The Sixth Sense between Truth and Illusion

Human's sixth sense of danger, which some scientists have rejected as a myth, is actually found in a part of the brain that also deals with conflict resolution.

Joshua Brown of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri said in an interview that the brain region known as the inner cortex is already sounding an alarm about dangers that cannot penetrate the conscious brain.

The inner cortex is located near the apex of the lobus anterior cerebelli and alongside the dividers separating the left and right brain sections. Brown used a computer program that required healthy young people to respond to the activity of a monitoring device and measure their brain activity at intervals of 2.5 seconds with a (MRI) Magnetic resonance imaging machine.

Brown said that the results showed that "our brains pick up warning signals better than they thought in the past." Brown said, in the past, we used to find activity in the inner cortex when people had to make a difficult decision or after they made a mistake, but now the region can actually learn to realize when one makes a mistake.

It learns to warn us in advance when our behavior leads to a negative result. Brown added that the inner cortex is strongly associated with serious mental problems, including schizophrenia and compulsive aggressive disorder.

Brown said that the same neurotransmitter is involved in drug addiction and Parkinson's disease, and it seems that dopamine plays a major role in training the collar inner cortex to recognize the right time at which it has to send an early warning signal.