Original subtitles

SHATNER: Legendary seers

who can predict the future

with incredible accuracy.

Psychic spies with the ability to see inside enemy territory.

And clairvoyants that gain supernatural powers

from the dead.

Throughout history,

a number of people have been described

as possessing a so-called sixth sense.

Whether it's called clairvoyance,

ESP, or second sight,

these individuals seem to have the ability

to predict the future,

communicate with the dead,

and, at times, perform incredible physical feats.

But is this intuitive awareness

outside the normal human perception a real thing?

And if so,

does a sixth sense exist in all of us,

just waiting to be unlocked?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

For thousands of years,

people have been fascinated with and fearful of

unique individuals who possess the power of prophesy.

Great seers like Nostradamus,

Grigori Rasputin,

and Edgar Cayce have been revered

for their seemingly supernatural abilities to predict the future.

Could this so-called sixth sense simply be incredible intuition?

Or is it something scientific we have yet to understand?

JOHN KRUTH: When we study psychic phenomena,

when we study mediumship,

when we study things like precognition--

knowing information about the future--

when we study telepathy--

getting information mind to mind from another person--

or clairvoyance-- getting information

about objects or things that are hidden from a distance--

all of those would've been considered magic oh so long ago.

And, today, we still study these same things,

but we don't call them magic anymore.

We look at them as science.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being skeptical.

And by being skeptical, I mean the true meaning of skeptical,

which is that it's like, "Well, I'm not sure.

Show me the evidence."

Now, the reality is,

when you look at the research that's been done

in the last 150 years,

the questions that still remain

is, really, why is it that certain individuals

seem to have exceptional abilities,

whereas the rest of us, myself included,

sort of minimal abilities?

SHATNER: Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi

-(gunshot) -is assassinated

in a surprise attack outside her home.

(clamoring)

The country is thrown into confusion and grief.

But, incredibly,

this tragic event was foretold

in surprising detail 15 years earlier

by a legendary psychic known as Baba Vanga.

VIKTORIA VITANOVA: It was in 1969 when Vanga said

that, um, Indira Gandhi would be killed by her dress.

"Her dress is going to kill her," she said.

And what happened was that,

before a meeting, she put a dress

which didn't allow for a bulletproof vest

to be put under.

And then she was shot dead by her security guards.

So this is a really strong,

strong example of-of a prediction

attributed to her which really happened.

SHATNER: While skeptics say Baba Vanga's eerily accurate prediction

was nothing more than an extraordinary coincidence,

it's believed that Baba Vanga also predicted

the September 11th terrorist attacks

on the World Trade Center in New York...

...and the election

of the first African American president

of the United States,

and, quite famously, a disaster

involving a Russian nuclear submarine known as the Kursk.

VITANOVA: In 1981,

Baba Vanga said that,

um, a big tragedy will happen around the turn of the century,

in August 1999 or 2000.

Vanga is known to have said,

"At the turn of the new century,

"Kursk will be underwater

and the whole world will cry over it."

So these were her words.

And the whole world was shocked when,

at the turn of the century, indeed,

in August 2000,

the whole submarine sank to the bottom of the ocean,

350 feet down,

with the whole crew dying.

SHATNER: How did Baba Vanga predict

such a specific and tragic event with such accuracy?

Many believe the answer can be traced back

to the 1920s,

when she was 12 years old,

and a traumatic event unlocked her remarkable powers.

JOHN HOGUE: Baba Vanga was from

the town, the village of Strumica.

And at the time,

Macedonia was part of the Ottoman Empire,

just before World War I.

It's very simple. It's very small.

And Baba Vanga was a normal child,

an average child, in a way,

with brown eyes.

But the life-changing incident

that made Baba Vanga who she was

was a day where she was walking on a country road.

And she was caught up by a tornado...

(girl screaming)

...that literally carried her up in the air

and threw her into an adjacent field.

For dozens of hours,

people in the village were trying to find her.

And when they finally found her,

they found her absolutely terrified

and sobbing in the field.

The strangest thing was it was almost as if a lot

of rock and dirt had been stuffed under her eyelids.

KRUTH: Over a few days, the eyes became infected,

and she became blind.

As her physical senses started to deteriorate,

she realized other senses were starting to grow.

She started to be able to see

what was going to happen in the future.

TEA KRULOS: She slowly began to develop psychic abilities

that replaced her sight.

And it took a while for these to develop.

But by World War II,

she was able to have psychic visions

and see what was happening during the war.

After that, people who were very concerned

about their loved ones who had passed on

would come to her to see

if she was able to communicate with the dead.

And they gave her the nickname Baba Vanga,

which means, like, "a wise grandmother."

SHATNER: As Baba Vanga's popularity grew,

she also attracted the attention of the scientific community.

In the late 1960s,

Bulgarian scientist Georgi Lozanov

studied Baba Vanga at the Institute of Suggestology,

which is part of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,

with quite a lofty goal.

Can science unlock the secrets behind the sixth sense?

They made experiments with Baba Vanga

from February to October 1967.

Lozanov thought that clairvoyance happens

because some people,

very few people,

are capable of receiving signals from the environment

which cannot be registered.

They cannot be seen.

So he tried to use the most modern technology

and equipment they were able to get

to try and register and pinpoint

those stimuli, those signals he was supposing exist.

They were measuring her brain activity

while she was making predictions.

Unfortunately, they were not able to register

what they were searching for.

So they also interviewed people visiting her

to ask them whether what she said really came true.

It was a long-term project,

and 70% of people answered those questions with, "Yes,

Baba Vanga really could say what will happen to my life."

SHATNER: In 1996, Baba Vanga passed away

at the age of 84,

leaving behind predictions for the coming decades

that include deadly plagues,

terrible wars,

and even extraterrestrial visitations.

And while we wait to see

if her future prophesies prove accurate,

researchers continue to study people who possess

the sixth sense.

(siren wailing)

SHATNER: Six days after the shocking murder of actress Sharon Tate

and four others in her home...

...Tate's husband, film director Roman Polanski,

arrives to tour the scene of the crime

with a rather unusual investigator,

a psychic detective named Peter Hurkos.

Hurkos was allowed to go to the scene

of the Sharon Tate murders,

and he picked up some interesting details

that were not known at the time.

He said that there were three murderers.

And he said that he saw a vision of someone in this house

who had taken some bad LSD

and visualized the devil.

And that's interesting because Tex Watson,

who was one of the killers,

when he came into the house, he said,

"I'm the devil, and I'm here to do the devil's business."

JACKSON: When Hurkos got there,

he kept getting the name "Charlie."

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, over and over and over again.

And he was able to describe this man

who was this force of destruction

and wiry and dark,

who was manipulating others.

It's very interesting,

because that's exactly who was behind these murders.

SHATNER: Charlie, of course, turned out to be

the notorious cult leader Charles Manson,

who was convicted of first-degree murder

and sentenced to life in prison.

What ability did Peter Hurkos possess

that allowed him to envision the mastermind

behind this heinous crime?

KRULOS: In 1941,

Peter Hurkos was doing a job

painting a house,

and he fell off his ladder,

falling about 40 feet.

And he had a brain injury and slipped into a coma.

So, when he awoke out of the coma,

he discovered that he had psychic abilities.

And he discovered this almost immediately,

because he could sense things about the other patients

in the same hospital room as him.

SHATNER: Is a traumatic injury the key to unlocking a sixth sense?

While that may be the case for some seers,

there are others who, like author Laura Lynne Jackson,

believe they were born with these remarkable gifts.

So, I'm a psychic and a medium.

And being psychic means that I can read energy.

It was before I even had language

that I would feel and read energy around me.

I'll see pictures. I'll see images.

I'll see things that are symbols for me to understand.

And then, being a medium means

that I'm able to connect with the consciousness

of someone who's no longer in a physical body.

Sometimes it can be in the voice of a loved one who's crossed.

Sometimes it just arrives as a thought without much sound,

where you just suddenly know something

in every ounce of your being,

but there's no logical way you could know it.

It took me a very long time to fully embrace my abilities.

And part of that journey for me

was getting tested in every way possible.

This'll be interesting for me, too, because my readings

for people usually go 60 to 90 minutes.

And so usually the first 15 minutes of a reading,

I'm just aligning my energy with the sitter's energy.

I'm doing an aura reading. I'm seeing what they're like.

It's almost like tuning in to that frequency,

and then it really starts.

So I don't know how this is gonna go.

We're gonna have to see.

SHATNER: In 2013, Laura participated

in a fascinating experiment under the supervision

of psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Tarrant.

TARRANT: I'm gonna turn it over, look at it, and say go.

-Okay. -All right. Go.

Yellow.

-Red. -Go.

SHATNER: The goal was to analyze Laura's brain waves

-Green. Red. -to see what's really happening inside her head

when she taps into her intuitive abilities.

TARRANT: What we did was

we took a 19-channel EEG cap--

kind of looks like a swimming cap with sensors built into it.

What it allows us to do is then compare her brain

in different states.

So what we're looking at in these images

are a comparison of Laura Lynne Jackson's brain activity,

comparing a conversation to a psychic reading.

And, really, what you notice is

this dramatic increase of activity

in the back right quadrant.

Here you see it starts to turn a little more white, which is

an even greater increase.

And so this is showing this strong increase,

especially in these very fast brain waves,

during a psychic reading.

Looking at the data,

this clearly suggests that, for her,

a psychic reading and a regular conversation

are distinct states of consciousness.

They're different,

and they don't look the same in the brain.

So, for me, the question becomes...

why?

This, to me, is the mystery right now.

At one point, you had three in a row.

JACKSON: Okay.

Dr. Tarrant's brain scan experiment

revealed a lot of very interesting information.

When he looked at my brain in resting state

to just get baseline,

he asked me if I had ever had traumatic brain injury.

Dr. Tarrant shared with me that my brain looked very similar

to people who have had traumatic brain injury.

And yet I've had no traumatic brain injury.

It didn't really make sense to me.

So I think the question really is

is there a possible physiological component

to being able to access this sixth sense

or these other abilities?

And I think that there is.

TARRANT: Some people have these abilities unlocked

after some sort of neurological incident

or a traumatic brain injury.

But then other folks,

they're just born with these abilities.

I think what this suggests is that,

whether it's through an injury or whether it's through

some sort of practice of altered states or meditation,

somehow, we have to shift the brain

out of its normal functioning.

But there's still, actually, a lot that we need to understand

in terms of how it is possible to unlock our sixth sense.

It's exciting to think

that if we can find the key to unlock our minds,

we might all possess extrasensory powers.

In fact, recently declassified files reveal

that both the United States and Russia

spent decades trying to identify

and train people suspected of having psychic abilities.

Not just to discover their true potential

but also to weaponize them.

SHATNER: The Arctic Ocean, 1958.

The United States Navy's first nuclear-powered submarine,

the USS Nautilus,

dives deep below the waves,

outside of radio contact.

A sailor inside the submarine holds up a series of cards

that have various shapes printed on them.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Maryland,

a psychic tries to visualize the cards the sailor is presenting

using only the power of the mind.

AUERBACH: With the sub under the Arctic ice cap,

they did several runs of completely shuffled cards.

I believe it was 160 guesses.

112 turned out to be correct

when everything was compared after the sub came up.

That's a 70% hit rate.

The Soviets heard about this.

They did a check, apparently, with some sources who said,

"Yes, that's what happened"

and decided to start spending--

turned out to be-- billions of dollars

to investigate the possibility of telepathy,

as well as other psychic phenomena.

SHATNER: While the U.S. Navy denied these psychic tests were taking place,

the rumors alone inspired the Soviet Union

to invest in programs with the goal of developing

psychic weapons.

KRUTH: The Soviets started

to recruit special people

to help them with their studies.

They recruited one woman named Nina Kulagina.

Nina Kulagina was from Ukraine,

and she was a housewife

who said that she could control different objects

without touching them.

AUERBACH: She was mainly able to ostensibly move

objects with psychokinesis.

Mind over matter.

At one point, they had her try to use her psychokinesis

to try to stop the heart of a frog.

And it did.

At least, that was what was reported.

SHATNER: Is it possible to turn someone's sixth sense

into a deadly weapon?

While it's a matter of debate,

we do know that this Soviet program

would trigger a top secret psychic arms race.

KRUTH: American intelligence

realized, "Oh, my goodness,

"they're getting ahead of us.

We need to start our own psychic spying program."

They wanted to see if they could have people who were psychics

get information about the Soviet Union

where their satellites could not get information.

This was a form of clairvoyance,

the ability to see objects or events from a distance

called remote viewing.

SHATNER: According to declassified documents from 1972 to 1995,

the CIA, Army, and Defense Intelligence Agency

engaged in a joint effort to recruit and train remote viewers

as psychic spies for the American government.

This top secret program was called Project Stargate.

DEAN RADIN: The Stargate program

ran from 1972 to 1995.

During that period, there were 20 people on staff.

There were nine consultants and two visiting scientists.

I was one of the visiting scientists,

and I was there for the calendar year 1985.

It took me about nine months to get all of the clearances,

'cause it ended up having to be a top secret clearance.

If an agency came and asked, you know,

"Could you look into this thing?,"

whatever it happened to be,

these remote viewers would do their best

to describe what it is.

The CIA and the FBI and a bunch of other agencies,

they came back again and again and again.

There's something like 450 missions

that these remote viewers were asked to do.

So somebody somewhere found it to be useful.

SHATNER: In an unassuming building

in Fort Meade, Maryland,

Project Stargate's military unit performed

hundreds of remote viewing missions.

And one of these psychic spies

was a gifted Army officer named David Morehouse.

MOREHOUSE: In 1986, I was recruited

to become a member of what, at the time, was called Sun Streak.

Now everyone knows it as Project Stargate.

In a remote viewing session,

you're gonna be over in the viewing room.

What you're doing is calling together all of your senses

to go to a target that is unbeknownst to you

to determine, you know, what the temperature might be,

what the sounds are that you're hearing,

what the visual representations of things are

that you are perceiving.

Now you're developing an overall picture of it

and then putting a summary together and turning it in.

Three targets a day,

90 minutes each, working it.

SHATNER: Remote viewers used their psychic abilities

to search for lost spy planes,

peer inside top secret military facilities,

and even targeted wanted criminals

for the United States government.

But just how successful were they?

Pan Am Flight 103 bound for the United States

mysteriously explodes in midair

over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland,

killing all 259 people on board

and 11 on the ground.

And while a traditional investigation is launched,

Morehouse and a team of psychic spies

at U.S. Army base Fort Meade begin their own analysis

of the shocking event.

MOREHOUSE: Pan Am Flight 103 blew up

over Lockerbie, Scotland.

We, of course, didn't know this.

We were assembled,

uh, and we did our work.

We identified it as an explosion.

We were even able to identify where the explosion came--

below the passenger level,

in front of the leading edge of the right wing.

We were the first to identify the explosive device

being hidden inside of a boom box.

What the remote viewing team did

was provide essential information

to at least determine, uh, in part,

what happened on that fateful night.

SHATNER: Project Stargate was officially shut down in 1995.

But considering the project's longevity and reported success,

you have to wonder, is it possible

that the United States government

still uses psychic spies today?

MOREHOUSE: Do I believe

that the Central Intelligence Agency

is still utilizing remote viewing,

buried it somewhere deeper, darker, more protected

in some other intelligence agency,

whether it's the NSA,

Directorate of Science and Technology,

or some other agency as they're evolving?

Yes. Of course they are.

If the United States government

is in fact still trying to weaponize psychics,

it's no wonder why the program would be kept secret.

In any case, some experts believe

an even better use of a person's sixth sense

is not to launch attacks

but to prevent them

by looking into the future.

SHATNER: Nestled along the blue waters of Lake Michigan,

all is calm in this quaint Milwaukee suburb

until 7:32 p.m.,

when a peaceful autumn evening is interrupted

by a massive explosion of dynamite.

(alarm bell ringing)

KRULOS: There was an explosion

at the Shorewood Village Hall.

It exploded and shattered all the windows

and left a huge hole in the building.

Then, less than 24 hours later,

two branches of the First National Bank

had explosions about a half hour apart.

So, by now, the city is in panic because

it appears there's a mad bomber on the loose.

Four days after the explosions at the banks,

two different police stations are bombed

within about ten minutes of each other.

These dynamite bombs caused serious damage.

Nobody could quite understand

why this was happening.

Were these anarchists? Were these communists?

Were these people just trying to sow terror?

No one knew the cause.

SHATNER: From October 26 to November 3, 1935,

this series of bombings would become known as

the Seven Nights of Terror.

And while these shocking attacks

caught the townspeople off-guard,

they were no surprise to a local psychic named

Arthur Price Roberts, who predicted the event

and its location just one day

before the first explosion.

Arthur Price Roberts, throughout his life,

was known by many names.

Some called him Doc Roberts,

Professor Roberts,

but his very favorite thing to be called

was psychic detective.

The story that gets the most attention

is the story of the mysterious bombings.

In fact, the reason that we even know of his prediction

is because he gave it at a live psychic show.

He talks about police buildings,

government buildings, banks being bombed,

and people who are at that show

start contacting Shorewood Police saying,

"There's going to be a series of bombings in Milwaukee."

And the police instantly dismissed that.

And then,

just a day later,

the Shorewood Village Hall is dynamited.

KRULOS: So, now the police turn to Roberts

and Roberts informed police

that there's going to be one more explosion,

and he said that

it would happen south of the Menomonee River.

And that's exactly what happened.

The two bombers who had been responsible for this

had been making the bombs in a little shed

pretty close to the river...

(explosion)

...and they accidentally blew themselves up,

along with their entire supply of dynamite.

And this explosion was so big

that they could hear it for about eight miles away.

And that was it.

The Seven Nights of Terror were over.

SHATNER: To this day, the motive behind the dynamite bombings

carried out by 20-year-old Hugh Rutkowski

and 16-year-old Paul Chovanec remains unknown.

But how was Doc Roberts able to predict these bombings

with such uncanny accuracy?

Many believe it was because he possessed

a rare psychic ability known as precognition.

KRUTH: In precognition,

what we're talking about is someone getting information

that they could not project from the current circumstances.

Things that they could never know.

Now, this is very different from someone who is able

to look at the current world and make predictions

on what's going to happen next.

We're talking about someone who's able to know

an unpredictable event,

something that no way they could know.

With Roberts, he was accurately able to do this.

As a psychic,

he was able to perform

precognitive feats quite regularly.

Roberts actually predicted his own death in 1940.

He said to friends, "I will be dying on January 2nd, 1940."

And he did.

What I love about precognition and studying precognition

in the human mind is that it allows us

hope that if we could know about

something in the future, we can prepare,

which is incredibly important for our well-being.

Like, for instance, if a particular crime happens,

and so if you can predict

the "what" and the "when,"

how can you manage that?

I think it opens up a lot of questions about

does the crime actually have to almost happen,

but then you stop it just before it does?

If they're wrong and someone is thought to be a criminal

and they're not, what happens then?

There's all sorts of ethical problems with this.

SHATNER: The widespread prediction and eradication of crime

does have some glaring issues.

And how would you even find such a large workforce

as psychics to accomplish such a lofty goal?

Well, some believe the answer may be found in Argentina.

Because, in 2024, Argentina's security forces announced plans

to predict and prevent future crimes not with psychics

but with artificial intelligence.

Some people believe that you can use artificial intelligence

to predict what crimes are going to occur.

And if you are

looking at patterns of what happened in the past,

with artificial intelligence, you are maybe able

to project what's going to occur in the future.

HOROWTIZ: The very premise of AI is not just that it gathers

and weighs information,

but it devises new ways, new methods,

of gleaning information.

If AI lives up to its potential as a public tool,

it would be foolish of us to conclude that it couldn't

be used as an instrument of foresight.

There's no telling where that wheel stops turning.

Might there be a future where we can predict

and even stop crimes before they happen?

Wouldn't that be wonderful?

But there's another remarkable ability

of a much different kind

that some associate with a sixth sense.

It involves

communicating with the dead.

SHATNER: This peaceful, quaint community

is often referred to as the psychic capital of the world.

In 1894, George Colby, a medium who could

commune with the spirits of the dead,

established the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp here.

And today, his legacy lives on

with residents of the camp like spiritual medium and teacher

Reverend Louis Gates.

GATES: The Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp

is the biggest spiritualist camp

in the southeastern part of the United States.

It's a place for mediums to gather.

People live here

to do their work and to teach and instruct,

but also, the camp is here to allow people to come

and to get readings and to connect to their loved ones

and people that have passed over into the spirit world.

Camps were actually formed back in the day

when there was no place for spiritualists to meet.

And spiritualism really majorly took off

because when we have wars, Civil War,

World War I, II, all the wars we've had,

when people have lost loved ones,

people want to hear from their loved ones.

But it has always been a form of communication.

Shamans, part of the tribe,

had that communication with spirit.

It's always had some kind of connection with death.

SHATNER: While holy men have communicated with the dead

since antiquity,

spiritualism is a religious movement

and belief system that began in the mid-1800s.

Through séances and human conduits

to the spirit realm known as mediums,

spiritualists believe we can communicate with the dead

and receive messages and guidance from beyond the veil.

JACK HUNTER: Spiritualism

started in New York state

in a town called Hydesville in 1848.

And it started off, really, in the house of the Fox family.

There were three sisters in the house--

Kate, Margaretta and Leah.

And they started to hear noises,

strange bangs in their house.

And they soon realized that they could

communicate with these noises.

They would do one knock for yes and two knocks for no.

And they were able to determine

that it was the spirit of a peddler

who'd been murdered a few years earlier.

And later on they found human remains down in the cellar.

It became a big news story.

HOROWITZ: The Fox sisters announced that they had

worked out a code to communicate

with intelligences from the other world.

People descended on the cabin to investigate the girls.

Clergy, lawyers, newspaper reporters, scientists,

and many came away proclaiming them authentic.

Americans were ready to believe and they embraced the claims.

So, the movement of spiritualism began.

SHATNER: It's been estimated that by the late 1800s,

the American Spiritualism movement

had upwards of six million followers.

But could there be another reason

spiritualism became so popular,

besides our longing to speak with the dearly departed?

Well, some believe that it could be a path

to unlock mysterious powers.

HUNTER: There are different kinds of mediums.

Probably the most common forms that we're

familiar with are called clairvoyant mediums.

They go into a trance,

and then different spirits

will start to communicate through their bodies.

And then physical mediumship is where the medium

is causing objects to levitate or move.

Their physical body might change in different ways.

You might see their faces transform.

They might become larger or smaller and things like that.

SHATNER: Can some mediums really gain otherworldly

physical powers from the spirit world?

Perhaps the answer lies with one legendary séance from the 1800s.

Members of London's intellectual elite

gather to participate in a séance

led by famed Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home.

It is during this séance

that he earns the nickname

the Flying Psychic.

And he earns it by somehow levitating above the table,

hovering above it and then somehow

physically flying out of the window

of the séance room and in through another window.

No one knows how he did it.

There were no wires.

There was no one in the room that was working with him.

It was just the people at the séance

and Home conducting this amazing feat

that we are still talking about and still puzzling about today.

HUNTER: After the fact, people have sort of

raised doubts about what took place on that night.

But the fact that there were so many witnesses in the room,

that they were supposedly respectable members of society

observing these events from different angles,

and they were adamant that what they'd seen

was a real phenomenon.

GATES: He had a gift that not everybody else has.

But there are mediums that have gifts,

that have a connection to gifts from the spirit world.

I do believe that people can unlock a sixth sense

by meditating, by breathing,

by working at it,

to open up their mind to other realms,

other places to come in contact with spirit.

If you keep working at the same thing,

day after day after day,

the energy will get stronger.

SHATNER: From 2011 to 2015,

a government agency known as

the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity

conducts a series of competitions

designed to answer a fascinating question.

How effective are regular, everyday people

at predicting the future?

These contests are known as forecasting tournaments.

MOSSBRIDGE: Forecasting tournaments are competitions

where people try to predict a future event,

something that's of global importance.

Like, will this country withdraw its troops from this

other country by such and such a date?

Will the yen go up by two points on Thursday?

Really detailed questions that are very hard to predict.

And these are just ordinary people.

They could be someone who works at home raising their kids.

These aren't special PhDs or anything.

But when they're grouped together,

they become this kind of superforecasting unit

that together, can predict future events

much better than even intelligence officials

with classified information.

SHATNER: It was reported that, when grouped together,

future predictions made by ordinary people

outperformed intelligence analysts who had access

to classified data by about 30%.

And the question becomes why?

TARRANT: When we look at the work of superforecasters,

there's this debate about whether what they're doing

is just kind of listening to their intuition

versus maybe some sort of

precognition, the ability to know things in the future.

Our mind-body is picking up on something

before it materializes.

This is probably an evolutionary adaptation

that we've developed.

We all have intuitive abilities,

but many times, we don't listen.

We're not aware of it on a conscious level,

but we have a feeling.

So, in terms of the superforecasters,

maybe they're really good at listening.

SHATNER: Can the sixth sense really come down

to highly attuned intuition, something that everyone has?

And if so, is it possible not to entertain

one very exciting possibility?

Through practice, can anyone develop

these mysterious powers of the mind?

People are very curious about unlocking a sixth sense.

People ask me, you know,

you're a neuroscientist, what do I do to my brain

to make it so that I could have these capacities?

I actually think it's part of how the brain works,

so it's not really unlocking something that's locked away.

It's more like using what's already there,

but taking it seriously.

You're already getting in the information,

not judging it,

not blocking it,

not assuming it's wrong,

but testing it out.

So, for example, if I meditate,

am I more aware of my thoughts

that seem to come out of the blue

that might help me with a problem I'm working on?

It's more like attending to what's already there.

It's intriguing to consider

that the ability to predict the future

may be a skill that can be taught to all of us.

Whether it's seeing events before they happen,

communicating with the spirit world

or reading someone else's thoughts,

the human mind seems to be capable of feats

that defy our understanding.

Are these abilities a freak combination

of luck and intuition?

Or could they be evidence of an elusive sixth sense

locked away within the human mind?

It's an intriguing mystery that,

for the moment, remains

unexplained.

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