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Crystal Leonard's picture

intuition of another's presence

The idea that we receive thousands of sensory inputs from the environment that we aren't aware of has helped me think about intuition. I have always been aware of the fact that people can sense the presence of another person near then without consciously seeing/hearing/smelling them. Under the constraints of the "5 senses" I could never understand how people could do this. I had tried to rationalize it, to no avail. For example, I thought maybe the 2nd person's movements caused pressure disturbances in the surrounding air and a pressure wave propagated to the 1st person and activated the mechanoreceptors in the 1st person's skin. But this never sat right because any pressure disturbances that the 2nd person created would be extremely small and the air molecules' movements wouldn't have enough force to be perceptible. Now that I know that we receive large amounts of sensory information that we aren't conscious of, the problem is more easily explained. The senses of sight and touch are still unlikely sources of the 1st person's knowledge. More likely, the 1st person unconsciously detects chemical signals through the chemoreceptos in their nose (ie. pheromones) which alerts them to the presence of another individual.

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