Most of us have felt it before -- that sinking feeling that something is about to happen, that something is not quite right. It’s the stuff of scary movies, X-Files episodes and psychic visits. But according to a new study by Ron Rensink, an associate professor in both psychology and computer science at UBC, the "sixth sense" is a distinct mode of visual perception and may be something all of us can learn to employ. He calls it "mindsight" -- the phenomenon where people can sense a change but do not see it (i.e. have a visual experience of it) for several seconds. "There is something there -- people do have access to this other subsystem," says Rensink, whose findings appear in the January issue of Psychological Science. "Vision is not just one ability, it’s not just one sense. There is vision for conscious perception -- this picture you have of what’s going on -- and there is also vision for action. It turns out these are two very different subsystems -- one of them is conscious, one of them is non-conscious -- and they actually work slightly differently. That’s why when you’re driving, for example, you can actually tune out and you can drive just fine because this other system takes over." In a preliminary experiment initially designed to test attention, Rensink presented participants with a photograph of a real-world scene and a modified photograph in a sequence, with a brief gray field between successive images. Participants were asked to hit a button when they saw a change.

But some participants asked if they should hit the button when they actually saw the change -- or when they first felt something happening.


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