Fearless Future Forecasting

by Richard

Dude, I knew you were going to say that.

Okay, fine. Not really. However, considering this post is about precognition (that is, knowing the future), I really couldn’t help myself.

So, yeah. Here’s the deal. I’ve always been fascinated with the subject of possible psionic powers, which include telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, clairvoyance and precognition, amont others. I’ve always thought that stuff was just completely cool.

Unfortunately, I’ve never actually believed in it. To quote from the X-Files: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That is, if I’m going to believe someone can move things with the power of their minds alone, I’m going to need more than Uri Geller moaning and rubbing a spoon. If you know what I mean.

I’m going to need scientific proof before I can actually start to think (note I didn’t say believe. Science doesn’t require belief. Science just is.) this sort of thing exists. Amazingly, it turns out people are actually conducting serious investigative research into just this sort of thing and one researcher might have found evidence for the existence of precognition. That is, people might be able to perceive the future before it arrives as the present.

In a research paper titled Feeling the Future, recently accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Prof. Daryl Bem at Cornell University presents some rather compelling empirical evidence that in some cases — and with weak but highly statistically significant accuracy – many human beings can directly perceive the future.  Not just predict it based on the past.

Bem decided he wanted to look into the existence of precognition (consciously perceiving the future) and premonition (unconsciously perceiving the future).

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms.  Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process.  Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective.

His new paper explores precognition and premonition empirically, via reporting the results of 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 Cornell University students.

What I loved most about this research (other than the fact that it might just prove psi powers exist after all) is the manner in which Bem tested for it. He set up a series of cards and the participants had to tell him if an erotic card was going to come up. Yep. You read that right. He tested for porn. From the future.

How is that anything less than awesome?

This is one dude I’m going to keep an eye on. I can’t wait to see where this research leads.