Original subtitles

[ birds chirping ]

Freeman: Touch...

Taste...

Sight...

Smell...

Hearing.

These are the senses that connect us to the world.

But are there more than five senses?

Researchers are diving into hidden folds of our brains,

discovering that the blind can actually see...

That thoughts can fly across space...

And that somehow, we might have the power to feel the future.

Is there a sixth sense?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

♪ Through the Wormhole 2x05 ♪ Is There A Sixth Sense? Original Air Date on July 6, 2011

== sync, corrected by elderman ==

The human brain is a truly remarkable organ.

It contains as many nerve cells

as there are stars in the Milky Way.

Sights, sounds, smells, anything happening in the world around us

triggers waves of activity

that ripple through this vast network in our heads.

Could this network interact with the world

in ways we don't yet understand?

We are only just beginning to see

what these cells are really capable of.

As long as the brain remains a mystery,

the sixth sense cannot be written off as superstition.

Scientifically, it's entirely possible.

I was mostly a good kid.

But every once in a while, I stepped out of line.

But even with my back turned...

...I knew when I'd been caught.

I could just...

feel her accusing stare.

Was this a sixth sense?

At Tilburg University in the Netherlands,

Beatrice de Gelder is researching

how emotions travel from person to person.

She studies blind sight...

...A strange phenomenon in which some blind people

are able to see emotions in other people's faces.

De Gelder: We tend to think of visual perception

as a matter of intact eyes.

In fact, the eyes only see

because they are connected to the brain.

Freeman: Most of Beatrice's patients don't appear blind.

On the outside, their eyes look perfectly normal.

But on the inside, there is hidden damage.

In a healthy brain,

a complex symphony of signals flows from the eyes

to a region called the visual cortex.

But if the visual cortex gets damaged,

usually as a result of a stroke,

the signals can no longer be picked up.

A stroke normally affects only one side of the cortex,

leaving the patient blind in one eye.

Beatrice is investigating

whether the brain might have other ways

to pick up signals from that eye.

She uses a partition to separate

what a patient's blind eye and functioning eye can see.

A computer shows images of happy, sad, or angry faces

to one side only.

De Gelder: So, we present a stimulus.

It's an image of somebody laughing,

somebody expressing joy.

Freeman: Electrodes on the patient's face

pick up any twitches of his muscles,

detecting if he reacts to the emotions on display.

We see that his face was actually imitating.

He was using the same muscles without knowing it, of course,

that the model he is seeing on the screen

uses to produce that smile.

Freeman: What's remarkable is that the emotional faces

are being shown only to the patient's blind side.

The seeing eye only sees neutral expressions.

Yet, time and again,

Beatrice's patients imitate the emotions

their blind eye is looking at.

But the response is not a conscience one.

De Gelder: We asked the person,

"Were you sure, or are you guessing?"

And we systematically get the answer that they were guessing.

Freeman: Beatrice believes blind sight is a deeply buried,

subconscious sensory system

rooted in a hidden part of the brain

that receives signals from the eyes

only when the image is loaded with emotion.

But where could that part of the brain be?

[ Monitor beeping ]

De Gelder: We are really trying

to tap into the different layers of the brain.

From the surface landscape,

we try to sort of go underground in a way.

You can see that this is, like,

underground or undercover work.

What is it all built on?

What are the lower, more ancient layers?

Freeman: Beatrice uncovered those layers

by showing the same images of facial expressions

to blind-sight patients while they were inside an M.R.I.

Normally, information from the eyes

travels down the optic nerve directly to the visual cortex.

But when the eyes are looking at human emotions,

the signals diverge from that path

and travel to the amygdala, the superior colliculus,

and six other structures in the brain.

De Gelder: The human visual system

consists at least of nine different pathways.

Only one of those we begin to understand,

and the eight other ones are completely in the background.

So it's only in the case where that one needs to be sidestepped

that the alternative pathways have a chance.

Freeman: Beatrice has identified subconscious mental pathways

that allow us not to see emotional stimuli

but to sense them.

We all have these pathways,

even though they are normally overwhelmed

by our primary sense of sight.

It's the first scientific evidence

of a new sense beyond the five we know.

De Gelder: One should have a sympathetic ear

to those noises about a sixth sense

because we don't have a clear view yet

of the abilities of the brain.

Freeman: Beatrice's work has shown

that our brains can sense things

even when we are not aware of them.

It implies that any search for a sixth sense

depends on understanding the boundary

between conscious awareness and subconscious experience.

Once a month, an elite group of philosophers

meets at a small tavern in Greenwich Village.

[ Mid-tempo music playing ]

Greetings, New York.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Freeman: They call themselves

the New York Consciousness Collective.

♪ I act like you act ♪

♪ I do what you do ♪

Freeman: At the helm of this jam session is David Chalmers.

He may never fill Madison Square Garden,

but his research is earning him a growing fan base in academia.

He's trying to understand

the nature and limits of consciousness.

♪ What consciousness is ♪

♪ I ain't got a clue ♪

Consciousness is pretty well the biggest mystery in the world,

and for these reasons, because it's such a hard problem,

scientists tended just to set it aside.

Science is objective.

Consciousness is subjective.

It's just in the last couple of decades, really,

that scientists have started coming back

to consciousness as a problem in its own right.

Freeman: David believes the way to understand consciousness

is to think of it in layers --

layers constructed from the data our senses are gathering.

So, consciousness has all these different levels.

First of all, there's primary consciousness.

This is consciousness of the things around you.

I look out, I might see someone and see what's around them.

That's my first level of consciousness.

But then if I stop and reflect,

I could be conscious of my consciousness.

I can become conscious of what I'm thinking about.

Then we've got consciousness within consciousness.

If I reflect again,

I can start to be conscious of the fact

that I'm conscious of my consciousness.

Then you get consciousness that contains consciousness

that contains consciousness.

Go three levels deep.

In principle, you could repeat this to infinity.

Freeman: Since our brain is dealing with so many layers,

it stands to reason that we might not always be aware

of everything we're sensing.

Chalmers: Some things are in the background

of your consciousness,

way out in the distance.

Some things are flickering through your consciousness

that grab your attention for a moment, then they move on.

Some things are in the focus of your consciousness.

They grab your attention.

They don't let go.

Freeman: But how do we discover what we are missing?

Why does only certain neural activity

manage to fight its way into our awareness?

What's actually happening in our brains

when we are conscious of something

is still a complete mystery.

One of the basic questions about consciousness

is whether you can explain it in terms of physical processes

'cause we've got used to the idea in science

that you start with a few basics in physics,

like space and time and matter.

Put them together, you can explain everything else.

You can explain chemistry.

You can explain biology.

Now, I think in the case of consciousness,

this great chain of explanation breaks down.

My view is, we've got a new fundamental building block

in nature of consciousness,

and we need to understand the fundamental laws that govern it.

Freeman: This scientist thinks he's discovered

a new and surprising aspect of consciousness.

He believes it does not simply exist within our minds

but extends outward, as well.

And he claims he has the evidence to prove it.

What is a thought?

Neuroscientists would say

it's just a pattern of electrical activity

inside our brains.

But if I scowl or smile, my thoughts can cross a room.

In fact, they're reaching out to touch you right now.

Some scientists believe this is how the sixth sense works --

that human thoughts merge into a collective consciousness

that spans the globe.

Roger Nelson has spent the past 30 years

looking for evidence of a global mind.

Nelson: Consciousness lives in the real world.

The touch is very light.

But to the degree that it's a real touch,

it's extremely important.

Most people don't believe this is possible.

The research shows that it is possible.

Freeman: In the mid-1980s, Roger began investigating

a strange phenomenon

that had been reported by several other researchers.

They had noticed that the readouts of electronic devices

called random-number generators

could be affected by people sitting next to them

if those people focused their thoughts on them.

In the course of a long series of experiments over years,

we found that people could change the behavior

of these random-number generators

very slightly but significantly.

Freeman: Random-number generators are electronic coin tosses.

Instead of heads or tails,

they throw ones or zeros.

Their results are supposed to be totally random.

Roger reasoned that if one person sitting close by

could alter their readouts,

then perhaps the mass thoughts of entire cities

could do the same.

Could random-number generators placed around the world

be used to track the minds of millions of individuals?

Nelson: What we have done is set up a scientific experiment

with a fairly simple hypothesis.

The idea is,

when large numbers of people share a consciousness state,

especially emotional,

then our network will show deviations from randomness.

Freeman: By the late 1990s,

Roger had persuaded several colleagues across the globe

to collect random-number data in their labs.

The global consciousness project was born.

This is a map

that shows where the global consciousness project

has installations all around the world.

That's Hawaii there, Australia, New Zealand,

lots of them in Europe.

There's a random-event generator or a random-number generator

attached to a computer at each of those places.

Freeman: This global network runs 24/7,

collecting data and then sending it back to a server

at Roger's lab in Princeton.

Nelson: We take the real-time data,

and every second, a color block will appear.

Mostly it's small,

but when there's a big deviation in the data like that...

Oh, my God, another one.

[ Laughs ]

This is unusual to see so many large deviations

in such a short time.

Freeman: Every time there was a major global event,

Roger checks to see if his network deviates from normal.

And many times, it does.

Some of the strongest changes

took place during the presidential elections of 2008.

Nelson: When the polls closed,

the media were saying, "Looks like Obama has won."

This graph shows the data

from the time the polls closed for the next five hours.

In the middle of that is Obama's victory speech.

[ Cheers and applause ]

We have never been just a collection of individuals.

We are and always will be the United States of America.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Nelson: This is a strong trend.

It just goes straight up this incline.

[ Cheers and applause ]

It's like 1,000-to-1 odds

that we should have that accumulation of positive effects

in a data set this size.

We have more than 340 independent experiments.

When we put all the data together

from 12 years of these experiments,

the bottom-line result

has odds against chance of a billion to one.

[ Cheers and applause ]

Freeman: Roger's data suggests

there is some form of global consciousness.

But how might it actually work?

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake

believes the answer lies in a hidden field

generated by all living things.

He calls it a morphic field.

Fields are regions of influence.

It's easier to see what fields are with magnetic fields.

These balls are little magnets,

and as I drop them onto the plate,

the balls attract each other or repel each other.

They turn around, and so they all join up in patterns.

There's a self-organizing property in fields.

They're inherently integrative.

And what I'm suggesting

is that there's another kind of field called morphic fields,

which organize the bodies of animals and plants

and organize the activities of brains and minds.

Freeman: Rupert believes that morphic fields

are what allow birds to fly in perfect formation,

what guide the mass migrations of herd animals,

and he also believes

they are the reason we get that uncanny feeling

when someone stares at us.

He has even run a series of experiments

to try to prove that this sense is real.

[ Beeping ]

Not looking.

You either look or you don't look

in a random sequence of trials at somebody else,

and they have to guess in each trial

if they're being stared at or not.

Not looking.

Sheldrake: The starer should concentrate their mind

on the person they're looking at.

When I do it, I also think of the person's name.

Looking.

I concentrate all my attention on them.

When I'm not looking at them,

I look at the floor or I close my eyes,

and I think of something completely different.

Not looking.

Brilliant.

14 right and 6 wrong.

Something's going on,

and although the effect's not big, it's consistent

and it's repeated over large numbers of trials.

Freeman: Rupert has gathered a body of evidence

that shows people really do appear to know

when they are being stared at.

For him, it supports the idea

that our bodies are surrounded by morphic fields,

an invisible extension of ourselves.

What I'm suggesting

is that our minds work through extended fields

that stretch out far beyond our heads into the world around us,

linking us to other people and to our environment.

Freeman: Many scientists dismiss Rupert's ideas,

arguing that if morphic fields exist,

we should have detected them by now.

But in a darkened lab in Sudbury, Ontario,

this researcher believes he has

and that he has evidence

that thoughts can fly from one mind to another.

Every minute of every day,

we are surrounded by an invisible force.

Our world is wrapped in a magnetic field.

For many creatures on Earth,

life would be impossible without it.

Birds, sea turtles, and fish rely on this global magnetism

to navigate.

Could our minds be using it, too?

And is it, perhaps, the root of the sixth sense?

Michael Persinger runs the neuroscience research group

at Laurentian University in Canada.

The powerful effect of Earth's magnetic field on animals

inspired him to investigate

whether it could also influence us.

Animals can use the three-dimensional magnetic field

of the Earth

as a kind of navigation or homing device.

There's very good evidence for it.

Freeman: The connection Michael suggests could exist

between Earth's magnetic field and human brains

is much more controversial.

Persinger: The sixth sense is effectively

the ability to detect information at a distance --

that's one of the definitions --

through mechanisms not known to date.

The critical question is, how is it done?

The magnetic field of the Earth

is basically the medium within which we were all exposed,

all seven billion of us.

[ Indistinct talking ]

And that's what allows

the potential exchange of information.

Freeman: According to this theory,

Earth's magnetic field is like an ocean rippling with waves.

Electrical activity from our brains

can surf along on top of it,

passing from one person to another.

It's a radical idea,

but Michael has designed an elaborate experiment

to put it to the test.

And whatever you do, don't drill into his head.

Trephining is outlawed in Canada.

His team placed two subjects, Mandy and Mark,

in rooms 20 feet apart.

The rooms are acoustically and visually isolated

from one another.

They are also completely shielded

from Earth's magnetic field.

Michael replaces that

with a precisely controlled magnetic field of his own design

generated by electrical coils on this headband.

In this way, he can be sure

that Mandy and Mark experience identical magnetic fields.

By producing the same complex configuration

of a magnetic field in two different brains

at a distance,

you're basically imitating what happens in nature

in the Earth's magnetic field.

I'm going to turn off the lights,

and I'll be recording your E.E.G. the entire time.

And we'll be able to see if, indeed, their brain activity

is the same once they share the same magnetic field.

Freeman: Over the course of the next 20 minutes,

a light will flash at Mark several times

while Mandy remains undisturbed in her darkened room.

Michael and his team

monitor both of their brains' activity.

Three minutes in, the light begins to flash

in Mark's room.

You can see a nice spike right there.

About five minutes later,

the light flashes again.

Same intensity. Actually, you can see the spikes even in this one.

Mandy's brain activity

spiked right at the time mark saw the flashing light.

Now Dr. Persinger's team need to know

what Mandy experienced while she sat in the dark.

Mandy: Well, at about three minutes in,

in my left visual field of my left eye,

I experienced a bright flash.

And it lasted very briefly,

and it felt like it just sort of faded into the darkness again.

Later on at around six to eight minutes in,

I had a flash in my right peripheral field.

Persinger: When the light was flashing to one,

producing all these changes,

the other person's brain activity,

even though they were in the dark,

also changed.

Freeman: The experiment seems to show

that two brains in separate locations

can share a single experience.

Persinger: Human thoughts are not non-physical.

They are physical units of action potentials

from the nerve itself.

Can they be transmitted across space?

Under certain conditions, absolutely,

and there's evidence for it.

If we have seven billion human brains

all immersed in the magnetic field, which they are,

then a change in one, if it's connected --

and we are 'cause the magnetic flux lines

go right through us, right through our brains --

then a change in one could influence everyone.

Michael Persinger believes he has evidence

for a primitive form of sixth sense --

an ability to share simple sensations

with people who are far away from us.

But our senses may not just be able to travel across space.

They may be able to reach out across time

and feel the future.

Science is full of ideas that seem hard to believe.

Take quantum mechanics.

In this strange world of subatomic physics,

a particle can be in two places at once...

Until we look at it.

Most physicists will tell you

where the particle ends up is just a roll of the dice.

But there's another theory.

My conscious mind

could be controlling this subatomic world.

And the sixth sense

could be what makes the universe tick.

Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist.

As a pioneer of string theory,

which proposes the world is actually nine-dimensional,

he believes scientists need to keep an open mind

about the sixth sense,

no matter how strange it may sound.

We physicists are conservative revolutionaries

in the sense that we have to be open

to all sorts of crazy, bizarre phenomenon.

Who would have thought

that there's something called radioactivity?

Who would have thought that we would have quantum forces?

So we have to be open to these things.

The most successful physical theory of all time

is called quantum mechanics, the theory of the atom,

because it's based on the idea of probabilities,

that you don't really know where an electron is.

And electrons can exist, in some sense,

in multiple states at the same time.

Freeman: The fuzzy nature of subatomic particles

might just provide a way to explain the sixth sense.

Erwin Schrodinger,

one of the founders of quantum mechanics,

designed a thought experiment to drive home

the strange rules of his theory.

Let's say we put a cat and a vial of poison in a box.

[ Cat meows ]

We add an atom of radioactive uranium

and a geiger counter.

If the uranium decays, it sets off the geiger counter,

which then releases the poison and silently kills the cat.

[ Cat meows ]

Before we open the box and look,

we can't actually know whether the uranium has decayed or not

since radioactive decay

is a probabilistic quantum event.

Here's the question.

Is the cat dead or alive?

Well, according to quantum mechanics,

the cat is neither dead nor alive

but the sum of the two states.

Well, at that point, you say, "Well, that's nonsense.

"That's preposterous.

"How can you be both dead and alive simultaneously?"

Freeman: Schrodinger's cat was supposed to show

that nothing in this universe is certain

until someone makes a measurement.

But another pioneer of quantum mechanics,

Eugene Wigner, believed it could teach us

something else about the working of the universe --

that consciousness controls everything.

Kaku: Wigner said, "Let's take it one step farther.

"If I, a human being, looks at the cat,

"I am conscious.

Therefore, consciousness determines existence."

At that point, Einstein went ballistic

and said, "what?

"You're saying that the fact that you are a conscious being

determines the fact that the cat is alive?"

The answer is yes, and Wigner made one more step.

And that is, "How do I know I'm alive?"

You see, the cat and me, we're part of the same universe.

If I don't know the cat is alive or dead,

I could also be dead at the same time

and not even know it.

So, who determines that I'm alive?

Well, Wigner's friend looks at me,

I look at the cat,

and we exist.

But then who looks at Wigner's friend?

And there's an infinite chain of people looking at people

looking at people

until, finally, you hit cosmic consciousness.

Some consciousness that's ethereal,

that envelops the Universe,

which looks at us and says, "Aha, the cat is alive."

Freeman: Wigner believed that consciousness

is an inextricable part of reality,

that nothing really happens in the physical world

unless a conscious mind observes it.

Most physicists regard cosmic consciousness

as an intriguing idea that will never be provable.

But in Princeton, New Jersey,

Roger Nelson may have some solid evidence.

In the vast array of data

collected by his global consciousness project,

one date stands out above all others.

[ Sirens wailing ]

Nelson: We explored the data around 9/11

because there were changes.

This shows a little more than a week around 9/11.

Here, right in the middle, is September 11th,

and this little block respects the time

when the first plane hit

to the time when the last building fell.

Freeman: On that fateful day,

Roger's global network recorded random-number data

second by second.

Nelson: Here, we already have some activity

that doesn't really look normal,

and at this point, which is 4:30 in the morning,

the data really changed and took off in a way

that I think is highly significant.

This is an aberration in the random walk,

and it happens to be centered on 9/11,

and it happens that in order to be centered on 9/11,

it started before the first plane hit.

We don't have an explanation for that.

Freeman: 9/11 was the first and only time

the global consciousness network responded to an event

before it actually began.

Roger believes it shows human consciousness

does not just react to major events --

it is an inextricable part of them.

But the nature of that connection

is still unclear.

One of the really hard questions that we're dealing with

is how it works.

Is it a global consciousness that we can sort of imagine

but we can't perceive directly?

Is it a global consciousness having a premonition?

And we honestly cannot say what of those things

it could be.

Freeman: Is this the first evidence

of cosmic consciousness?

Something that's part of the very fabric

of the Universe?

This man believes it is.

He claims he has evidence that each one of us

has an extraordinary mental power

to predict the future.

The future is always out there...

Just beyond our reach.

The question is,

can we ever perceive it before it becomes the present?

We've all had gut feelings

that something is about to happen.

Now researchers claim to have proof

that those feelings are more than superstition.

They could be coming from your sixth sense.

Dean Radin, a senior scientist

at the Institute for Noetic Science,

is a leading voice in the study of the sixth sense.

Radin: Most people at one time or another

have an experience that they might call

an intuitive hunch or a gut feeling.

A prototypical case is driving down the road

and you're coming to an intersection,

and you just get a bad feeling, so you slow down.

Something feels spooky.

[ Truck horn blares ]

[ Tires screech ]

And a truck goes through the red light

and would've hit you broadside if you had not slowed down.

But what is that?

Sometimes it's coincidence.

Sometimes people make up things.

The presentiment experiment

is a way of seeing whether or not, in principle,

that sometimes it's actually because

you're getting your future -- your future experience.

You put your arm up.

Freeman: Dean has developed a scientific method

to test whether people can really anticipate events

in the future --

an ability he calls presentiment.

Today, he's working with a volunteer, Janet.

Okay, have fun. Thanks.

Freeman: He has asked her to look at a series of images

on a computer monitor

while he records her body's physiological responses.

What she looks at are a randomized series of photos --

some bland,

some emotionally charged.

Dean charts Janet's skin conductors,

a measure of her stress level,

against the types of images she was seeing.

What Dean and any other psychological research

should expect to find

is a sharp change in the response

right after an emotionally jarring image.

But that's not what he finds.

Dean: This line shows where the actual picture shows up.

So if this picture shows up here,

you would think that there shouldn't be

any difference in the overall average

of the emotional pictures

and overall average of the calm pictures.

But when she sees an emotional picture, there's a bump up.

So, now we go backwards in time five seconds before,

and we can see that from that moment

that if it's going to be an emotional picture,

she's already becoming emotional as compared to the calm.

This difference is what I call a presentiment response.

Freeman: According to Dean's research,

Janet's body is responding to the pictures

five seconds before she sees them.

It's the same effect he's found in hundreds of trials

over the past 30 years.

All of his subjects show this presentiment response.

Rabin: It appears as though the information

is leaking backwards in time.

What this experiment suggests

is that there's some kind of anticipatory effect

that's five seconds.

We don't know what the limit is.

Freeman: If our minds really can see

into the future...

How can we explain it scientifically?

Kaku: In the 1860s,

during the time of the American Civil War,

physicist James Clerk Maxwell in England

worked out the entire theory of light and electromagnetism.

What Maxwell showed is that light,

this mysterious thing that pervades our Universe,

is actually a wave.

So we now know that light is nothing but a wave

of electricity and magnetism oscillating together.

Think of a dancer waving this gigantic flag.

The hand motion comes first,

and then the wave starts to unfurl.

But let me let you in on a dirty little secret.

There is a second solution to Maxwell's equation

that has haunted physics for the last 150 years.

There are also these bizarre advanced waves --

solutions that allow you to see the future.

Freeman: In the advanced wave solution,

the flag moves before the dancer's hand.

Information travels from the future to the present.

So, could this alternate solution

to one of the basic laws of physics

explain Dean Radin's results?

In the 1950s, genius physicist Richard Feynman

realized that advanced wave solutions

were actually mathematical clues

that a new form of matter existed -- antimatter.

Hmm.

What looks like matter traveling backwards in time

is actually antimatter acting perfectly normal.

Kaku: Matter going backwards in time

is the same as antimatter going forwards in time.

We thought that maybe, just maybe,

it might be possible to see the future,

communicate with our descendents from the present time.

But here comes Feynman, who says, "no."

Freeman: Feynman won a nobel prize for this work.

But Dean Radin isn't convinced that advanced waves

rippling backwards in time from the future

can be written off entirely.

Radin: In modern physics,

now we at least have a plausibility argument,

where we can no longer say that the physical world

makes it impossible.

We know that it is possible.

So the challenge now is to say,

"Well, how do we connect this missing gap?"

Freeman: Advances in theoretical physics are one way.

But there is another --

more evidence.

This researcher could be the man

who finally convinces the world

that the sixth sense

is real.

Scientists have been searching for evidence

of the sixth sense for well over a century.

If it exists,

it can't be as strong as the other five senses.

Otherwise, we wouldn't still be arguing about it.

But if we can prove that the sixth sense is real,

it won't matter how weak it is.

It would turn modern science on its head.

Daryl Bem has had a long and successful career

as a Professor of Psychology at Cornell University.

Now he, too, has turned his focus to the sixth sense.

I wanted to do work on precognition or premonition

because it just boggles the mind

to think that the future can affect the past.

Freeman: Daryl has spent the last eight years

testing this very question.

A person is shown two curtains

and are told that behind one of the curtains

will be a picture

and behind the other is a blank wall.

And their task is to pick the curtain

that has the picture behind it.

Freeman: Just like Dean Radin,

Daryl is trying to see whether people can anticipate

future events.

Bem: The computer waits until they've made their selection,

and then, without cheating by looking at what they did,

it flips a coin.

Freeman: Most of the time, their success rate is 50/50.

In other words, they're guessing.

But when and only when

the computer shows erotic images,

subjects can predict what's behind the curtain

53% of the time --

a small but statistically significant

beating of the odds.

Daryl believes this ability to sense erotic opportunities

in the future

has developed over millions of years.

It was shaped by evolution to give individuals an edge

in finding mates.

Evolution rides on reproductive advantage --

the ability to seek out and have sexual opportunities.

So it makes sense evolutionarily

to think that precognition or something like it

would certainly serve reproductive advantage

and survival advantage.

Freeman: If he's right,

Daryl has revealed a completely unexpected aspect

of human nature.

Time may not flow neatly in one direction.

And humans, being evolutionary survivors,

have learned to use that to their advantage.

Bem: I call it "Feeling the future"

because it tries to get in the fact

that the future is able to affect

both your thoughts -- cognition -- and your emotions.

Freeman: When it was published

in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

Daryl's article caught worldwide attention.

Sixth-sense research, long on the fringes of science,

is moving ever closer to the mainstream.

There's more sixth-sense stuff around

than we are maybe willing to acknowledge

because we are processing much more information

on a continuous basis than we are aware of.

Persinger: It's clearly physical,

it's tied to small amounts of energy,

and it tells us that there's a connection

between us and our world around us

that we haven't previously fathomed.

Bem: We're at the point where we can show

that we have anomalous findings.

And what do we mean by anomalous?

It means it doesn't fit into the current structure

of how we conceptualize physical reality.

We're looking at the edge of what's known.

Radin: I think we can say with high confidence

that in the realm of psychic phenomena,

something interesting is happening.

Freeman: Is there a sixth sense?

That's not even the right question to ask anymore.

Mainstream brain research has already uncovered

previously unknown sensory pathways.

But whether our thoughts can join a global mind

or whether we can sense the future,

we only have fragments of evidence so far.

In the end, we will find the answers

because they're all...

Right here.

== sync, corrected by elderman ==