I’m curious to know if you have had something happen to you that you can’t explain, and was later proven to be the right decision, or an extraordinary moment?
Have you ever experienced something you can’t really logically explain?
When I was a child I was able to hear some sort of very high pitch noise when someone was approaching, like about enter the room or just from around the corner. I was about 3 or 4, young enough to think that was normal for everyone.
The noise was like the noise that I now think is some sort of tinnitus.
I was taking a little me time at a cabin. Pretty remote, a 45 minute drive down a dicey mountain road to the beginning of civilization (a convenience store and a church). I was there solo to unwind.
One night I made a nice little fire down a hill from the cabin, maybe 40 yards away. Around 10, I put the fire out and started back up to the cabin. The porch lights were on and throwing some nice ambient light, so I decided not to turn my headlamp on and harsh the vibe with blue light. I couldn’t easily see the ground where I was starting from, but the path was well-maintained gravel and I was familiar the terrain.
After ten feet, I froze. I’m a person who struggles to trust my instincts sometimes. But my lizard brain was picking up on something not consciously perceptible, and I have never before or since had every part of my screaming that something was wrong.
I turned on my headlamp and saw, about twenty feet up the path, a fucking rattlesnake. Then I immediately started second-guessing myself. Do we even have rattlesnakes in this part of the country? And it didn’t even rattle, isn’t that their whole thing? Also it’s night, aren’t they active in the daytime with the sun? I stared without moving an inch, barely even breathing, just silently gaslighting myself. After a few minutes it continued on its way and finished slithering across the path back into the woods.
I ran up the rest of the hill and into the house. Promptly grabbed my phone and typed “rattlesnake [regional area I was in]” in the search bar. So, it turns out there are rattlesnakes there, and yeah their pattern is exactly the same as the one I saw. Something primal in my body knew, and I’m really glad I listened to it.
I’m glad you’re here to talk about it! There were some parts that definitely had me rolling, like; why stand there thinking about whether it can hurt you or not? It’s a snake! I avoid them all. Also every time I see “lizard brain” it makes me giggle.
No
My intuition sometimes speaks as my inner voice but it’s just as reliable as intuition normally is
Once working at the bottom of a radio tower with people up the tower. After about an hour and a half I remembered I should be wearing a hardhat.
5 min later one of the guys up the tower dropped a wrench and it hit pretty much where I was standing without the hardhat.
As a species we are prone to assigning meaning to coincidences (or even just stuff that happened).
We are also prone to overthinking, acting against our better interests, and a whole slew of things that are still interesting to explore. I don’t disagree, but there isn’t enough evidence to say that’s the only factor.
Have you ever experienced something you can’t really logically explain?
This question begs another question. For every time that you had one of these situations happen, how many times did you have the same sort of moment happen where it was either the wrong decision or an unremarkable moment?
If you have 20 premonitions, and only one comes true, then you don’t really need to logically explain that one, other that to say that unlikely things happen, given sufficient chances.
We humans have a tendency to remember the one time something happens and forget about all of the times nothing happens.
Yes, I’m aware it’s not rooted in mysticism but science. I still think they make good stories to tell, and most people have some experience with it.
My point was that these sorts of stories can almost always be logically explained simply by the fact that coincidences happen, and that humans have a bias about what they remember.
As a result, it’s a strange way of putting it to say it’s “something you can’t really logically explain”.
That would be a fair argument if logic was a monolith, but it is not. My personal logic is not the same as yours, they are still valid and logical. Logic and mathematical certainty are quite different from each other.
Nothing comes to mind for the moment but I’ll just note that I never quite realized just how many services (subroutines?) are active beneath my front of consciousness until somewhat recently. Our brains really are like Inside Out with various specialties around a conference table talking, with one or more hijacking the meeting occasionally.
Sure, and not everything that you intake as information is conscious. It just goes to show how little is really known about the human brain.
I once accidentally scryed in a puddle: I “saw” a scene outside my friend’s house with police cars and bad vibes. I called them to see if they were OK but they absolutely refused to talk about it, then I started getting threatened online. I tried talking to my friend’s cousin about it too, but she said she promised not to tell anyone. It turned out this friend’s brother got in trouble for domestic abuse after attacking her (I only found out years later). He was likely the one threatening me online.
My best guess is that somehow I subconsciously figured it out and the reflection in the puddle kinda acted as a focal point for putting together details I didn’t even realize I’d picked up. I’d always been pretty good at intuiting some kinds of information, but this was a whole different level. I also haven’t really experienced anything quite like it since.
We have a lot more than five senses…
Close your eyes and clap your hands, now how did you just do that?
Proprioception is a sense of where our body parts are in relation to each other, and how we can walk without staring at our feet the whole time.
What you’re looking for is a “gut feeling” which is often your subconscious, but your gut has a shitton of neural cells too. And can function like a “minibrain”.
Most likely it’s an actual “proto-brain” hold over from before organisms even had heads.
But anyways, most likely it’s coming from your subconscious, there are things it puts together and recognizes, and especially if danger is around then it’s just gonna flash a warning light and not walk your conscious mind thru the logic that tells you why there’s a warning light. Because it’s better to respond fast and later work out why the warning light was flashing.
So, an example would be before I learned about the correlations between prenatal testosterone, in group bonding, and facial width; it was a joke among a specific friend group that “don’t trust guys with skinny faces”.
Not that low prenatal testorone makes someone untrustworthy, just that in situations where you need to 100% count on people to have your back, the people most likely to not are the ones that are not biologically wired to blindly defend what they recognize as “us”, their in group.
But this is a thing on a wider social scale, guys with “rat face” are often cast as villains and betrayers in media, because on some level even tho we consciously don’t recognize why, we all just instantly distrust to some extent. Not from conscious logic, but individual lifetimes of experience and us just automatically picking up the pattern.
Prenatal androgen exposure, approximated via 2D:4D, was associated with prosocial behavior. In contrast to previous research in older children, higher exposure was related to stronger prosocial tendencies, which corresponds to earlier findings on fairness in adults. Our findings point towards a potential role of sex steroids in the early development of children’s social behavior, but they have to be interpreted with caution due to the small sample size of the current study. Nevertheless, they underscore the importance of integrating biological and psychological perspectives, while also highlighting the significance of studying the development of prosocial behavior within peer groups.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378378224001245
I don’t believe that there aren’t various scientific and chemical processes happening in our brain and things like this can be a product. However, there isn’t enough information about the processes of the human brain to say this is the only thing happening. The stories are interesting, and are anomalous occasions most humans seem to have in common more times than others.
Huh?
Explaining something doesn’t mean it stops happening, and everything has an explanation unless you just want it to be “magic”…
