Side effects can be good. New data that science has been acquiring and collecting about the brain itself has provided an over-stimulating amount of data to condense usable information from. How much we don’t know about the brain is not only ironic, it's borderline tragic.
I keep my eyes and ears on new studies published. Reading knowledgeable interpretations of information about the brain are much easier to chew on. I am hopeful the number of senses will be revised, upgrading our generation to Human version 2.0, but minimally I am hoping for an official promotion of ‘intuition’ as a new addition the team of five sense staples. I realize these chances are about as likely as Pluto getting an official reinstatement, and it’s at least as many miles away from sociological acceptance in the mainstream.
Why intuition as our sixth sense? I’m not talking about ESP, or anything metaphysical (maybe hyper-real at most), but every human knows what this (intuition) is, every culture, all time, and this gives us tangible proof of its existence. Why should it be a sense? Let’s just look at how we talk about it; “I smell a rat” (smell), “I saw Red Flags” (sight), “the hair stood up on my neck” (touch), “alarm bells were going off” (sound) “left a bad taste in my mouth” (taste) “trust your gut” (you tell me)-all of these are metaphors for our senses. Intuition should be inducted. Nobody talks about umami anymore.
I keep my eyes and ears on new studies published. Reading knowledgeable interpretations of information about the brain are much easier to chew on. I am hopeful the number of senses will be revised, upgrading our generation to Human version 2.0, but minimally I am hoping for an official promotion of ‘intuition’ as a new addition the team of five sense staples. I realize these chances are about as likely as Pluto getting an official reinstatement, and it’s at least as many miles away from sociological acceptance in the mainstream.
Why intuition as our sixth sense? I’m not talking about ESP, or anything metaphysical (maybe hyper-real at most), but every human knows what this (intuition) is, every culture, all time, and this gives us tangible proof of its existence. Why should it be a sense? Let’s just look at how we talk about it; “I smell a rat” (smell), “I saw Red Flags” (sight), “the hair stood up on my neck” (touch), “alarm bells were going off” (sound) “left a bad taste in my mouth” (taste) “trust your gut” (you tell me)-all of these are metaphors for our senses. Intuition should be inducted. Nobody talks about umami anymore.
Wrapping Our Heads Around the Brain
As President Obama’s time served (in office that is) comes to a close, new perspective is just breaking dawn, hindsight is on the horizon and we will soon be able, with the clarity of daylight, assess and consider the full aftermath of this polaroid of presidency. Aside from weighing pros and cons, let us first consider the massive BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, a.k.a. Brain Activity Mapping Project) alone, a facet of the Human Genome Project which Obama has been a front runner for during his reign. The BRAIN project began in April 2013 and is expected to continue running a tab of $300 million per year over the next ten years. Not to make mountains out of molehills or flower beds out of potholes, but this figure needs to be put in perspective.
Each state of our union spends $1.3 billion annually (on average) for pothole and road erosion repairs (I know it’s hard to see, or feel that money being put to use).
NASA has an approximate $18.4 million budget projected for the fiscal year 2015, or to look at it another way, considering McDonalds sells 75 hamburgers every single second every single day, at around a buck each, in just one day McDonalds slangs 6,480,000, earning the equivalent of $6 million in just burgers in one day, somebody’s definitely luvin it. Hopefully your own brain is not french fried just yet, we have some feeling around to do still in the brain.
Each state of our union spends $1.3 billion annually (on average) for pothole and road erosion repairs (I know it’s hard to see, or feel that money being put to use).
NASA has an approximate $18.4 million budget projected for the fiscal year 2015, or to look at it another way, considering McDonalds sells 75 hamburgers every single second every single day, at around a buck each, in just one day McDonalds slangs 6,480,000, earning the equivalent of $6 million in just burgers in one day, somebody’s definitely luvin it. Hopefully your own brain is not french fried just yet, we have some feeling around to do still in the brain.
Aside from the most obvious goal of better understanding how this complex muscle “the brain” works and the physical mapping of it (being able to trace, predict and even alter our brains circuitry), and in addition to all this raw data and interpretation, until now we have been just barely scratching below the surface of the scalp in order to conceptualize where ideas come from, how inspiration is triggered, why does synesthesia fade, and what is the difference between the brain and the mind?
None of us has a clue.
“Parallels have been drawn to past large-scale government-led research efforts including the map of the human genome, the voyage to the moon and the development of the atomic bomb.” -John Markoff, NY Times, SCIENCE
Image By Hiromichi Matsuda (松田 弘道, ?-1969) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
Recently Harvard Business Review did a story about our use and the reliability of intuition, and they concluded this elusive phenomenon could only be trusted or “is helpful only under certain conditions”. Those stipulated conditions include familiarity or expertise, meaning you need to know something about what you are intuiting in order to understand the intuition fully. Harvard says it takes a decade for this condition of intuition to be optimal, but isn’t that an educated decision, and not intuition? They continue to explain intuition must be judged by its unstructured parameters, “An unstructured problem is one that lacks clear decision rules or has few objective criteria,”, okay that’s pretty clear, the instructions should not be evident, there should be no restrictions.
Brown University around the same time published their “Study describes brain circuitry for selecting among sensations” which explains how our brain chooses to listen to what among the constant flood of sensory input. They found that when our cortical cells are firing at low frequencies they inhibit the thalamic cells. This means that two separate parts of our brains are working in conjunction to regulate, filter and prioritize how much information we receive through our senses. This makes perfect sense, pun intended, as it relates to intuition. When we sense danger, certain senses are elevated, or frozen, our adrenaline is kicked on and we are unable to “feel” the same things. If the Harvard study were practical intuition would not be considered such a silent life saver, when has genuine intuition ever been wrong?
Brain Picking’s offers an overflowing buffet of brain food, all of which is delicious and easy to digest, and also noted intuition as not an exclusive word unto itself, requiring certain elements to work. Looking at the definition of intuition as the dictionary decided, it means “the ability to understand something immediately without need for conscious reasoning”, Maria Popova mentions intuitions origins from Latin meaning ‘knowledge from within’, the latter definition seems more accurate but should be a verb and not just a noun. Does intuition simply understand (without reasoning) or does it act, do something? Like the noses on our face, the brains floating in our skull, I guess we don’t know as much as we thought we did, but I smell something fishy in the scientific community when it comes to a sixth sense, called it intuition.
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