We’re all familiar with the first five: sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. Some claim a sixth sense that extends beyond those, often called ESP or paranormal sensation – more on that later. Many add pain and pressure to the list. So that brings us to eight. The ninth?

Once upon a time, the story goes, a writer you might have heard of named Hemingway was being interviewed by a reporter. Looking for a sound bite, as reporters often do, the reporter kept pressing him for a simplistic answer about the qualities that make a good writer, finally asking him to name the one essential quality. Hemingway replied, “In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.”

I hereby officially designate that as the Ninth Sense, as it often requires thinking skills roughly one and one-half as good as those who claim to have a Sixth Sense. Example: Emily Rosa, a precocious possessor of the Ninth Sense, developed a simple test for pseudo-medical practitioners of “therapeutic touch” or similar woo-woo scams. Emily tested the ability of a practitioner whose vision was obscured to tell which hand of theirs Emily was holding her hand over. This test was performed in front of national TV cameras for the ABC network. One practitioner, upon being told she had scored 4 correct out of ten, thought that was “pretty good.”

Uh, chance alone gives you fifty percent, or a five of ten score. To be statistically significant the practitioner would have to score better than chance on a regular basis, at least 55 out of 100, but more realistically it would take regularly scoring at least seven out of ten to convince most people that the practitioner had any special abilities. The Ninth Sense is the ability to weed out such nonsensical claims without spending half your life doing so – unless, like James “The Amazing” Randi, you can manage to make a second career out of professionally debunking such claims (and saving time for the rest of us.)

Though obviously not the first to have it, I’m the first to name the Ninth Sense. I developed my crap detector at a young age, and I’ve saved thousands that others would have wasted on psychics, palm and Tarot card readers, purveyors of assorted religions new and old, and practitioners of pseudo-sciences like astrology and creationism. (Yes, I spent that money on other things, but it was on things I enjoyed, not false hope and empty promises.)

Someday maybe everyone will have the Ninth Sense. Until then, I’ll continue to employ mine for the benefit of myself and my friends, and the detriment of those who live life on the premise that a fool and his money are soon parted, and parting the two is their mission.