The Lost Sixth Sense

We all yearn to understand more than what the standard five senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing can offer. “Extra-sensory perception” is regarded as a gift and the sought after “sixth sense” has a mystical aura to it. New research however, has suggested that we did have a sixth sense, or at least our ancestors did, but somewhere in the process of evolution, we threw it away.

The new research is the result of 25 years of investigation into the evolution of vertebrate species (species with a backbone).

More than 500 million years ago there was a split in the evolutionary tree of vertebrates. One branch led to ray-finned fishes including paddlefishes and sturgeons, while the other branch led to lobe-finned fishes and then land vertebrates beginning with amphibians and heading right on up to humans.

The ray-finned fish have a sixth sense that allows them to detect electrical fields and use this information to detect prey, find direction, and communicate. Primitive vertebrates like salamanders and axolotls also have electroreception. The question is, did it evolve separately in salamanders and axolotls after they split off on their own evolutionary branch, or did the capacity to detect electrical fields come from an ancestor that was common before the branching between ray-fiined and lobe-finned fishes took place. If the latter is the case then that means that humans had an ancestor that could electrical fields.

Using the Mexican axolotl as a model to represent the evolutionary lineage leading to land animals, and paddlefish as a model for the branch leading to ray-finned fishes, the researchers found that electrosensors develop in precisely the same pattern from the same embryonic tissue in the developing skin, confirming that this is an ancient sensory system common to both lines.

How careless are we human beings! Millions of years ago, we discarded the very thing that we now seek.

It raises intriguing possibilities of course. In an age where communication is all about wirelessly receiving digital messages, imagine if we could reawaken our electrical sixth sense and could once again detect electrical fields in our environment. You would no longer need a handset to act as your phone or receiver, you could plug directly into the communications ether just using your forearm and relay the messages to your cerebral cortex. Of course, hacking could be an issue but then, hackers only go where there is worthwhile data to download. In the case of most modern cerebral cortices, frankly, and with due respect to the modern human experience, downloading the latest episode of “World’s Most Dangerous Soft Furnishings” would not be high on a hacker’s list.