American scientists have found which particular part of the human brain is responsible for … predicting the future! It also turned out that this ability is possessed not by some elected representatives of humanity, but by almost all people. Simply because of the habit of rationally thinking and behaving as is customary in society, we suppress this property in ourselves.
Do you know how to predict the future? Of course you can. During the day, you make a lot of predictions in your mind, and if you suddenly make a mistake, your brain immediately signals an error to you and adapts to an unpredictable course of events. This is not a joke, but a scientifically proven fact. Only we are not talking about global predictions of the future, but about everyday forecasts that we make unconsciously, relying on our knowledge and experience.
Changes in the external environment serve as a trigger for making such forecasts. When something happens in the surrounding world, a person needs to imagine what to expect in the next moment. If you knocked over a cup of tea, you know what will happen to its contents even before the cup touches the floor, and if you missed the departure bus, then wait for the next one not earlier than in 5-10 minutes. When there is a knock on the door - your brain involuntarily gives out guesses about who it could be. In the course of the evolutionary development of mankind, as well as in the process of growing up of an individual, more and more diverse experience is accumulated, and the accuracy of forecasts increases.
American scientists from the University of Washington set out to determine the specific part of the brain responsible for these everyday prophecies. To do this, they asked young healthy people to watch videos illustrating the usual events of everyday life. At one point, the experimenter would pause the film and ask the participants what they thought would happen on the screen in the next few seconds, and then scrolled the video to the end.
The volunteers were divided into two groups: in one group, the experimenter slowed down the viewing of the video while the character of the film had already begun a certain action (washing dishes, folding a figurine or a constructor), in the other group - before it had time to start. However, this almost did not affect the accuracy of “everyday predictions”: more than 90 percent of the participants in the first group gave the correct answer about what would happen next, in the second group the number of correct answers was 80 percent.
At this time, the brains of the volunteers were scanned by the method of magnetic resonance imaging, which makes it possible to track the activity of its various departments. During the experiment, several areas of the midbrain were activated in the brains of the participants - in particular, the black matter and the striatum. The midbrain, we recall, is, among other things, responsible for the processing of sensory (namely, auditory and visual) information.
All theories about the possibility of clairvoyance are built on the assumption that our brain is able to analyze the accumulated experience at a qualitatively different level and, accordingly, make much more accurate and realistic predictions. But the supporters of this hypothesis believe that due to the habit of rationally thinking and behaving in the way that is accepted in society, we suppress impulses and premonitions, which are in fact the result of "far-reaching" predictions of our nervous system.
Psychologists and neurophysiologists have already recognized that the work of the central nervous system to "predict" usually occurs unconsciously, and in our consciousness it is already present in the form of ready-made conclusions, assumptions or even premonitions. Unlike the unconscious - instinctive, animal impulses, experts call this part of the psyche "overconscious" or even "superconscious". The supraconscious is defined as "the level of mental activity of the individual that does not lend itself to individual conscious-volitional control when solving creative problems." The product of the work of the supraconscious can be creative insights, unexpected solutions to problems, intuitive insights, or simply a new look at a problem.
Promotional video:
Earlier, scientists from the Emory Research University in the United States found that the brain of adolescents is capable of such "predictions". Young people were allowed to listen to several songs of unknown musical groups and to predict which of them would soon become hits. According to the experimenters, a third of adolescents accurately determined whether this or that melody would become a hit or not.
Of course, such insight cannot yet be called the ability to predict in its purest form - but scientists have concluded that many adolescents are able to predict the appearance of certain cultural phenomena. Apparently, their brain analyzed information about which melodic moves, words and rhythms were characteristic of recent hits, and based on this, they made a prediction whether this or that composition has a chance to also win a thousandth audience.