Take heart, religious believers: recent research isn't evidence of God, heaven, soul, or the afterlife, but it could point to something similarly mysterious.
Or, not.
There's a lot of controversy surrounding Daryl Bem's claim that precognition is real. But his paper is going to be published in the respected Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. An article in New Scientist says:
Extraordinary claims don't come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven't yet happened can influence our behaviour.
Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal.
What's more, sceptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can't find any significant flaws. "My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can't be true," says Joachim Krueger of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has blogged about the work on the Psychology Today website. "Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn't see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order."
However, good order is in the eye of the scientific beholder.
Some Dutch researchers argue that Bem's work reflects weaknesses in how findings are analyzed statistically. Their Bayesian approach, which I don't claim to understand, showed no evidence of precognition.
Regardless, the effect wasn't huge, just a few percent above the 50-50 that would have been expected by chance. It's cool, though, that Bem's first experiment used erotic images.
In his first experiment, Bem explored the effects of erotic stimuli on perceiving the future. After being shown an image, one hundred Cornell students — 50 male and 50 female — were each shown pictures of two curtained screens on computer monitors, one covering a blank wall, the other covering the image. Many but not all of the pictures behind the curtains were erotic images, such as those of “couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts,” according to Bem’s paper. Each participant was to click on the curtain which he or she thought had the picture behind it.
Bem hypothesized that 50 percent of those who were shown erotic stimuli would identify the correct curtain, and that those shown erotic pictures would have a higher “hit rate” — the number of times that the correct curtain was identified — than participants that were shown non-erotic pictures.
In the 100 sessions, the hit rate for those shown erotic stimuli was 53.1 percent, while the 49.8 percent hit rate of those shown non-erotic pictures did not deviate from chance. This shows that on average, given that the erotic image shown to the participant made a considerable impression, that participant’s ability to foresee the future is statistically higher than chance, according to Bem.
“The remarkable finding [we made] is that their physiological responses are observed to occur about 2-3 seconds prior to the appearance of the picture, even before the computer has decided whether to present a non-arousing or an arousing picture,” Bem said.
Well, I'm open to the possibility that something outside of our current understanding of the laws of nature and causation is going on here. But Bem admits that he doesn't have any firm hypotheses about what that might be, a fact that disturbs the above-mentioned Joachim Kreuger.
The whole point of psi experiments is to demonstrate the existence of something that is inexplicable by ordinary lights. If it were explicable, it would not longer be anomalous; it would not be psi.
That's the paradox. Psi research seeks to establish the existence of weird phenomena while at the same time refusing to offer a positive theory of why and how these phenomena come into being. This must be so because once you have a positive (i.e., intelligible) theory about the process underlying the phenomenon, the mystique is gone.
If you want to dig deeper into Bem's research, a preprint of his journal paper is the place to go. I browsed through "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect," skipping the numbers and focusing on conclusions.
Such as:
If psi exists, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that it might have been acquired through evolution by conferring survival and reproductive advantage on the species (for a discussion, see Broughton, 1991, pp. 347–352).
For example, the ability to anticipate and thereby to avoid danger confers an obvious evolutionary advantage that would be greatly enhanced by the ability to anticipate danger precognitively. It was this reasoning that motivated Experiment 2 on the precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli.
Similarly, the possibility of an evolved precognitive ability to anticipate sexual opportunities motivated Experiment 1 on the precognitive detection of erotic stimuli. The presentiment experiments were probably inspired by similar reasoning.
And after attempting (more accurately, in my opinion,straining) to invoke quantum mechanics as an explanation of precognition, Bem says:
Unfortunately, even if quantum-based theories eventually mature from metaphor to genuine models of psi, they are still unlikely to provide intuitively satisfying mechanisms for psi because quantum theory fails to provide intuitively satisfying mechanisms for physical reality itself.
Physicists have learned to live with that conundrum but most non-physicists are simply unaware of it; they presume that they don’t understand quantum physics only because they lack the necessary technical and mathematical expertise. They need to be reassured.
Richard Feynman (1994), one of the most distinguished physicists of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, put it this way:
"The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, ‘But how can it be like that?’ which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar....Do not keep saying to yourself...‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get...into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that [emphasis added]. (p. 123)"
Comments on Kreuger's Psychology Today skeptical blog post about the research also are interesting (if sometimes technical) reading. This one hits on a point that was on my mind:
Psychology is such a joke. A demonstration of future events influencing present events would be one of the most important (if not *the* most important) findings in the history of mankind. Yet this demonstration doesn't end up in Science or Nature, but is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology? And some wonder why psychology is still considered pseudoscience....
So....even if it were somehow demonstrated that future events influence present events, there would still develop a myriad of questions, such as: which events? why?
It's easy to surmise that, since "life as we know it" could only develop within a fairly narrow range of environmental conditions, that these conditions developed in order to accomodate "life". Such a thought, however, is basically useless. Might as well stick with the random/pure chance hypothesis. The math works easier that way.
Perhaps reproduction is life's attempt to overcome the nauseatingly obvious fact that individual organisms cease to function. Is there a more cogent example of precognition?
Richard Feynman indeed had it right - nobody knows (or ever will know, even if psi is a "real" phenomenon) how it could be like that.
It just is.
Posted by: Willie R. | December 29, 2010 at 05:19 AM
I used to study and apply astrology. I found that it was useful in determining character traits and life circumstances, sometimes with great accuracy, sometimes with astonishing inaccuracy. It is a tool for sharpening your innate intuition, that's for sure, even if you miss sometimes. I now have little interest in the subject and remember it only superficially. I have lived long enough to forget lots of things I used to know like how to use a timing light to tune my engine, or the feel of a breast of a woman under 30 years of age.
I used to know a guy who was an astrologer, healer with good talent. He also was an egotist of extraordinary dimension, eventually pronouncing himself a perfect sat guru and wiseman and eventually descending into madness and reduced to begging on the boardwalk in Venice, CA.
After not seeing him for several years I ran into him at the natural food co-op (before insanity had set in). I asked if he still practiced astrology. He said no, that he found it a clumsy tool compared to direct perception, or words to that effect. He proceeded to describe my past lives, one of which was as a goat herder that was murdered. I have not been able to verify that or the entity that would have such an existence in some other "life".
Finally, I come to my point. I believe there is pre-cognition. I have been to a number of "psychics" some mediocre at best and others very gifted.
I have had future life events and circumstances desribed by a couple of them so accurately and with such detail that all chance was virtually eliminated. Some of these predictions were years in advance and recorded on tape. (CD's were not invented yet.)
This was none of this stuff like you see on TV talk shows where the supposed psychic says "I see someone in your life with the letter "R". Then the person gets all excited and says "You must be talking about my uncle Arthur who died in 1972"! Then the psychic says he has a message from uncle Arthur. Such bullshit.
Posted by: tucson | December 29, 2010 at 09:41 AM
Buyer Beware! My advice to you is to read the following article:
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
After studying the above mentioned article you will understand why I agree wholeheartedly with the Dutch Researchers conclusion that the experimental evidence for precognition is not statistically sufficient.
Bayesian statistics is not difficult to understand (a quick tutorial can be studied here: http://web.vu.union.edu/~coulombj/Articles/SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY/Bayesian%20statistics%20for%20dummies/index.html)
As always...Mark Twain was way ahead of his time (precognition?) when he wrote: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Posted by: William_Nelson | December 30, 2010 at 05:05 AM
I have had precognitive dreams at different times in my life since chilhood. Nothing ever warns me that I will have one beforehand, they just happen at times. I have also had plenty of times in my life where I felt like something specific was getting ready to happen, and that very thing did happen.
I feel precognition is natural to the human species, and it probably happens to more people than we hear about. Most people don't talk about such experiences in fear that others will think them crazy.
We don't know everything, nor does our scientific community, nor our religious community. Why not have the open mindedness to think that anything in life is possible...even things that seem supernatural. Be open, and inquiring about such claims, and happenings.
I've enjoyed reading your blog. Keep posting! :-)
Posted by: Raven | January 09, 2011 at 12:15 AM
Without arguing tangibility and focusing on the point "events that haven't yet happened can influence our behaviour" I think of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Posted by: Danielle | February 23, 2011 at 02:24 AM