The paranormal trencadís

Hello and welcome back:

If you are an art enthusiast, or if you simply remember your school days, you are surely familiar with the concept of collage; collage is an artistic technique that consists of pasting different cut-out images on a canvas or paper. The term is applied above all to painting, but by extension it can refer to any other artistic manifestation, such as music, film, literature or music videos.

In painting, a collage can be composed entirely or only in part of photographs, wood, newspapers, magazines, everyday objects, posters, etc.

But if there is a wonderful example of what a collage is, it is undoubtedly trencadís. If you don't know it (although I think you do), allow me to explain it to you: this term comes from a Catalan word that means "chopped" or "cut up", and basically consists of making different designs with pieces of tiles.

This type of ornamentation is typical and characteristic of Catalan modernist architecture and Valencian modernism. The genius of this type of art (because it really is art) is the greatest figure of Catalan modernism, Antoni Gaudi. But I'm sure you might be thinking that we are going to talk about the paranormal side of the great Catalan architect and artist. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, because that is not the case.

Let's go back to the concept of collage: the basics of collage is that it takes pieces with certain information that initially have nothing to do with the final message that is intended to be given or achieved, and when these unconnected or meaningless units of information are joined together, they reach a new threshold of significance.

Now we are going to take a turn and comment on one of the aspects that currently present the most controversy in the field of recording sounds of possible paranormal origin. In this case, we are all clear about the direct recording of what some call psychophonies and others psychophonic inclusions already present doubts both in the interpretation and in their recording mechanism, subject to constant doubts about the non-paranormal origin of the same.

But there is another type of research related to the subject of the possible recording of voices from beyond, which is what is called Instrumental Transcommunication. Within this field there are many researchers, and like any field of paranormal research, it has the same number of detractors and critics. But there is a certain criticism that I would like us to address: and it is that which claims that the records obtained through instrumental transcommunication techniques are nothing more than spurious recordings, that is, that the inclusions obtained are nothing more than parts of other radio broadcasts and that these broadcasts are due to chance, without there being any intention in their recording or recording beyond pure luck.

But if you allow me now, we will cross-reference the two aspects, that is, the initial aspect of the collage and that of the trencadís, and you will allow me to assume that it is indeed true, as the criticism of this type of research indicates: they are parts, pieces of radio emissions or of any other type that are recorded, but at the same time, in the same way as the trencadís, there is an external cause that “organizes” these unconnected pieces of information, which when joined together acquire a new meaning: that is, the external cause (or internal if we are talking about the Super-Psi hypothesis) is capable of “handling” this type of inclusions, forming, in a way analogous to what Gaudí did, a paranormal trencadís, in such a way that each individual piece that in itself lacks meaning, achieves a new clear and defined meaning.

I'm sure you have many criticisms and observations to make about this approach, and I assure you that I am looking forward to hearing them, so please do not hesitate to comment. Best regards and see you next time.

 Things as they are

Hello everyone:

Perhaps one of the strangest, and at the same time most challenging, problems of modern science is what is called “the hard problem of consciousness”. I am sure that if you follow me you will have already understood that mine is a “problem of consciousness” and that I have sometimes commented on this very problem, but following a curious video that I saw on the social network X, it has led me to think a little about this problem and especially about the problem of perception. But to begin with, let us comment on what is the famous hard or difficult problem of consciousness.

The famous “hard or difficult problem of consciousness” was born from the idea of ​​David John Chalmers, an Australian philosopher who, studying consciousness, came to something he could not explain, and that was why the way in which a certain phenomenon affects us depends on our subjectivity with respect to it. We can give a simple example that I am sure everyone will understand if we see what happens when two teams with a great rivalry face each other and a relevant event occurs in the confrontation: for one group of fans the decision taken will be clear and consistent, for another it will be a “real robbery” and for another large group of “indifferent” people neither one nor the other: it will be an event without significance for them.

It is still an unsolvable problem for now, but curiously recently, as I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, I came across a curious video that was not really about consciousness, but about statistics, and if you allow me, I will show it to you before continuing with the argument.

What you are seeing is a series of points that draw different images, but which curiously have several parameters in common: the mean of the X coordinate, the mean of the Y coordinate, the standard deviation of X, the standard deviation of Y and the correlation coefficient between both variables. And I am sure that you will be asking yourself with good judgment: what does this have to do with consciousness and its problem? Well, that is where I wanted to get to: and it is the “sacrosanct” perception.

We think that the reality we live in is a unique reality, but the facts show us the opposite: and it is true, since what we perceive is not reality itself, but as shown in the image above, a way we have of “interpreting” what surrounds us and that depends on many factors, both physical, biological and even psychological. A beautiful landscape can lead us to emotion, as long as we can integrate it into our visual center; but what really happens in the perception process? Well, I think that from now on we enter what we could call “the hypothetical area” because I warn you that from now on what you are going to read is only my opinion. Therefore you have two options, either continue reading or stop doing it… like in a certain very famous movie.

In my opinion, what the perception process really does is integrate information that is collected by the “sensors” of the different senses: whether it be the eyes for vision, the Pacinian corpuscles for pain and pressure, the olfactory cells of the cribriform plate of the ethmoid, etc. In other words, our cortical areas perform an information integration function.

And it is precisely in these places where the “miracle” of perception takes place, since we integrate the information that, as we have said, reaches them from the senses: in a way analogous to the theory of integrated information, our consciousness would be in charge of “integrating” this large amount of information, discarding that which “in its opinion” was not important and keeping that which really is: the mystery now emanates from knowing what it is and how this informative consciousness decides what is relevant, or to put it another way, what part of the message that is transmitted by the sensory pathways has relevant information and what is noise, leaving it therefore as “not relevant” and dispensable:

And now we return to the video I mentioned at the beginning. As I was saying, it was a video where several points formed different figures despite having certain common values ​​(mean, median and correlation coefficient); that is, different images can be “summarized” in the same way; and this point leads me to ask myself, could the opposite occur? Could certain phenomena be capable of being integrated differently depending on how our consciousness decides which part of that information is essential and which is “noise”? In everything paranormal (and anomalous) this duality often appears: two witnesses who observe a phenomenon may “perceive” it differently: using our example, the same mean, standard deviation and correlation coefficient of several points “draws” different images in one witness or another.

And the hard problem of consciousness? In my opinion, it is precisely this capacity for different integration of each phenomenon despite having the same characteristics that would be responsible for this subjectivity of perception. But as always, these ideas end up creating even more questions, because in this case, what decides the “dot drawing” of the phenomenon? Does it depend on our education, our memory, our experiences or our lack of them? As you can see, it is still a fascinating field and unfortunately it is not so striking, at least in our environment. I hope you like it and until next time.

You must choose a door

I would like to explain a curious phenomenon about one of the most important symptoms in medicine, and one that has become a workhorse for human beings over the centuries: pain. First of all, let's define what is called a symptom and a sign in medicine: a symptom is everything that the patient reports but that we cannot objectively verify: a classic example is pain: unfortunately we do not have a machine that allows us to measure it objectively; and a sign is everything that we can objectively record in a patient, for example, fever: we have a thermometer that measures it and, above all, we have a scale that allows us to compare some temperatures with others.

Once this is established, how could we define pain? Classically, pain has been seen as a defensive mechanism, which allows us to get away from what hurts us or could be harmful to us. Having a life full of pain is just as negative as not having the systems that cause it, since it fulfills many functions that we do not normally see. But like everything in medicine, there are two general types of pain: acute pain (somatic) and chronic pain (visceral). And we are going to explain each of them. Let's start with somatic pain.

Somatic or acute pain is what we feel when, for example, we prick ourselves with a needle or get hit: it is usually well defined, that is, the person who suffers it can tell us exactly where it hurts; it is faster and sometimes generates responses without the need for the pain itself to be integrated by higher centers such as the cortex: for example, if something pricks us, we reflexively pull our hand away, even before we are aware that we have pricked ourselves: this is what is called the “reflex arc”.

Visceral or chronic pain is a pain with special characteristics, such as the fact that it cannot be located with certainty, that it is not usually very intense, but because it is always present, and because of its integration, it has effects on the mood of the people who suffer from it. Of all the pains, this is perhaps the greatest enemy we face, because while the former has a great “defensive” component, in the case of chronic pain, this component disappears, because we cannot “run away” from what causes it. So this is the pain that most of the time represents a real challenge for those who practice and fight against pain.

And within this world that we are only just beginning to take a very brief look at (I can assure you that it is and continues to be one of the leading fields in both research and treatment in current medicine), I am going to focus on something curious about pain. I don't know if you remember that not long ago I spoke about the duality of pain with respect to consciousness, because it allows us to both emerge from unconsciousness (like when we wake up when we are hurt) and to fall into it when the pain is very intense (the so-called cardiogenic shock). But as I mentioned, there is another curious aspect of pain that I will later try to apply to the determination of anomalous integrations of information by consciousness. And this very curious fact that affects pain is the so-called "gate theory."

And to explain it, we are going to talk about something that is very mundane and that we have all suffered at some point: tickling. You may not know that tickling is a low-intensity pain, so low that it is not integrated as pain, but as another sensation, which we classically call tickling; in fact, remember the famous “Chinese martyrdom” of tickling: it is a pain and like any pain, over time it becomes annoying; and how do we get rid of tickling? Well, by scratching ourselves. But what mechanism does scratching follow to make tickling go away? Well, this is where the theory of the gates of pain comes in.

What we do when we scratch ourselves is to cause ourselves a pain of greater intensity than that produced by the sensation of tickling, and then, magically, the less intense pain (the tickling) disappears. But how is this possible? Well, I'm going to try to explain it in a way that we can understand. This theory was proposed by Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall, and as always, it deals with information (in this case painful) that can be transmitted to higher centers where it becomes conscious.

This theory states that there are a series of doors (or gates) that work in the same way as a circuit: they can be open or closed when it is necessary to transmit one impulse or another: when a pain has greater intensity and somatic characteristics (as we do when we scratch ourselves) the gate is “closed” for chronic or less intense pain. But these gates are not only affected by pain, but also by each person’s mood; I am sure that many of you have suffered a traffic accident, initially with nerves, we do not feel any pain: our state of excitement or nervousness causes the gate that takes the pain to the cortex to integrate it (the information) to remain closed. As time passes, our nervousness decreases, and therefore, the gate opens allowing the painful information to pass through the spinal cord and be integrated in the form of pain: it begins to “annoy” us. Something similar is described by some soldiers who, when wounded in war, remain unchanged in the heat of battle: their body has “closed” the door that allows passage to pain.

Well, so far we have talked about pain, but now it is time to talk about what you already know I like, which is nothing other than consciousness. So remember that from now on it is only a hypothesis and personal opinion, it is not even a theory. Let us recall what we know about pain and the gate theory. Pain is a sensation, and we can think that there are other sensations that have the same “control” mechanism. And now let us take a somersault: could the anomalous integration of information that would explain some anomalous phenomena follow a process analogous to that of the gate theory of pain?

In this case, the sensations that we could call “normal” signals are those that prevent the door leading to the anomalous perception of information (in any sense) from being opened. When this “sensation” of greater intensity disappears, the door manages to “open” for the integration of the anomalous information: could this idea then explain the fact that whenever an anomalous phenomenon occurs, a kind of “sensory vacuum” is produced, either through sensory isolation (as occurs in Ganzfeld) or through the famous “vacuum bell” that many witnesses claim precedes certain anomalous phenomena? If this is so, it would really remain to be seen whether this “anomalous sensory noise” is present in all people, how it is produced and where it is integrated in the higher pathways. But as for now it seems enough to me, let’s stop here and leave for another occasion what possibilities we have for this anomalous integration of information coming from the data collected by the sense organs and who knows if by other organs.

 An inner voice

I’m sure you’ve heard (pun intended) about the “inner voice”; but today I’m going to allow myself to tell you something about another inner voice, which also (as always) is linked to the anomalous integration of sensory data and ultimately to #consciousness (gotcha!). And I’m going to do so by talking to you about a disease that some of you may know, which also affects a sensory organ and gives rise to a curious paradox: I’m going to start talking to you about otosclerosis.

We could very quickly define otosclerosis as an “arthrosis” of the chain of ossicles in the middle ear: yes, the famous hammer, anvil and stirrup. These tiny ossicles have a fundamental function: they are the transducers that transform the vibrations of the eardrum into waves inside the saccule of the inner ear, to be exact in a liquid called endolymph, through the so-called oval window, and that make the famous “snail” vibrate with a fundamental frequency according to these waves: a whole system that nature has designed to make us aware (note the importance of the word) of two important circumstances, namely, sound, but also our position in space. These waves then travel through the auditory pathway to the auditory center and allow us to hear, by integrating the information that reaches it to the auditory cortex, which as I think you know is located in the temporal area of ​​the brain (and this detail that seems to be of no importance is very important).

In some people, these little bones end up changing their shape, so that they stop performing their function: so the person has what we call non-central deafness, that is, they lose hearing ability (because they still have some) due to a failure in what we could call the sensor that collects data from the outside (sound waves), and it gives rise to hearing loss, as well as other symptoms such as peripheral vertigo, which is very annoying for people who suffer from it, because we must remember that the ear is not only the organ of hearing, but also of balance, or if you prefer, the organ of positioning ourselves in space. But in addition, this disease gives rise to a curious paradox, which I think will surprise you.

I don't know if you know that we hear in two ways: through what is called the air conduction and through the bone conduction: this double hearing is responsible for why when we hear our voice on a recording it sounds so strange to us: in fact, normally our voice is the one we hear "internally" together with the external voice, while those who listen to us speak can only hear the external voice (for this reason I have always admired people who can imitate others so perfectly despite the fact that they have double hearing). Well, the fact is that these patients, despite the fact that they don't hear well, normally use a very low volume of their voice, so much so that sometimes those of us who are supposed to hear well have to ask them to raise their voice, and this is precisely because unconsciously (this is where I wanted to get to) their vocal system adjusts the volume of their voice in relation to the volume they perceive directly: they "hear" themselves perfectly because they are using the bone conduction for hearing (remember that this is independent of the chain of ossicles), while they have a natural "mute button" on all outside noise: the result is that they automatically lower the volume of their voice.

And you may wonder (not without reason), what could this have to do with anomalous integrations? First of all I want you to remember that these people unconsciously regulate the volume of their voice: now we are going to carry out what we could call a “mental experiment” (it is only speculation): think for example of the case of a person who claims to have the ability to have certain “sensations” that others cannot: could it be that this increase in sensitivity is due to an alteration of some sensory organs? What if some senses always need to lose “external” sensitivity in order to gain “internal” sensitivity? In other words, a kind of sensory “mute” is necessary, and what reason would there be for this “external isolation”? If we analyze it from a neurological point of view, the brain (to be exact, the cerebral cortex, which until now is the only part of the central nervous system that we know is capable of shedding the light of “consciousness” on what surrounds us) would be constantly “integrating” the information it receives from not only the sense organs as such, but from the multiple sensors (temperature, pressure, chemical components, etc.) that are distributed throughout our economy (the way we health professionals call our body) and that are used to determine both the external and internal situation. This creates a kind of “background noise”, like the noise that accompanies us during the day and prevents us from hearing certain sounds that become more evident at night, when there is less activity and allows the brain to interpret and integrate those signals that are no longer diluted into a signal of greater intensity.

I don’t know if you have noticed that most of the time people who have a certain capacity, for example “precognitive”, are represented with their eyes covered, when they are not directly blind: is it a coincidence or does it have some relation with that need to “silence” what we could call “sensory noise” to allow certain signals to be integrated in an anomalous way by the integration pathways of perception? Would this fact support again that for the manifestation of Psi capacities one of the factors is the absence of sensory noise? If not, let's go to another characteristic that we could call "disturbing" that accompanies some phenomena in this case of sightings of UAPs, UFOs or FANIs depending on the nomenclature you like best: and it is the phenomenon of the so-called "Bell of silence", which also occurs in a not so frequent way in other cases of anomalous or paranormal events, where the witness claims that in an unusual way, both the noise, as well as the thermal sensations, or the wind, etc., stopped being so evident. If we analyze it carefully, we are faced with a "sensory silence". However, what is not very clear is whether this silence is the reason why we can "notice" the anomalous phenomenon or is the anomalous phenomenon itself that causes this situation: that is, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

I hope that these questions will make you think, because they also give us the opportunity to design various experimental or quasi-experimental models to test this hypothesis. By the way, I would like to take this opportunity to leave you with a link to a magazine on Transcommunication that I sometimes collaborate with and that I think may be of interest to you. I hope you liked this story and see you next time.

Leo Aitu #3

The eye with which you look at God

 The eye with which you look at God

Hello everyone and welcome:

Through a wonderful musical composition I have come to know one of the most unknown theologians, Master Eckhart: born in Thuringia in 1260, he was a German Dominican, known for his work as a theologian and philosopher, creator of what would later be known as Rhenish mysticism. I would like you to hear it and read the lyrics because it is worthwhile. Here is the link:

What has led me to write this short article is his thought that says: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye.” Apart from the profound metaphysical and religious implications that this phrase has, as you know that I am passionate about the world of consciousness, neuroscience and everything that surrounds it, this phrase led me to ask myself a question: when we face the sacred, the spiritual, is the way we do it capable of molding this world that is beyond the material? And if so, then can we say that there are various types of spiritual worlds but with a common base?

Within the hypotheses of consciousness, there is still a kind of “somersault” that continues to create problems for us: the so-called difficult (or hard) problem of consciousness: how is it possible that each of us is capable of having really different experiences from the same sensory inputs? What makes an experience pleasant or unpleasant depending on how it is seen?.

Imagine that you and your best friend are watching a football match (let's think live, because watching it on television is another post): each of you supports a team: the fact that one wins and the other loses makes the same match create totally different emotions in you and your friend. How is that possible?

However, there is something that is common to many cultures, and that is that most of them have a very special way of connecting with the spiritual world, and that way is through music. To see each one, let's start with the Hindu world, which for many represents perhaps the first union between the spiritual and material worlds: I would like you to please watch this short video about a Hindu melody, and keep it in your head for a moment:

I am sure that it will have produced a sensation of serenity and relaxation, brief but intense. It seems that there are certain notes that make our consciousness immediately disconnect from the continuous noise: it is as if we were taking a moment. But if you allow me, I am going to go a step further, and we are going to another spiritual world: now I ask you to listen to this one:

Yes, you got it right, it is Gregorian chant: again, it is as if a parenthesis is put in the “worldly noise”: this type of music brings us back to a state of introspection, where in a certain way we are able to reject external stimuli. As we see, it has a lot in common with Hindu music when we refer to its effect, but let’s go one step further: let’s go to zikir:

It is one of the most impressive Sufi ceremonies: through repetition and breathing, the participants enter into an altered state of consciousness, which again separates them from the material world and brings them into communion with God (Allah in this case). But we are not done yet: I am going to put, if you allow me, an extract from a film, which I think you all know, here it goes:

Although this is a film (and what a film!), we return to the same thing: music exerts a certain effect that consists of isolating the person, avoiding the stimuli of the world that we could call material so that he comes into contact with divinity, or at least, with that spiritual side that is normally prevented from being accessed by the flow of information that is constantly being generated by the sensory apparatus. And now, as it could not be another point, comes the twist on the anomalous perception or integration of information coming from sensory data.

Perhaps we need this silence to be able to access that “spiritual” world (for now I can’t find another way to define it), but it may be that certain people have the ability to recognize within the great flow of information that part that is present but is hidden by the material sensory noise: perhaps it is what is called sensitivity, which for some is artistic, and for others it is of a more complicated and unknown type, which is sometimes difficult to describe for those of us who do not have that ability, in the same way that it is very difficult for you to describe the color red to a person born blind.

I hope I have not bored you too much and that little by little we will expand the complexity of what consciousness itself is.

Road to Perception

 

Anomalies of any kind (name the anomalous phenomenon you want) have always been considered as part of an anomalous perception. This, which seems obvious, tells us that when an anomalous phenomenon appears, it is due to an “anomalous perception” of it, but perhaps through the “anomalous” stimulation of our senses, which we remember are basically five: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. But as you know, I tend to go a bit “free-wheeling”, and using this scheme, I am going to give this hypothesis a twist.

Well, as we were saying, anomalous phenomena are sometimes considered “anomalous perceptions”; in fact, if you look in the literature or bibliography, this is the term that normally appears: to put it simply, these senses would pick up stimuli that they do not normally pick up and they are the ones that would then be integrated in a normal way using the pathways that each of these senses have. That is, if you see, it would be the auditory pathway, if you hear, the auditory pathway, if you smell, the olfactory pathway, and so on. In other words, what is anomalous is the reception of the information.

And now I am going to give my opinion (not yet a hypothesis because it needs a lot of thought) on this subject: and I would like you to recall the first image: if you remember it, it tells us that there are two ways in which the brain has access to what happens both around it (external environment) and inside it (internal environment). That is, we have “sensors” for both the external and internal environment. And each has its specific pathways: normally the sensors of the internal environment work autonomously, through the so-called autonomic nervous system.

Classically, this system is composed of two subsystems, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems: of both, the one I would like you to focus your attention on is the parasympathetic: and why? Because this system has four components that we could call "the aristocracy" of the nervous system, which are called cranial nerves: in a simple way and without much technicality, they are large nerves that originate in the brain stem, that is, they are part of the central nervous system. (Remember this point).

Four of these cranial pairs belong to the parasympathetic system: the oculomotor (III), facial (VII), glossopharyngeal (IX) and vagus (X). This is important because from now on we are going to introduce another variable into our equation: what in anatomy is called “anatomical variables”, which are nothing more than differences in the normal arrangement of certain components of our body: some of them have a very important significance, as is the case of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which causes a potentially fatal cardiac disorder.

From these wickerwork, I am going to state the idea: what if what really happened was not an anomalous perception but an “anomalous integration” of information? What if anomalous phenomena were “perceived” through alterations in the internal environment and not the external one? And the next question you would ask me would be: if so, how would it be done? Well, here I am going to present one of the most important nerves that exist in our body, with a name that does not do it justice: the Tenth Cranial Nerve or Vagus Nerve.

As we can see, the vagus nerve is anything but vague, it is perhaps one of the most important nerves in our body. But what interests me now is how it integrates information: normally, we do not need to think about breathing, or making our heart beat: this is regulated automatically, and it does so through specific pathways. It does so through a set of cells in the brain stem called “nuclei”, in this case, the dorsal nucleus of the vagus nerve. If we look at the image, its afferent fibers (from the receptors) and efferent fibers (that come out) do not go beyond the brain stem.

As a result, we never become “conscious” of the mechanisms that regulate the functions assigned to this nerve. But now comes my proposal: what if there were some anatomical variability in some people that connected these brain stem cells with higher structures? What if what people with certain sensitivities did was to integrate differently the information that reaches them from the internal environment, and once it entered the sensory integration pathways, this information was treated normally?.

That is to say, it would not be an “anomalous perception” of the senses that is responsible for the anomalous phenomena, but rather an “anomalous integration” of the information carried out through pathways that are not the usual ones for the integration of these senses: it would be a process analogous to synaesthesia, which as we know is the integration of the information of a sense through a pathway other than the one to which it corresponds: to be exact, we would not be talking about synaesthesia, but rather a “xenointegration” of the information not from the “external” senses, but from the “internal” ones.

To start, let's stop here: I think that any contribution you want to make may be interesting: the fact of what and how the internal receptors are altered is another question that we will leave aside for now: for now I only talk about how it would be integrated (in this case through an anomalous integration pathway). I hope you liked it and I look forward to your comments.

 A historic future

I think we all know that ability that some people have to “presume” or “guess” the future: this is what some people call precognition. In theory we can say that precognition is the ability to foresee events that are about to occur. In turn, we could speak of a large subdivision within precognition: those that extend over time (capable of knowing events that will occur well in advance) and those that occur in events that are about to occur or that will occur in a short space of time. We sometimes call the latter hunches. And I am sure that we have all had one at some time. But perhaps this phenomenon of the short-term hunch may be something physiological, and although you may not believe it, it is related to the integration of information that our brain makes from the data that is collected by the sensory organs. And if you allow me, I will try to explain it to you, because in reality, we constantly live in the past and exercise a certain ability to guess the future.

But to try to explain this apparent paradox, we first need to comment on something curious that happens to all of us, and that is the so-called reaction time. This is the time that elapses between the stimulation of a sensory organ and the beginning of a response, that is, as long as it is conscious (we will not consider reflexes, many of which are regulated by autonomous processes and therefore remain outside the realm of consciousness). In turn, this reaction time can be of various types:

• Simple reaction time, when a single stimulus is used and the time until the beginning of the response is measured.
• Choice reaction time, when two stimuli are presented, each with a specific response (for example, pressing with the left hand if we see a dot and with the right if we see a dash)
• Selection reaction time, when several stimuli are presented but only one is responded to (for example, pressing the right hand only if we hear a certain word)

Some factors affect this reaction time, such as the amount of data to be integrated to give a response, or the sensory modality that generates the response: the visual modality requires more time than the auditory one. Other factors that affect this time are drowsiness, illness, emotional or mood state or even the level of stress. In addition, it can be “trained” in a certain way, as happens with athletes who try to react as quickly as possible once they hear the starting shot.

The usual reaction time is around 0.75 seconds: this may seem like a short time, but this time is very important, for example when driving a vehicle, which in this case becomes the so-called reaction distance, which is the distance that the vehicle travels until we initiate an action, and which depends on the speed at which we are driving:

If we look at it carefully, we never really know the present moment, since we always react with a delay of ¾ of a second: and that means that our brain makes a continuous prediction exercise about our world, foreseeing how it will change and provoking our reaction, always in the past, what is happening in the now is not integrated until that time has passed, so in a certain way we live in the past. But I am sure you will be wondering, what does this have to do with consciousness and precognition? Well, as I always say, from now on we will talk about hypotheses and opinions, so if you allow me, I will put up the sign that warns that it is only my opinion:

If you allow me, let's go back to the beginning, when we were talking about the types of precognition, and to be exact, I mentioned that one of them would be the one that is capable of predicting a future event with a small margin of time: knowing what we know now about reaction time, could we come to think that these premonitions or hunches are the integration of certain information that is acquired by our consciousness but not through the senses that we could call classic? In fact, this type of sensations are usually associated with stomach disorders, or accelerations of the pulse. What if what we can anticipate is nothing more than a kind of reaction time but that is moving forward in time? This idea also opens up a possible model for experimentation: could we come to follow up on these hunches by altering certain biological markers? What we can say, if you have come this far, is that you should remember that you and I and all of us live in a historical future, because it has already been ¾ of a second since it happened. Thank you very much and see you next time.