How to Develop Your Sixth Sense, Backed by Science

Imagine you’re walking down the street as the sun is setting. You usually take a shortcut that only saves you about 5 minutes according to your watch, but it feels much shorter and it’s also a prettier walk.

But today, as you turn toward the shortcut, something tells you to take the longer way. You haven’t taken that route in a while and there’s a Vintage Store used to like to walk past, it would be nice for a change to see it.

You find your feet turning, and before you know it, you’re already walking a path you haven’t taken in months. The Vintage Store is still there. You go in and you look around. You chat with the owner and you tell them why you haven’t been there in a while.

After a few minutes, you head off on your way again. You don’t even think about it anymore until a few days later when you hear a story. Someone was mugged in the same alleyway that the shortcut passes through. It was around the same time you would have walked through there. The victim is okay, but they’re very shaken up.

You wonder —

“What stopped me from walking down that path?”

Usually, you do it without even thinking, but on this day, before you went any further, you paused to think about what you were doing and you chose a different path.

But why?

Well, some people might say it was your sixth sense or your natural intuition. That somewhere in your brain, a little alarm bell went off. Instead of warning you about potential danger, which you might have brushed off, the story about the Vintage Store and changing your scenery — it sounded better.

Some people might say it was a complete chance. Coincidences happen all the time. The mathematical possibility of you changing your mind on this day isn’t really that rare. Your intuition is this ability to understand or know something without having conscious thought or reasoning behind it. It’s an idea or a feeling that guides our thoughts and behaviors.

Herbert Simon was an expert in decision-making and rationality. This American political scientist also worked in computer science, cognitive psychology, and economics — and received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

According to Herbert and his team, everyday problems are solved by tiny sparks of recognition. The big picture in the problem might be different, and so, we don't recognize it as the problem we had yesterday or the day before. But the smaller details of the problem, the ones that we are not consciously aware of, those ones crop up every day. We’ve already solved them, we can’t explain why we’re making this decision, we can’t rationalize it — but we know that it’s right.

In his study of recognition, Herbert uses the example of a grandmaster chess player's memory. It’s predicted that over the years, these players have stored at least 50,000 chunks of information on familiar cues that they can recognize and solve. Now, they may not have encountered the exact game before, but there are strengths of information attached to each move that creates a big-picture prediction, and from there, they can see the game as if they’ve already played it.

Herbert says that —

“Your intuition (or sixth sense) isn’t mysterious, it’s simply recognition. It’s based on years and years of experience that has been stored in our brains and used to create different patterns.”

Now, if we go with Herbert’s explanation, that intuition seems pretty reliable and somewhat predictable. It’s not some otherworldly feeling or talent that we possess, it’s our brain doing its job, but how much can we rely on our intuition?

If we have a feeling that someone is lying to us, we just throw it in our gut.

Are we right? Should we really trust that feeling?

You consume the equivalent of 16 hard drives of data every day. That’s a lot of information, and we need it to get through our day-to-day lives. The thought of going through all of that data every day for every decision is overwhelming, right? It would be physically impossible for us to do that.

Remember that time you were thinking about a friend, that you should call them, and then randomly on the other side of town, you run into them, or they call you, or their name pops up on a television game show — is that data or chance?

Well, the experts and scientists don’t believe that it is pure coincidence, but they also don’t believe that there are magical energies of the universe that bring us our knowledge together. Ancient cultures all over the world, from the tip of Africa to Britannia to Eurasia, used divination to guide their behaviors when their rational thinking and reasoning reached their limits.

Now, different cultures used divination differently. It could be for forecasting something to come, it could be used to diagnose a problem, or it could be used to intervene to change someone's destiny.

These days we scoff at divination and call it primitive thinking. We call it delusional or deranged, but it’s a mass delusion that’s consistent across multiple cultures for thousands of years. They were just intentional with their thinking. We’re not even aware of how much subconscious cues influence our thinking. In our conversations, nonverbal cues carry more weight than words — they shape our top-level thinking, which influences our behavior.

Psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal coined the term thin slicing, which examines the accurate judgments we make based on the tidbits of information. They discovered that 210 seconds silent clips provided enough information for people to accurately predict a teacher's effectiveness, in line with the teacher evaluation scores of the students for that year.

Now, these thin slices can be gathered from the body, speech, voice, and transcripts. They retain information from patterns of behavior while eliminating information from verbal streams, past history, and context.

If any more time is spent on analyzing, then it’s not considered a thin slice because there’s more opportunity to eliminate processes to influence your decision and cloud your judgment.

The idea here is to rely on your subconscious brain, the one that can sift through all that data within seconds. When we obsess over a decision, we lose our way. Taking a break from it allows our unconscious minds to go through all the data and make a more accurate prediction, but this doesn’t mean our predictions are foolproof.

Our brains make mistakes all the time. Trusting it blindly would be foolish just as not trusting it at all would be a waste of a superpower. The trick is to hone your sixth sense (intuition in this case) and give your brain enough information and space to solve the problem. If it makes a prediction that doesn’t work, don’t discount it — simply put it in your mistake and learn box.

Did the shortcut through the alleyway look darker than usual on that day? Once there, nobody walking through when usually you see at least one person walking in or out. Was there a dumpster that might have been moved slightly providing an ideal hiding spot for someone? Because your brain picked up on something different that day. You might not have noticed it or even explained it, but it was enough to deter you.

So, readers, you need to listen! You need to trust yourself!

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