The Mysterious 6th Sense
We have all had a gut feeling which turned out to be correct. Аn ominous sensation minutes before receiving bad news, the feeling someone is watching through a crowd proven correct, a decision you just have to make but don’t know why, a friend or family member popping into thoughts moments before they send a text message.
What if this is more than just a coincidence? What if it is, in fact, some sort of 6th sense? Is it possible that since the earliest days, human beings had a sense which goes beyond sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, a sense which, rather than lost over time, has merely been obscured?
This may sound like the trailer for the latest superhero movie or at least something out of new-age spiritual teaching, far from it.
The concept of a 6th sense has existed throughout the annals of human history, and, increasingly in modern times, is being discussed and studied seriously by science.
So, what is this supposed 6th sense? Does it exist? And, if so, just what can it do?
Scientific Studies on our 6th Sense
In 2019, researchers from the California Institute of Technology, known as ‘Caltech,’ led by the enigmatic scientist Joseph Kirschvink, published an article that shocked the scientific community. Through vigorous study, Kirschvink and his team had shown that human beings are capable of magnetoreception, that is, humans have the ability to pick up the earth’s magnetic field, a previously unrecorded 6th sense.
The study was complex. Researchers built an isolation chamber in which study participants were asked to sit for an hour in utter darkness and silence. During this time, a magnetic field was passed around the chamber, and participants’ brain waves were measured and recorded via electrodes positioned at 64 locations on their heads. Researchers noticed that when the magnetic field pointed north and then swept upwards or downwards over the head, or, rotated counterclockwise, a significant drop was seen in the subject’s alpha brain waves—this indicated activity. When the brain is resting, alpha brain waves are high; a drop signifies engagement.
Kirschvink described the response of participants during these scenarios as “freaking out.”
Perhaps freaking out is not an overly technical term. What did Kirschvink mean? What exactly was happening to the study’s participants? As one of the members of the research team said, “the brain is responding to a magnetic field in a particular way. I just have no idea what mechanism that really represents.”
What was this 6th sense participants were experiencing?
Magnetoreception
The mystery can begin to be unraveled by momentarily directing attention away from human beings and towards mole rats. Studies have shown that these animals have the ability of magnetoreception, which they use as a sort of guidance system on long journeys. In fact, this is not at all unique to mole rats. Migratory birds use magnetoreception to guide them, as do bees, bats, salmon, and turtles; even snails and worms possess the ability. Think of lobsters walking in a single file line of 50 or more at the bottom of the ocean – this is magnetoreception at work. Further, studies have shown cattle and deer align with the magnetic field when standing around, while dogs will not defecate unless their spines are aligned in a north-south compass direction. One scientist even found that a specific bacterium has a pronounced ‘magnetic sense.’
The point is simple: this magnetic 6th sense is something that exists across the animal kingdom. And as Connie Wang, Caltech graduate student and one of the lead authors on Kirschvink’s study, asked: “Many animals have magnetoreception, so why not us?”
Robin Baker’s Experiments
Note that Kirschvink and his team were not the first to consider the topic of magnetoreception in human beings. They were simply the first to achieve the groundbreaking step of producing measurable data.
In 1980, British scientist Robin Baker conducted a series of experiments around Manchester, England, which he believed showed magnetoreception in humans. He started by blindfolding participants and taking them by minibus on a winding ride through the countryside. Eventually, thoroughly lost, he would ask the participants to orient themselves towards the compass direction of home. Incredibly, in almost all cases, they were able to correctly pick the direction, except for those who had a magnet placed in their blindfolds. This suggested that it was, in fact, magnetoreception, which informed the ability to determine direction, the magnet acting as an interruption of the natural magnetic field.
Baker produced similar results with walkabouts and spinning chairs, even performing such experiments on television. However, when Baker went to the United States to recreate his experiments for skeptical scientists at places like Princeton and Harvard universities, they failed to yield the results he had promised. Baker was labeled a charlatan and a fake, until years later, it was discovered that AM radio stations interfere with magnetic fields. As Baker had first done the experiments in Manchester, which did not have AM stations at the time, before coming to the northeastern US, which was saturated with them, this explained his failure to replicate his experiments at the time.
Not surprisingly, the incredible inventor Nikola Tesla, who was way ahead of his time, knew that already, and is being quoted saying the following:
“Alpha waves in the human brain are between 6 and 8 hertz. The wave frequency of the human cavity resonates between 6 and 8 hertz. All biological systems operate in the same frequency range. The human brain’s alpha waves function in this range and the electrical resonance of the earth is between 6 and 8 hertz. Thus, our entire biological system – the brain and the earth itself – work on the same frequencies. If we can control that resonate system electronically, we can directly control the entire mental system of humankind.”
Could this be the reason governments around the world are mass constructing 5G towers in the most populated areas and precisely in front of homes and schools? These towers are emitting weaponized frequencies which alter our bodies natural electromagnetic fields. They can damage DNA and lead to cancer; cause oxidative damage that can cause premature aging; disrupt cell metabolism; cause brain cancer, and potentially lead to other diseases through the generation of stress proteins. They basically create a global grid that lowers our brain’s frequencies and dumbs down the population.
Oleg Shumilov’s Experiments
Meanwhile, half a world away, Russian scientist Oleg Shumilov was conducting his own research on the earth’s magnetic field and its impacts on humans. Over the course of decades, Shumilov noted that there were three geomagnetic peaks each year, March to May, in July, and then finally in October. Perhaps not coincidentally, Shumilov found these peaks coincided with peak times for recorded suicides. In fact, since then, many studies have shown suicide, along with mental health problems like depression, to be associated with the appearance of geomagnetic storms or solar flares.
What Baker, Shumilov, and others had shown if without measurement, was that human beings do possess some sort of magnetoreception ability and that changes in the earth’s geomagnetic field have real impacts on this 6th sense.
However, this raised more questions than answers. As Baylor College neurobiologist David Dickman explained, with the existence of a 6th sense being proven, the issue became “how the brain actually uses this information.”
Walter Rawls’ Experiments
The most interesting scientific insight on this question thus far perhaps comes from author and experimental scientist Walter Rawls. Rawls started with the work of Robin Baker, who, years after he first conducted his ‘direction’ experiments in Manchester, discovered magnetic deposits in the brain surrounding the pineal gland. Perhaps, thought Rawls, it was the pineal gland which would provide the key to this mysterious 6th sense.
He began to conduct an experiment in which he would wear a mask that held a magnet directly over his pineal gland for 10-30 minutes at a time. During the first week, as he sat and worked quietly wearing the mask, he suddenly noticed something out of the corner of his eye. When he turned his head to see what it was, he was shocked by a ghostly figure entering the room through the wall, then disappearing out the other side. The next week, the same figure appeared, less ghostly this time, more defined. It looked at Rawls, then disappeared. Finally, during the third week wearing the mask, the room around Rawls dissipated entirely, leaving him looking at a hillside with two people sitting under a tree. One of them was the figure he had seen twice previously. They looked at him, startled before the scene faded away and a fearful Rawls took the mask off forever.
It may sound incredible, unbelievable even, but is it possible Rawls was onto something?
The Pineal Gland
The pineal gland is located on the roof of the third ventricle of the brain, directly behind the root of the nose. Think of the space between your eyes. It is shaped like a pinecone, which is where it gets its name, ‘pinea’ being Latin for pinecone. It is known to produce melatonin and serotonin, in effect, making the pineal gland a crucial regulator of the body’s functions, of bio cycles, growth, sleep, metabolism, hormones, and sexual development. More mysteriously, the pineal gland produces chemicals called beta-carbolines, neuromodulators which have the same effect as pharmaceutical products like Prozac, and the chemical known as DMT, a sister to ayahuasca, a psychedelic ceremonial drink used by the tribes of the Amazon rainforest. Was it possible Rawls had altered the production of these chemicals with his magnet mask?
Regardless, it seems this tiny gland possesses an unusual and outsized power, a power which science does not yet have a grasp on. As University of Michigan professor of physiology and neurology Jimo Borjigin put it:
“We still lack a complete understanding of the pineal gland. Numerous molecules are found in the pineal, many of which are uniquely found at night, and we do not have a good idea of what their functions are.”
Pineal Gland Symbology in Ancient Cultures
With science baffled, it must be outside of the realm of science from which insights are gained.
Consider the ancient Egyptians, for whom the pineal gland was a representation of power, wisdom, and good health. The Eye of Horus, among the most well-known Egyptian symbols, is actually a depiction of the pineal gland inside the brain. 
Further, atop the staff of the god Osiris sits a pinecone, another pineal reference. It should be no surprise then that Egyptians preserved the pineal gland separately in the process of mummification.
But they were not the only ones who used the pineal gland and its pinecone representation throughout their most important iconography. It appeared in many other civilizations, from Greeks and Romans, to Assyrians, Sumerians, and even across the world, to the ancient tribes of what is now Mexico; the spires of the Cambodian marvel Angkor Wat are pinecones reaching up to the sky, while even the Vatican, at the heart of Catholicism, has an enormous pinecone statue. In fact, the Pope, like the Egyptian god Osiris, carries a staff topped with a pinecone, while church lamps and candleholders also contain the symbol, representing the pineal gland as illumination, as showing the way out of darkness.
What is it that human beings used to know about the pineal gland, in order to make it such an important part of their existence across cultures and time periods, which modern science does not? What is this way out of darkness?
Third Eye – The Principal Seat of the Soul
Famed French philosopher René Descartes described the pineal gland as “the principal seat of the soul.” He explained that humans have two ears, two eyes, and two sides of the brain, but only one pineal gland, the only part of the brain which is not doubled. Descartes believed that this meant it must be the place where information from all of these pairs was consolidated for consideration by the soul, a sort of meta-organ which both combines and transcends all other senses. 
Here, the pineal gland described by Descartes bears a striking resemblance to what in Hindu tradition is called the sixth chakra, the “eye of intuition,” or, more simply, “the third eye.”
Interestingly, recent scientific discoveries have shown that the pineal gland does, in reality, have a strangely similar tissue make up to the retinas of the eyes; under a microscope, the cells appear almost identical. Because of this, scientists have postulated that the pineal gland may, in fact, be the remnants of an actual eye leftover evolutionarily from a prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestor, like the wings of an ostrich.
But perhaps this ‘third eye’ is not so much leftover, as forgotten. Perhaps the 6th sense discovered by Kirschvink and his team was, in fact, rediscovered, an ancient knowledge once celebrated through art and spirituality, an ability which human beings have not lost, but rather merely lost awareness of.
But if the pineal gland is the source of a 6th sense which humans have lost awareness of, what could a return of this awareness mean? 
In Hindu tradition, the third eye is a source of intuitive wisdom, knowledge of past, present, and future. It is a sort of cosmic consciousness that goes beyond the typical limits of perception beyond the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. It has been suggested that the development of this ‘eye’ can facilitate an enhanced spiritual connection, lucid dreaming and telepathic empathy, even psychic vision and astral projection. As author Ilchi Lee proclaimed, the pineal gland shows
“Spirituality is a built-in feature of the human brain.”
Think of Walter Rawls, manipulating his pineal gland with a magnet, the ghostly figures he started to see certainly beyond what he would typically have been able to perceive with his five basic senses.
But Rawls has only scratched the surface of this phenomenon.
Human beings do have a 6th sense, that much is now irrefutably known thanks to Kirschvink and his team of Caltech scientists. What remains to be seen is just what type of power this 6th sense might hold, what type of secrets, once known by the ancients but since lost to humankind, it might reveal, just what this literal and spiritual ‘third eye’ might actually be able to do.