[RhetoricThug]

Human Brains Have 'Wi-Fi' That Can Explain People's Gut Feelings

Our gut feelings allow us to "know" things, even if we can't explain where this information or judgment comes from.

This intuition, however, gives a sense of certainty when we make quick and sometimes important decisions such as avoiding a particular person or situation.

Human Brains Are Interconnected

Now, a leading professor from the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England has suggested of a phenomenon that can explain why people have gut feelings. Clinical Professor of Psychotherapy Digby Tantum claimed that the human brain is interconnected to others through a type of Wi-Fi that allows people to pick up information about other people.

Gut Feelings And The Interbrain

Tatum said that because of the direct connection between people's brains, people are capable of directly knowing other people's emotions and what they pay attention to. He called this phenomenon "the interbrain."

The interbrain may help explain people's gut feeling. Tatum believes that the brain subconsciously absorbs information about other people.

Why Commuters Can't Maintain Eye Contact

People can also pick up subliminal information and Tatum said that this is why commuters have a hard time maintaining eye contact on a busy train. The presence of a large number of people can overload the brain with too much subliminal information.

The interbrain may also be the reason why laughter is infectious.

Brain Communication, Language, And Smell

Tantum thinks that language plays only a part in the way humans communicate and the brain is, in fact, the one that works hard to collect small signals that communicate a person's thoughts.

The professor wrote about his idea in a new book The Interbrain published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. He thinks that brain communication may occur as an inadvertent leak that is linked to smell.

"The area of the brain that is closest to the nose is the orbitofrontal cortex. It might be there because so many of our most basic connections to other people are via smell," Tatum said.

Dangers Of Using Electronic Forms Of Communications

Amid the popularity of using the internet and electronic devices to communicate, Tatum warned that electronic forms of communication such as video calls can interrupt the interbrain process and cause harm. He explained that face-to-face visual input comes with a gesture, sound, smell of sweat, possibility of touch, and a connection. He said that internet communication could be another reason why some people have become more complicated and introvert.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/21822 ... elings.htm

Interesting piece, Thoughts?

EDIT: I fixed the thread title.

[Hong Wu]

I think people are loath to admit that you don't have to actually see someone to pick things up about them.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

As cool as it sounds to consider the possibility of extra-sensory perception, telepathy, and other honestly quite neat things (which would be cool if they existed), the sort of stuff discussed in the article is already mentioned broadly in the field of psychology. All of us are constantly picking up on a lot of cues, conscious and subconscious, that inform us about other people, our surroundings, ourselves, and so on. Our "gut feeling" is a combination of a lot of different sensory cues, generally subconscious, which we consciously act upon. There've been a lot of studies concerning how our subconscious awareness of various details, behaviors, and so forth influence the way we think, feel, and act. Some of the examples given in the article are good examples of that sort of thing: people will often avoid eye contact in a crowded area filled with strangers because it helps to avoid confrontations and it's how we are conditioned to behave in such situations, or how laughing along with people helps us to conform in social situations (which is one small way to help us succeed in life around other people if we behave in ways that conform to the group's behavior).

I would absolutely enjoy living in a world where ESP/telepathy was a real thing, but the unfortunate fact is that there is just no evidence for this. The author of the article seems to have taken some journalistic liberty with the material he was writing about: I took a gander at Tantum's book, and I see no sign he's suggesting anything the article's author is implying. Tantum actually wrote about the complex interplay between the conscious and the subconscious, and about the complex subconscious cues that inform our judgment and behavior of other people, which is perhaps worth checking out. His term for the "interbrain" is simply the subconscious mechanism of our psyche that processes our sensory input on people, combines it with another subconscious filter that determines whether something is threatening, pleasurable, etc, and then we experience a "gut feeling" or something else that lets us consciously act on what we subconsciously noticed.

[ness31]

of course they do! Of what we know of the brain the question really is why would we think otherwise?

[ness31]

I thought the tin foil hats were to keep stuff out

[RhetoricThug]

I thought the tin aluminium foil hats were to keep stuff out

aluminium foil can be used as a very cheap Faraday cage. Give it a try, wrap your cell phone in it.

As cool as it sounds to consider the possibility of extra-sensory perception, telepathy, and other honestly quite neat things (which would be cool if they existed), the sort of stuff discussed in the article is already mentioned broadly in the field of psychology. All of us are constantly picking up on a lot of cues, conscious and subconscious, that inform us about other people, our surroundings, ourselves, and so on. Our "gut feeling" is a combination of a lot of different sensory cues, generally subconscious, which we consciously act upon. There've been a lot of studies concerning how our subconscious awareness of various details, behaviors, and so forth influence the way we think, feel, and act.

Sure, it's quite literally 'common sense.'

Some of the examples given in the article are good examples of that sort of thing: people will often avoid eye contact in a crowded area filled with strangers because it helps to avoid confrontations and it's how we are conditioned to behave in such situations, or how laughing along with people helps us to conform in social situations (which is one small way to help us succeed in life around other people if we behave in ways that conform to the group's behavior).

Yep, involuntary and voluntary reflex.

I would absolutely enjoy living in a world where ESP/telepathy was a real thing, but the unfortunate fact is that there is just no evidence for this.

Sure, there's no evidence yet, but that's not the point of this article. He's simply stating that there must be a 'field' or substrate responsible for 'gut feelings.'. Everything involves 'touch,' sight, sound, taste, smell, etc. Can we tap into that field or technologically harness the substrate? What part(s) of the brain would we have to augment/manipulate?

BTW, CIA studied ESP for several years. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom ... 00090023-8

Attention and intention can influence our subliminal field.

The author of the article seems to have taken some journalistic liberty with the material he was writing about: I took a gander at Tantum's book, and I see no sign he's suggesting anything the article's author is implying. Tantum actually wrote about the complex interplay between the conscious and the subconscious, and about the complex subconscious cues that inform our judgment and behavior of other people, which is perhaps worth checking out.

Your conscious thoughts filter out the subconscious. Do you think about breathing? Nonetheless, you can think about breathing if you give it attention. Can we build technological filters that give attention to subconscious phenomena? Can we heighten our awareness and consciousness? I think we can, because everything is a vibratory process, mixed and tuned through relative and nonlocal phenomena.

His term for the "interbrain" is simply the subconscious mechanism of our psyche that processes our sensory input on people, combines it with another subconscious filter that determines whether something is threatening, pleasurable, etc, and then we experience a "gut feeling" or something else that lets us consciously act on what we subconsciously noticed.

His focus is on the COMMUNICATION between the subconscious mechanisms of our psyche. You're underwhelming right now, BJ.

Tatum warned that electronic forms of communication such as video calls can interrupt the interbrain process and cause harm.

Lastly, The article mentions how screen-time disrupts the gathering of subconscious information. More support for the medium is the massage? I call it the epi-genetic consequence...

[RhetoricThug]

Although the following articles deserve a new thread... I'm excited to see this kind of research, because it may support the Pribram-Bohm Holonomic brain theory. Also, it reminds me of Sheldrake's morphic resonance theory.

Discovering a New Form of Communication in The Brain

Biomedical engineering researchers at Case Western Reserve University say they have identified a previously unidentified form of neural communication, a discovery that could help scientists better understand neural activity surrounding specific brain processes and brain disorders.

“We don’t know yet the ‘So what?’ part of this discovery entirely,” said lead researcher Dominique Durand, the Elmer Lincoln Lindseth Professor in Biomedical Engineering and director of the Neural Engineering Center at the Case School of Engineering. “But we do know that this seems to be an entirely new form of communication in the brain, so we are very excited about this.

Until now, there were three known ways that neurons “talk” to each other in the brain: via synaptic transmission, axonal transmission and what are known as “gap junctions” between the neurons.

Scientists have also known, however, that when many neurons fire together they generate weak electric fields that can be recorded with the electroencephalogram (EEG). But these fields were thought to be too small to contribute to neural activity.

These new experiments in the Durand’s laboratory, however have shown that not only can these fields excite cells, but that they can produce electric fields of their own and generate a self-propagating wave of activity.

This newly found form of communication was discovered while scientists at Case Western Reserve were analyzing the propagation mechanism of relatively fast brain waves similar to those generated when we sleep. They call it ephaptic (or electric) coupling, a reference to the known and observed low-level electric field in the brain—but now believed to also be capable of generating neural activity.


“We’ve known about these waves for a long time, but no one knows their exact function and no one believed they could spontaneously propagate,” Durand said. “I’ve been studying the hippocampus, itself just one small part of the brain, for 40 years and it keeps surprising me.”

Stunning experiment

That surprise peaked during a series of experiments in which Durand and his team observed a wave “leap” across a cut they had made in brain tissue slice—a phenomenon they conclude could only be explained by the electric field coupling.

Again and again, the brain-wave appeared to jump across the empty gap. Picture a stadium fan “wave” as it hits the empty bleachers in center-field. You expect the wave to sputter out, but it gets picked up again by the crowd in right-field and keeps coursing through the crowd.

Except this was wave behavior in a neural tissue that had never been reported before by neuroscientists, or anyone else, the scientists said.

Durand said he didn’t believe it when he saw it. Neither did the fellow researchers in his lab or a partner at Tianjin University in China.

“It was a jaw-dropping moment,” he said, “for us and for every scientist we told about this so far.”

Among the dubious: The review committee at The Journal of Physiology, which required the researchers from Case Western Reserve to perform further experiments to double- and triple-check their work before agreeing to publish the work.

“But every experiment we’ve done since to test it has confirmed it so far,” Durand said.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neur ... ain-315556

‘Jaw-dropping moment’: Scientists discover mysterious new communication mechanism in the brain

Researchers studying the brain have stumbled upon a mysterious, previously unknown form of neural communication that has stunned the scientific community.

Despite major scientific breakthroughs, the brain largely remains a mystery, and the team from Case Western Reserve University have added to it with their latest paper on a self-propagating ‘wireless’ communication they encountered that can jump across different sections of the brain.

While we’re asleep, the cortex and hippocampus in the brain send out mysterious neural ‘waves’. Scientists have previously observed a low-level, slow periodic activity in the brains of decapitated mice by studying slices of their hippocampuses.

“We’ve known about these waves for a long time, but no one knows their exact function and no one believed they could spontaneously propagate,”says neural and biomedical engineer Dominique Durand from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

This slow periodic activity can generate electric fields which ‘switch on’ neighboring cells briefly, allowing for chemical-free communication across gaps in the brain. The team managed to simulate communication across completely severed brain tissue while the separate pieces remained in close proximity.

The review committee at The Journal of Physiology required the researchers to replicate their results again before they would consider publishing. The researchers were happy to oblige and their paper was subsequently published in the October issue.

When many neurons fire they create a weak electric field, which we can observe on an electroencephalogram (EEG); think of a Mexican wave that keeps going despite breaks in the crowd.

The team has yet to decipher how exactly the discovery works, or what its applications may be.

https://www.rt.com/news/451757-mysterio ... discovery/

[ness31]

I’m not surprised in the least.

What surprises me more is that most of us have never tried taking our brains for a proper ‘test drive’ to see what they’re really capable of.

[RhetoricThug]

Original study:

Slow periodic activity in the longitudinal hippocampal slice can self‐propagate non‐synaptically by a mechanism consistent with ephaptic coupling

https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ ... 3/JP276904

@ness31 What do you mean?