability to see them, so describing them to you would be like trying to describe sight to a blind person. And we say you can’t ordinarily see them, because science has figured out a way.
In their incessant quest to break reality in ever more interesting ways, scientists successfully managed to show some people a “bluish yellow” colour. We don’t mean green. We can’t really show you what we mean, because the way our eyes work is that when we see blue, the parts of the eye that detect yellow switch off, and vice versa. So it’s not supposed to be possible to see a true mix of blue and yellow. Green is something else, the closest thing your brain can offer when you show it something that gets it all confused.
If you think we’re just messing with you, there’s an example of one such impossible colour that most people can perceive without playing complicated tricks on their brain. We call it pink. Pink is an unholy mixture of red and violet that doesn’t appear on the rainbow any more than bluish yellow does. Seeing pink is basically the colour equivalent of seeing ghosts.
And then, most amazingly, there are the very rare people who are born with the ability to see this world of new colours that the rest of us can’t even imagine. These people are called tetrachromats, because they have four cones in their eyes instead of three like the rest of us. Each cone is responsible for seeing about 100 shades, so for us normal folk, that’s about a million colours. But for tetrachromats? They see a hundred million colours. We should be thankful that it’s rare, since it would make art class harder than AP history.
Men can sense ovulation
Researchers wanted to find out whether men could detect when women were more fertile. It turns out that not only can men sense when women are ovulating, but they subconsciously change their behaviour to adapt to it.
It’s not as creepy as it sounds. When a woman is ovulating, she has very subtle changes in voice, scent and skin tone, all of which men pick up without even realizing it. To explore this, they paired 123 male participants with five women over different stages of their menstrual cycle. Each man had a one-on-one session with the woman. They were prompted with a picture depicting a certain scenario, like a child giving another a toy, and the woman was asked to describe the situation.
The men were then asked to do the same thing. But what they found was that, when the women were less fertile, the men were more likely to be lazy and just copy what the woman said. But when the women were ovulating and thus more fertile, the men tended to shake it up a little and put more effort into their part.
Your eyes can “see” even after you go blind
We’re not talking about the way the blind superhero Daredevil can “see” with sound. This is something different, and weirder.
In one study, they put an old blind man in a maze and told him to find his way out on his own. And what happened? He completed the maze flawlessly. He could “see” the walls and twists and turns, because his retina had figured out how to bypass the broken visual cortex and send the information to the brain. He was still blind, but his eyes and brain had found a workaround.
In another study, researchers put pictures of happy and sad people in front of blind people. And again, they found that the blind people were able to tell most of the time which faces were sad and which were happy. They couldn’t see the faces, but their brains knew what was in front of them.
How? Well, for many blind people, there’s really nothing wrong with their eyes. The problem is usually with the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes what the eyes see. It’s just like taking the film out of a camera and replacing it with spaghetti — the camera works fine, but it’s still useless to you. But what if somehow your body could find another way to send the information from the retina to the brain? It happens, and it’s called blindsight. Some blind people develop it and are able to have complete awareness of their surroundings, even if they believe that they don’t.
