Inner compass, or Another parable. Exercise "inner compass" What should I do?

Take a walk through the center of any old city: explore the ancient church, museum, park. . Now go home. Walk away, retrace your steps in reverse order. In order for you to return home again, your brain “recorded” all these turns.

We have an internal compass, always keeping track of which direction we are facing and always monitoring changes in that direction. The brain can use this compass to guide the way. Just like your GPS device tracks every move you make in a car so that it can develop a new route from the direction you are currently facing.

A deep question in neuroscience is how the brain can build an internal compass: how can a chain of neurons track turns and movement? The answer is simple: a structure called a “ring of neurons” is responsible for this.

Theorists have long loved this internal compass problem. Many of their solutions have one thing in common: there are many neurons in the ring. And the connections between neurons are arranged in such a way that several neurons next to each other are active, and everything else is quiet. This beat of activity then represents the current direction in which the brain (and thus the body) is moving:

How does a ring of neurons represent the direction of movement? When moving straight forward, the neurons at the top of the ring are most active: there is a wave of activity at the top of the ring. The neurons on the opposite side of the ring are silent. When the body is rotated 90 degrees to the right, so that the edge rotates around the ring to represent this new direction of motion.

And when the entrance to that ring changes, so the shock returns to a new location, and that new location is the new direction in which the brain moves. When the input does not change, the brain is stable. The noise can't move it. This stability means that this ring is an "attractor", a type of system that has stable states. It was a theory. The main disagreement between theorists was exactly how the neurons were wired together for this to happen.

But recently, a group of researchers studied pieces of the fly's brain that helped it move, and they noticed that a group of neurons in the fly's brain were organized in a circle. Hmm, did they think it was an attractor ring? Testing was simple. The scientists recorded brain activity in this ring of neurons while the fly flew. And then they looked to see whether the activity around the ring of neurons changed when the fly changed direction.

The constantly moving activity in this ring corresponded exactly with the constantly changing direction of flight.

So this ring in the fly's brain is like a compass. But is it a compass? Or is it just reading data from somewhere else? To test this, they turned to ideas from theories: if it really is a compass, it is a ring attractor. They stimulated several nearby neurons with light, increasing their activity. It was found that the fly brain has a ring attractor, which is an internal compass. And thanks to this experiment studying flies, there is now a chance that we too have a ring attractor in the brain. During difficult times in your life, you may ask yourself, “Where am I?” Luckily for you, one part of your brain always knows exactly where you're going.

And . Even thick-skinned crocodiles turned out to be. However, it is still not known for certain whether people have a “magnetic” sense.

In the summer of 2016, American scientists used a Faraday cage to prove that human bodies have some kind of “magnetic sensors.” The scientific community was wary of such findings, and many scientists continue experiments and research aimed at identifying that “sixth” (magnetic) sense.

Meanwhile, the Cyborg Nest company decided to go a different route, giving people the ability to sense the cardinal directions using a wearable gadget.

The device, called North Sense, is a silicone “organ” no larger than a matchbox. It is attached to the chest under the skin using two titanium rods and emits a short vibration every time the user turns north. The gadget is completely waterproof and charges via a mini-USB connector.

Representatives of the company emphasize that we are not talking about any medical changes in the body: Cyborg Nest specialists are interested in creating and expanding human sensations.

“There is a whole world around us that we do not perceive - radiation, X-rays, infrared and ultraviolet radiation, as well as the electromagnetic field of the planet,” says company co-founder Liviu Babitz. “So we want to create new feelings to make every day better sense the environment."

"The Inner Compass" is designed to expand human capabilities and develop spatial orientation abilities.

As the developers note, the “sense of north,” which helps to navigate in space, has always been very important for humans.

For example, the Australian aborigines of the Guugu Yimitir tribe indicate the direction not using the usual egocentric coordinates (left/right, back/forward), but use geographic coordinates for this. That is, even indoors, a representative of this tribe will ask you to move, for example, not to the left, but to the east. At any moment, an aborigine of the Guugu Yimitir tribe, on an unconscious level, is able to clearly determine where the cardinal points are. They develop this skill from infancy: the brain learns to notice natural factors and remember movements and turns. As the creators of the North Sense gadget say, this is the kind of “inner compass” that would be useful to many people.

At the same time, Cyborg Nest engineers emphasize that they did not set out to create a practical tool like a navigator. "It's about all the sensory experiences we have as humans," Babitz explains.

In his opinion, changing the nature of our sensations can work like a domino principle: improving the perception of space can lead to an improvement in the other senses (however, correspondents of the Vesti.Nauka project). But Babitz believes that if a person begins to use his vision less for orientation in space over time (after all, a gadget will help him with this), for example, he may develop new ways and possibilities of using his eyes.

The creators of North Sense compare such devices with fashion trends. Just as piercings or tattoos were once considered signs of rebellion and then gained popularity, body “modifications” using gadgets will soon also become widespread.

Everyone wants to become, company representatives are sure, and the moment when such experiments will no longer be considered extreme is probably not long to wait. After all, Babitz says, many people today use augmented reality glasses, pacemakers, chips implanted in the body, or cyber prosthetics.

A silicone “sensory organ” no larger than a matchbox.

However, no one can yet predict what the long-term consequences of constantly wearing an “internal compass” will be. New senses require long-term integration, so scientists want to study how the organisms of different people will accept the innovation and how their perception of the surrounding space will change.

There is already a whole community of people willing to test North Sense on the Internet - from an elderly equestrian from Spain to an accountant from Chicago. "At the moment, there are no groups of people who would have the same artificial senses. Nor can you build theories from the experience of just one brain. We will have a group of people with the same device, so we will begin to understand what this means in a broader context." Babitz adds.

Name. Exercise "Inner Compass"

Purpose.

The exercise is designed to develop a sense of direction in space.

Tools: protractor and (preferably) compass.

Place a dot on the paper and draw a straight arrow from it. Place the paper on the table and point the arrow north (if you have a compass at hand). If there is no compass, then point the arrow in any direction. Prepare a protractor. Think of a number from 20 to 50.

Now cover your eyes and ears with your hands: plug your ears with your thumbs, put the rest of your fingers on your eyes. Make sure that you cannot navigate by any extraneous sounds, light spots or uneven floors. Start spinning clockwise, counting from one to the hidden number. When you get to 10, 20, 30 or 40, change the direction of rotation.

Having counted to the hidden number, stop. Try to imagine which direction you are heading. Turn in the direction you think the arrow is pointing. Open your eyes, fix your direction. According to this direction, draw an arrow from the same point as the large arrow. Using a protractor, measure the angle between the arrows (the angle should be from 0 to 180 degrees). Write down this number.

Make two more attempts, try to improve the result. Calculate the average between three attempts, write it down in a notebook for later monitoring.

Repeat the exercise systematically. Try to understand in which condition you do better and in which condition you do worse.

1. Exercise “Inner Compass” [Electronic resource] // A. Ya.. 05/29/2011..html (05/29/2011).

To travel and navigate in space, humanity has come up with a lot of inventions. Starting from the astrolabe and compass to modern satellite navigation systems. But all these achievements of progress cannot be compared with the natural mechanisms that many representatives of the earth’s fauna use.

Today, science knows more than 50 species of bacteria, insects, birds and animals that have excellent navigation abilities. Migratory butterflies easily travel from Europe to Africa and back. Sea turtles find their favorite feeding spots hundreds of kilometers away. Salmon travel enormous distances years later, returning to their place of birth to spawn. Why is the most perfect creation, man, deprived of this gift, the so-called internal compass?

The phenomenon of navigation of living creatures is studied by hundreds of scientists around the world, but it still remains one of the the most secret mysteries of zoology, the answer to which will bring a Nobel Prize. And who knows, perhaps we will get closer to the mystery of our origin if we understand how migratory birds can travel many thousands of kilometers without losing their course. Scientific data collected over the past 60 years leads to the conclusion that all living beings, including humans, have internal clocks that measure seasonal and even annual rhythms.

This timekeeper is located in a small group of neurons located in the brain. It is he who tells the birds that it is time to migrate. After this, their body automatically begins to prepare for the journey. The plumage is renewed, the body actively accumulates fat - the most compact fuel for long flights. Nervous excitement rapidly increases - this phenomenon is called migration anxiety. The largest scientific institutes in the world are studying the secrets of such mysterious behavior.

Every person is also overcome by a thirst for change from time to time. For no apparent reason, we are ready to give up everything, get up from our homes and go to an unfamiliar city or even to the other end of the planet towards adventure. It is possible that these are echoes of a biological migration program deeply hidden in our subconscious. So maybe we just forgot how to use the internal navigator? After all, the inhabitants of the steppes and polar regions, especially indigenous peoples, moved over vast spaces and did not use any complex instruments.

This assumption is confirmed by surprising facts. Olesya Gorbenko is included in the Russian version of the Guinness Book of Records. At the age of 13, she got lost in the Khabarovsk taiga. In these places, even experienced hunters disappear and die without a compass. For exactly a week the girl wandered through the forest, and then, by some miracle, she came to her native village. What was it? Intuition, sharpened to the limit by fear? Or did some previously dormant mechanism come into play in a critical situation?

Dutch scientists studying the ancient tribes of Australia announced a sensational discovery. They discovered aborigines who are able to accurately determine the cardinal directions even in complete darkness and indoors. Moreover, in the vocabulary of these natives there are no such concepts as “left” and “right”. Instead they say "spear pointing north" or "foot facing west." So maybe our internal navigator was discarded as unnecessary as a result of evolution?

Perhaps this is really so, and all our troubles are from the mind. In pursuit of comfort, we lose the skills inherent in us by nature. And if we discard the touch of civilization, will we acquire them again? But there is no need to rush to conclusions. Ornithologists have long noted an amazing fact - an internal compass exists even in migratory birds that were bred in artificial conditions and have never come into contact with the wild environment. So maybe the navigation mechanism is provided only in animals that migrate? But everyone else, including humans, simply doesn’t have it?

This opinion has been widespread for a long time, but recently the scientific world was rocked by the discovery of German and Czech zoologists. For two years, scientists studied the habits of foxes, namely how they attack their prey, and noted a strange feature. Having studied hundreds of fox jumps on prey under the snow, zoologists came to unexpected conclusions - foxes always attack the hunted object from the southwest side. And such behavior cannot be explained by reasonable reasons - the position of the sun or the direction of the wind. This means that when performing a maneuver, these animals use not only ordinary senses, but also something more.

But the biggest sensation came from the study of ordinary cows. Cattle breeders have long known that on pasture these animals line up in ranks and columns like soldiers and, according to zoologists, this is not just a herd instinct. In fact, cows have a real internal compass. Cows tend to align the axis of their body along the Earth's magnetic field, that is, with their heads either north or south. To prove this theory, a group of German scientists conducted a large-scale experiment.

Experts studied satellite images of more than three hundred cow herds scattered throughout continents. And they realized that such a clear orientation along the magnetic meridian simply cannot be accidental. This feature of artiodactyls is confirmed by observation of roe deer and red deer in the wild. But if almost all living beings on the planet have a magnetic sense, then humans should also have it, at least in a primitive form. Unless, of course, this planet is really our home.

“All societies, both ancient and modern,

both primitive and very complex,

guided by values ​​and goals, rooted in "deep intuition"

Willis Harman

Since you are reading this text, you should be prepared for the fact that your life will change dramatically. Your intuition has long told you that it’s time to prepare for an exciting journey of self-discovery. How and why does this happen? There is something living inside you that will not allow you to spend this life half asleep. Perhaps you notice that something strange is happening around you: amazing coincidences are happening to you that tell you that you should be doing something else, something that is different from what you are spending your time on now. You may have noticed that you want more awareness in your actions, that you no longer want to waste time on empty conversations, you are looking for something new, but you don’t know what. Where and for what? These questions are a sign that each person has their own path. You have it too, and you were born to walk on it. The “Intuition” course was created precisely so that you can pay attention and time to yourself, figure out what is happening in your life, understand what to do, where and why to go, what to invest energy and time into.

Intuition is a long-forgotten taste for life. Intuition is joy and flexibility, it is insight and instant answers to questions. The training course will teach you to live exactly like this - easily and joyfully guided by your own intuition.

You are probably reading this article because you feel that you need to gain intuitive knowledge: perhaps you have too much pressure on you, you do not know how to choose, what to choose, what to trust, how to move beyond the space in which you live - with more or less effort. Maybe your sense of life has become dull and the world seems flat. Do not worry. The world of intuition has its ebbs and flows. Intuition is a natural property of the soul; it can be forgotten, but it cannot be lost. The training course will help you dispel doubts and remove obstacles that you may have unknowingly erected in front of you.