One of the most widely reported characteristics of ESP is that it operates across time as well as space. This raises fundamental questions. Nothing seems so basic to our sense of reality than that time flows in one direction from the past to the present and on into the future. Our personal lives and our civilization are built around the notion of this one-way flow of time. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, physicists are not at all sure what time really is. Einstein wrote, in a letter of condolence to the wife of his best friend, “for us faithful physicists, the separation between past, present, and future has only the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.” In 2001 around two-dozen top physicists, historians, and philosophers gathered at a symposium in Minnesota to debate the nature of time. There was such a marked lack of agreement that one professor of physics reported, “1 don’t see any evidence that they’re talking about different parts of the same elephant”
People have no doubt reported experiencing glimpses of the future in all cultures throughout recorded history. Often referred to as foreknowledge, future knowledge, premonition, or as the parapsychological term ‘precognition,’ this experience continues to assume major importance in today’s world. A Gallup Poll in 2005 found that three in four people in America believe in the paranormal and that dreams of future events make up more than half of the ESP experiences people report).
The presence of precognition can very easily be studied in controlled conditions using Rhine’s Zener cards. The subject simply names the order in which the cards will appear before they are shuffled and examined. Rhine conducted a large number of these forced-choice tests. Over the years the research design has been improved with cards being shuffled by machine and still more recently using random number generators (RNG’s) to produce truly random number targets. In forced-choice studies, the subject is asked to guess which one of a fixed number of possible targets will be randomly selected at some point after the guesses are made. Targets might be ESP card symbols, the face of a tossed die, or colored lamps. If the subject’s guess matches the selected target, a hit is recorded.
In 1989 Honorton and Ferrari published a meta-analysis of all forced-choice precognition experiments that had been conducted between 1935 and 1987 consisting of 309 studies by 62 different investigators. This huge database involved nearly two million individual trials by over 50,000 subjects. The interval between the time guesses were made and the future targets were generated ranged from milliseconds to a year. The odds against chance for the combined 309 studies turned out to be ten million billion billion to one. For the results to have resulted from a file drawer problem would have required 14,268 unpublished unsuccessful studies, clearly highly unlikely. Of the 62 different investigators, 23 had reported successful studies eliminating the possibility that the overall results could have been due to a few wildly successful experiments. The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that precognition is a genuine effect demonstrated by scientifically controlled studies successfully replicated across many different experimenters
In recent years researchers have sought other ways of looking at precognition to get around the incredibly boring nature of forced-choice tests. One approach that proved fruitful relates to the observation that precognition appears to operate on an unconscious as well as a conscious level. Unconscious precognition, known as presentiment, is based on the assumption that we are constantly and unconsciously scanning our future and preparing to respond to it.
We know that our body has a predictable reaction to a novel stimulus, known as the “orienting response,” in which it momentarily tenses up while evaluating whether to fight or flee. If presentiment occurs, then one way to demonstrate it would be to test whether this body response occurs before the novel stimulus occurs. Dean Radin designed a research strategy to do this. A subject is seated in front of a blank computer screen. Electrodes are attached to the palm of one hand to record tiny fluctuations in skin conductance, and in the other hand she holds a computer mouse. To begin a trial, she presses the mouse button and waits for a picture to appear on the screen. The computer selects a picture at random from a large pool of images, waits a certain period, say five seconds, then display it for three seconds, after which the screen goes blank again for ten seconds. A message then appears on the screen telling her to start the next trial whenever she’s ready. The subject’s skin conductance is continuously monitored while she repeats 30 to 40 trials in one session. The images appearing on the computer screen are either calm pictures of such things as landscapes, nature scenes, or peaceful appearing people, or emotional pictures involving erotic, violent, or accident scenes
Radin describes four such experiments that he conducted of this type involving 24 to 50 participants in each. The combined odds against chance for these four experiments was 125,000 to 1 in favor of a genuine presentiment effect.”According to Radin ,these studies suggest that when the average person is about to see an emotional picture, he or she will respond before that picture appears (under double-blind conditions.
The concept of presentiment holds that not only will a physiological response occur before the emotional stimulus but that the strength of that response will increase as the emotionality of the future stimulus increases, indicating that specific information about the emotional content of the future image is perceived in the present. Radin investigated this effect in his four experiments and found that this to occur with odds against chance of 125 to L
Radin is very aware of the difficulties presentiment poses for scientists and philosophers because it challenges commonsense beliefs about causality and time. To provide a persuasive case for evidence supporting its existence every conceivable loophole would have to be carefully examined and tightly closed. A number of alternative explanations would have to be ruled out which, he noted, might include sensory or statistical cues about the upcoming targets, data collection errors, measurement or analytical artifacts, selective reporting biases, participant or experimenter fraud, or a variety of conscious or unconscious anticipatory strategies. In the process of designing, running, and analyzing his experiments, Radin stated, “all of these factors were considered and none could explain the results”
The Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, has gathered the largest collections of ESP cases in the world. Among these are 433 reports of precognition in which there was enough threat of danger to merit intervention. In two-thirds of the cases nothing was done. In the one-third of cases in which individuals did try to intervene to change the future they’d foreseen, successes attempts outnumbered failures two to one.
This raises serious questions having to do with free will and the nature of reality. If we see the future, are we locked into acting out the preview? And if not, and we do act to change the future that we’ve glimpsed, then could it really be the future, since it didn’t actually happen?
Although reports trickle in to the Rhine Center at a steady rate, they flooded in following September 11, 2001. Anecdotal reports and news stories revealed that scores and probably hundreds of individuals all over the country had premonitory dreams and waking fantasies prior to the events of 9/11. These took the form of inexplicable dread or sudden illness for those employed in the Twin Towers that kept them away from their jobs that day, or intuitions that prompted them to simply turn around and go home before the planes crashed into the WTC or the Pentagon. Stories also surfaced from people who had changed their travel plans at the last moment because of a vague, gnawing feeling that something was not quite right.
Some years earlier William Cox, a North Carolina researcher and businessman, was able to investigate a possible precognitive effect involving train crashes. He compared the number of passengers present on trains involved in accidents between 1950 and 1955 with the passenger load on the same run of each of the preceding seven, fourteen, twenty-one, and twenty-eight days. In every case he discovered that fewer people rode the trains that crashed or were wrecked than rode similar trains that did not crash. The odds against a chance explanation for this were greater than one hundred to one.
The four planes that were involved in 9/11 were only 21 percent full. Knowing if premonitions caused the high vacancy rates on the doomed planes would require Cox’s approach. That is, vacancy rates throughout the year would have to be compared against the rates on that date. Researchers have been unable to do this because the airlines have been unwilling to provide vacancy information. In fact, all the data for the September 11 flights were impounded by the FBI
Dossey, L. (2009). The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives. B
Radin, D. (2009). Entangled Minds.
Radin, D. (1997). The Conscious Universe.