A recent study conducted by researchers at the Univeristy of Melbourne holds information that could very well disappoint thousands of paranormal enthusiasts out there. For hundreds of years, many people believed that things like precognition, clairvoyance and other paranormal abilities usually associated with extra sensory perception (ESP) are real. However, the latest study suggests that it's only your mind playing tricks on you.
ESP is often defined as a "sixth sense" that allows individuals to receive or perceive information using only the mind, bypassing all five physical senses, via paranormal means. The study was conducted by researchers from the school of psychological sciences at the University of Melbourne in Australia. The results of the study shows that people who claim they have some form of ESP may simply be experiencing something their brains find difficult to process. This difficulty may arise from the brain's vision system getting information that it cannot articulate properly.
The study, which was published in PLOS ONE, was spearheaded by lead researcher Dr. Piers Howe.
"Several theories of visual awareness stress that we are aware of more than just the few objects to which we attend. In particular, it is clear that to some extent we are also aware of the global properties of the scene, such as the mean luminance or the distribution of spatial frequencies," says Howe, "It follows that we may be able to detect a change to a visual scene by detecting a change to one or more of these global properties. However, detecting a change to global property may not supply us with enough information to accurately identify or localise which object in the scene has been changed."
The human brain is able to detect any changes within the vicinity of an individual whether the change involves shifts in lighting or moving objects. However, the limitations of the human brain indicate that it can sometimes detect the actual changes without detecting what caused the changes to occur. When this happens, the brain may be fooled into thinking that it has gained access to information without relying on the body's physical senses.
While previous studies have hinted at similar results, the methodologies used in older studies may have been flawed leading to mixed results. These inconsistencies often invalidated any concrete assumptions that could be made. In the new study, however, the researchers used a new analysis technique that resulted in new evidence proving that the brain may sometimes miss visual cues that indicate the causality of an immediate visual change in an individual's surroundings.
