Timothy Birdnow

Another sense has been discovered in humans and it makes sense when you think about it (pun intended).

Many birds possess an unique ability to sense food that may be buried in the ground. Plovers and sandpipers and other birds that feed along seashores can find prey through what is called remote touch; they can sense worms or other delectables just by touching the ground. They do not need to actually physically touch the tasty critters upon which they feed; they can simply tell they are there based on minute displacement of sand.

Researchers wondered if humans had the same abilities. Turns out that while we are nowhere as good at it as birds (who have special organs that help them do this) we do possess this sense in a rudimentary fashion.

People who put their hands to sand with buried objects could find those objects oftentimes just by sensing they were there.

This really doesn't surprise me; blind people often have a limited form of "vision" through their skins, although this has long been hotly contested. Plants certainly have this ability, and some simpler animals. And of course we all feel heat and cold on our skin, which itself is a coefficient of how much energy is being pumped into a given system.

I offer an experiment for you to try; put your hand near your face and tell me what you feel. It should feel slightly warm even though you aren't touching the skin. That's because heat is moving between your hand and your face and your face senses that. It's a simple form of heat vision. Now, this is a long way from sensing objects or tasty worms in sand, but it seems to me logical that if you can sense your hand near your face you probably can sense things that are near you but not visible.

At any rate people blind from birth have been reported to be able to sense colors and other things that should be impossible to them. So what gives?

Humans likely have an atrophied version of this sense. We stopped needing it some time ago, as we became more hunters than grubbers in the soil.

There are many senses in the animal kingdom that do not work for us (such as sonar, or a shark's ability to "see" a seal's nervous system from great distances) but those senses are buried in the genome, unexpressed genes. (Remember, epigenetics says we have all the stuff in us that has been in any critter in our biological line but it merely is unexpressed, dormant.) We have only five dominant senses, but most likely have many others that work, or barely work. That is the basis, no doubt, for many alleged "psychic" phenomena; people using recessive senses to acquire knowledge they seem to be incapable of possessing.

I once read a website about mentalism. Mentalism is a type of legerdemain in which the magician deduced vast amounts of information from a mark, er, subject by seeming magic. The reality is he's just very observant and makes deductions based on how the person he's "reading" reacts. There are subtle clues that tip the mentalist off and allow him to make draw the right conclusions. Sherlock Holmes was essentially a mentalist if you want an example.

I rather suspect the better mentalists have fine-tuned their limited extra-sensory abilities and can see if someone is lying or telling the truth through it. Like this new sense discussed in the article, they may be able to feel subtle changes in body temperature and skin placement, much like a lie detector machine does. Yes, there are tells which most mentalists use, facial expressions and the like (most top gamblers are natural mentalists) but that wouldn't give you everything you need. I wonder if they haven't learned to use this sixth sense.

At any rate researchers found that the human brain would get overwhelmed if we had several more senses at work on a regular basis, so we are only really aware of five senses. Beyond that and we become confused. But that doesn't mean they aren't there, just that we can't really access them.

Or can we? There was a guy named Bottineau who lived on Mauritus in the latter part of the 18th century. There is little known about Bottineau but he was quite famous for a time for his discovery of something he called Nauscopie. See, Bottineau could predict the coming of ships, often days before they came, by studying the ocean. He argued there was a lot of dying and decaying life in the sea and it produced a vapor that would be disturbed by ships. By means as yet unknown Bottineau could somehow see this disturbance and thus make predictions based on it. He was said to have had a remarkable record of success making these predictions and was called the Wizard of Mauritus for his ability.

Sadly Bottineau was a horrible scientist and didn't keep records, or if he kept them they were destroyed or disappeared. He had been holding out on publishing the secret because he wanted to be paid for it - and the offers he was receiving were too low. The guy died before he could tell the world and so Nauscopie was never realized.

I wonder; was this ability a form of sixth sense? There are many people who can feel storms coming in. Heck; my back started to hurt every time a storm was coming for a long time after I slipped a disc. That was caused by changes in air pressure, no doubt. Why can't we "see" ships coming days before they arrived? Why can't we sense objects in sand with out touching them?

At any rate I suspect we DO have more than five sense, it's just that the five we are largely aware of domnate our thinking. But there are others that are well established; we can sense the position of our bodies, for instance. We feel hunger, which is a sense not involving the big five. There are others.

So why can't we see with our skins, or feel changes in positions of objects under sand?

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