There’s no such thing as sixth sense, Australian researchers have learned. Their study paper shows that even though some people can reliably sense changes that they could not visually identify, it doesn’t mean that they have ESP or extrasensory perception.

There are people who claim to be able to sense changes without relying on the five basic senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. They say that they can sense changes directly with their mind, which is a phenomenon known as the sixth sense or ESP.

But the study, which is led by Dr Piers Howe from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University if Melbourne, shows that ESP is not what helps people sense changes that they cannot visually identify.

“There is a common belief that observers can experience changes directly with their mind, without needing to rely on the traditional physical senses such as vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch to identify it,” Dr Howe said.

“This alleged ability is sometimes referred to as a sixth sense or ESP. We were able to show that while observers could reliably sense changes that they could not visually identify, this ability was not due to extrasensory perception or a sixth sense.”

For the study, participants were shown two portrait colour photos of a female presented on a black background. Each photograph was shown individually for 1.5 seconds with a one-second blank interval before the second image was shown. After the second photograph, the observers were asked whether or not they saw a change, and if so, they were asked to identify the change by clicking one out of nine possible options in a list (earrings, glasses, hat, necklace, clothing, hair, eye shadow, lipstick, or hat).

The results prove that the observers could generally identify when a change had occurred even when they could not identify exactly what was it.

For example, the observers might have noticed that the two photos had different amounts of red or green, but they couldn’t use this information to determine that the person in the photograph had changed the colour of her hat.

“They could spot that there was a change but couldn’t identify the change. This is why they believed they had a sixth sense, which was nonsense,” Dr Howe was quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald as saying. “It wasn’t a sixth sense. What happened was they took in more information than they could verbalise.”

But if it’s not ESP, then what was it?

The study wasn’t a total debunking of ESP, but rather just proves that people can sense information that they just simply cannot verbalise.

“Mindsight” might be a more apt term for the phrase. Mindsight is the ability to detect changes before being able to identify them.

“We’ve got all this stuff going on in the background at this subconscious level. To me that’s actually far cooler than having a sixth sense,” he continued.

The study was published in the PLOS One journal.