A Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for the discovery of “an inner GPS in the brain,” but while we now know this faculty of the brain affects how we map our surroundings geographically, could it also guide us in other ways?
Theories building on this discovery take us into the realm of intuition and “coincidences.” When you bump into just the right person at just the right time, could it be some kind of internal global positioning system (GPS) seated in the mind at work?
Norwegian researcher Edvard Moser, his wife May-Britt Moser, and British-American scientist Dr. John O'Keefe found that “grid cells” in the brain comprise this inner GPS.
Grid cells are located in the hippocampus and may also be located in the anterior cingulate part of the brain, which plays an important role in human emotion, Dr. Bernard Beitman, a Yale-educated psychiatrist currently working at the University of Virginia, said after reviewing some of the prize-winning research. “This emotional aspect of grid cell mapping could make particular locations more highly charged in our brain-based maps,” Dr. Beitman told The Epoch Times. “Like the maps used in GPS navigation, these maps could then help us find pathways to emotionally important people, things, and situations.”
The Epoch Times asked the Mosers what they thought of this idea. Edvard told the newspaper that “the link to emotions is very speculative.”
Dr. Beitman agrees that the connections are speculative, adding, “It is on such evidence that new theories can develop.” Many anecdotal coincidences he’s heard make it clear that people are somehow able to map their location in relation to emotionally significant people or places. “Just how [this works] is our fun question,” he said.
He offered an example: “A mother felt her 6-year-old daughter was in danger and rushed to the edge of a deep-water quarry to find her happily playing at the water’s edge. How did the mother ‘feel’ the danger? How did she ‘know’ how to get there?”
Similarly, as a child, Dr. Beitman found his lost dog after he made a wrong turn in a familiar neighborhood. It was strange for him to go in that direction, yet it led him exactly where he needed to go.
The file-drawer effect can explain some of these coincidences, he said: we remember all the times we found what we needed when we needed it through a surprising and accidental chain of events, but we forget all the times this didn’t happen. If you take into account the wealth of misses, the hits become more probable statistically. To illustrate this further, you may find it really remarkable that the person sitting next to you at a dinner party has the same birthday as you—that’s a “hit.” But, if you take into account all the dinner parties you’ve been to in your life, or all the dinner parties all humans have been to, at which two people sat next to each other and didn’t have the same birthday (a plethora of misses), it seems more likely that this would happen at least once among all these cases. It really is a one-in-a-million occurrence if you look at the million misses it took to get one hit.
Nonetheless, Dr. Beitman thinks the file-drawer effect cannot explain the whole phenomenon and he’s not the only one. Veterinarian Dr. Michael Fox has heard of pets tracking down their owners or finding help when they need it in situations that seem to defy the expanded limits of their sense of smell, sight, and hearing.
Dr. Beitman and Dr. Fox both theorize about sensory data around us that we subconsciously perceive. This data would guide the GPS. Dr. Beitman talks of the “psychesphere,” and Dr. Fox talks of the “empathosphere”—a layer of existence around us that we can’t perceive with the five senses, but which contains emotional information we may pick up on with yet-to-be-discovered sensory receptors.
If we make this discovery or understand better the phenomenon, Dr. Beitman said, we may be able to make useful coincidences more commonplace in our lives. Perhaps this GPS could help us find lost children. Maybe it could help us find love, or the right job, or a helping hand in a time of need. Of course, much mystery remains in figuring all this out—but for Dr. Beitman, it’s a train of thought worth following with further investigation.
Professor of aerospace science and dean emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University Robert G. Jahn has written about a “consciousness space grid” or “a grid of experience.”
In his book “Margins of Reality,” he ponders about the physical existence of human consciousness and how it may be mapped. He also explores, from the perspective of quantum physics, how consciousness may move toward a goal: “A person is described as a ‘close’ friend or ‘distant’ relative, as ‘deep’ in thought or ‘high’ as a kite; an idea may be ‘central,’ ’remote,‘ or ’far out‘; and we allow our minds to ’wander‘ over various conceptual ’grounds,‘ before taking a ’position' on an issue.”
These are qualitative descriptions. He wonders if it’s possible to develop quantitatively spatial descriptions related to consciousness. He theorizes that human consciousness exists in wave form and physically moves as such through the brain and beyond. He said further development in consciousness mechanics could form a “grid of experience, along which consciousness proceeds toward its goal by making discriminations or associations at each juncture, much as in a puzzle maze or the games of ‘Twenty Questions’ or ’Charades.’”
