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precognition or second sight
“To the present day, no one has come up with a persuasive experimental design that can unambiguously distinguish between telepathy and clairvoyance....Based on the experimental evidence, it is by no means clear that pure telepathy exists per se, nor is it certain that real-time clairvoyance exists." The evidence "can all be accommodated by various forms of precognition."--Dean Radin
Precognition is psychic knowledge of something in advance of its occurrence. The faculty of seeing into the future is called "second sight" if it is not induced by scrying, drugs, trance, or other artificial means.
Since there is no way to distinguish direct communication with another mind from communication with a past or future perception by that or some other mind, there is no way to distinguish telepathy from precognition. There is no way to distinguish telepathy, clairvoyance, retrocognition, or precognition from a mind perceiving directly the akashic record. There is no way to distinguish telepathy, clairvoyance, retrocognition, precognition, or perceiving the akashic record from perceiving what is directly placed in the mind by God (occasionalism). There is no way to distinguish telepathy, clairvoyance, retrocognition, precognition, perceiving the akashic record, or having perceptions directly implanted in our minds by God from perceiving the hidden record of all perceptions in the eleventh dimension that is vibrating in the intersection between the tenth and twelfth dimensions. I could go on, but it would be too annoying.
People can predict the future. We do it all the time, but we usually, if not always, do it by taking into account our experience, knowledge, and surroundings. Some predictions by psychics come true. So do some predictions by non-psychics. No doubt much of our anticipation of the future is unconscious and second nature, but it is based on quite natural and mundane abilities, not on mysterious or supernatural powers.
If a person could provide accurate and detailed descriptions of future events on a regular basis, that person would be celebrated as truly psychic. That no such person has ever existed in recorded history is a sign that stories of people with second sight are mythical exaggerations.
In 1994, biologist Rupert Sheldrake published a report on a psychic dog, Jaytee, a terrier who has precognition (Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals). In 1998, psychologists Richard Wiseman and Matthew Smith tried to replicate the Jaytee experiment and failed. (The belief in psychic dogs seems to be popular among true believers in the paranormal.)
One of the latest attempts at establishing the reality of precognition in a scientific experiment involves measuring galvanic skin response or brain activity (as measure by an fMRI) in presentiment experiments. Presentiment is a feeling that something strange or unusual is about to happen. If the feeling is especially foreboding, it is called a premonition. In presentiment experiments, however, what is measured is not the conscious feeling of anything, but the alleged unconscious effect on a machine of a physical response occurring before a stimulus is presented. Those doing this kind of research have no way of knowing that what they observe on their machines is in any way related to the stimuli they present. Assuming such a connection begs the question. The researchers might equally assume that the electrical resistance of skin in a subject or the blip of color on an fMRI caused the researcher to select the stimulus presented.
In 1993, Dean Radin got the idea "to monitor a person's skin conductance before, during, and after viewing emotional and calm pictures, and then see if the autonomic nervous system responded appropriately before the picture appeared" (2006, p. 184). He eventually did four tests with mixed results, but a meta-analysis saved the day. The first test was small (24 subjects) and he found that the subjects reacted 2 to 3 seconds after the presentation of the stimulus, as measured by a blip on a screen hooked up to a skin conductance measuring device. He also found blips occurring before the stimulus and he calculated their odds against chance at being 500 to 1, for what it's worth.
His second experiment had 50 subjects. All he says about it is that the "results were in the predicted direction, but weren't as strong as those observed in the first experiment." The third experiment had 47 subjects. He says it "resulted in a strong presentiment effect, with odds against chance of 2,500 to 1." The third experiment used different hardware, software, and pictures. The fourth study produced results that "weren't statistically significant."
Radin concludes:
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). (2006, p. 188, emphasis in the original)
That's how Radin sees his work. I see a mixed bag of results that assumes blips on a screen are caused by psychic means. The studies may be double-blind, but they don't use meaningful controls. Radin's kicker, however, is his meta-analysis. He lumped together the data from the four studies and produced a paper published in The Journal of Scientific Exploration (2004) called "Electrodermal Presentiments of Future Emotions." Voila! The odds against chance of getting just the results he got? 125,000 to 1, he says (2006, p. 188).
He concludes his defense of the evidence for presentiment with mention of several "replications," one of which involved testing earthworms. In the earthworm experiment, Radin says that the "results were very nearly statistically significant" (2006, p. 171). How comforting. Other "replications" involved using machines that measure heart rate and electrical activity in the brain, as well as skin conductance. All assumed that the various blips they produced were caused by paranormal phenomena.
"Based on the experimental evidence, it is by no means clear that pure telepathy exists per se, nor is it certain that real-time clairvoyance exists," says Radin. The evidence, he says, "can all be accommodated by various forms of precognition."
scientific evidence for precognition
The strongest evidence for precognition, according to Radin is a meta-analysis of all published reports in English of “forced-choice” experiments on precognition conducted between 1935 and 1987 done by Charles Honorton and Diane Ferrari (1997, p. 113). They found 309 studies in 113 articles by 62 investigators: nearly 2 million trials involving more than 50,000 subjects. There was very little uniformity in these tests. They involved different kinds of guesses (ESP cards, die face, symbols, etc.), different methods of randomization, different size samples, different time intervals between guessing and unveiling, etc. Only 23 of the 62 investigators (37%) got positive results. He doesn’t tell us what percentage of the studies got positive results. Yet, Radin proudly proclaims that the odds against chance of the results were on the order of 1025 to one. “This eliminated chance as a viable explanation,” he says (p. 114). Yes, it certainly does! He also eliminates the file-drawer problem as an explanation because he used some sort of statistical formula (not revealed here) to arrive at 14,268 as the number of papers that would have to be in the drawer to tip these odds back to chance. Radin concludes from this that “the precognition effect had been successfully replicated across many different experimenters.”
Radin notes that Honorton and Ferrari dumped the outliers, the top and bottom 10% (highest and lowest results). They then produced odds against chance of a billion to one. Radin calls this “effectively the same” as the result for all the studies. I don’t think ten million billion billion to one is “effectively the same” as a billion to one, except in the sense that they're both absurd.
When the quality of the studies was evaluated, there was no difference in outcome between the well designed and the poorly designed studies (though the quality of the studies improved over time). Radin thinks this is because the precognitive effect was “remarkably stable” (p. 115). He says Honorton & Ferrari identified eight elements of good experiments for precognition studies, but he only mentions four: 1) specifying how many samples would be collected; 2) planning the method of statistical analysis; 3) using proper randomization methods; and 4) using automated recording. In analyzing variables, they found that 42.6% of the studies that provided trial-by-trial feedback were successful, while none of the studies that didn’t provide such feedback were successful! (If you are not using true randomization, you might be measuring guesses based on pattern recognition rather than precognition.)
Radin thinks that because certain predictions were made that seem to have been validated, it shows that “precognition performance was not merely a statistical oddity” because it seems to vary in ways that made sense “psychologically.” He thinks this suggests some sort of lawful relationship going on that can guide future research. Skeptics might be concerned that a closer look at the randomization techniques and feedback methods might reveal the basis for this apparent lawful relationship. In any case, the whole idea of concluding anything important based on a meta-analysis of this kind seems preposterous. Finally, as psychologist Jim Alcock (2003) has pointed out many times: these researchers don't give the null hypothesis a chance.
At times, Radin seems to lose touch with reality, as when he posits testing for “unconscious precognition” to investigate “the possibility that the mind is in contact with its own future state.” He suggests we test whether future perceptions interfere with present performance on reaction-time tasks, but he doesn’t tell us how he’d do this. He also suggests we test whether future emotional states are detectable in present nervous system activity (p. 116). Again, he gives no hints as to what he might be talking about. Even if we found, for example, that certain nervous system activity (such as the production of adrenalin) precedes the feeling of anxiety, that would have no bearing on the precognition issue. (Maybe Radin was having a presentiment of experiments on presentiment that he would do later! In Entangled Minds [pp.166-168] he reports on the four small experiments he did on presentiment that were mentioned above. He got mixed results, but when he did a meta-analysis, guess what? He found that his results showed odds of 125,000 to 1 against chance!
See also clairvoyance, ESP, parapsychology, psi, psychokinesis, remote viewing, retrocognition, telepathy, part eight of my review of The Conscious Universe, and A Short History of Psi Research by Robert Todd Carroll.
further reading
books and articles
Alcock, James E. (1981). Parapsychology: Science or Magic? Pergamon Press.
Alcock, James E. (1995) "The Belief Engine," Skeptical Inquirer. 19(3): 255-263.
Alcock, James. 2003. "Give the Null Hypothesis a Chance," in Psi Wars - Getting To Grips With the Paranormal. ed. James Alcock, Jean Burns and Anthony Freeman. Imprint Academic, pp. 29-50.
Blackmore, S. J. (1980). "The extent of selective reporting of ESP ganzfeld studies," European Journal of Parapsychology 3:3 , 213–220.
Blackmore, Susan (2003). Consciousness: An Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Christopher, Milbourne. ESP, Seers & Psychics (Thomas Y. Crowell Co. 1970).
Christopher, Milbourne. (1975). Mediums, Mystics & the Occult. Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
Cole, Richard. "U.S. didn't foresee faults in psychic spies program," Associated Press, Sacramento Bee, Nov. 29, 1995, A2.
Frazier, Kendrick. editor, Science Confronts the Paranormal (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1986).
Frazier, Kendrick. editor. The Hundredth Monkey and Other Paradigms of the Paranormal, (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991).
Gardner, Martin. Science: Good, Bad and Bogus (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1981).
Gardner, Martin. On the Wild Side (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1992).
Hansen, George P. (2001). The Trickster and the Paranormal. Xlibris Corporation.
Hines, Terence. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).
Hyman, Ray. (1995). "Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena," Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 10 Number 1.
Keene, M. Lamar. The Psychic Mafia (Prometheus, 1997).
Luckhurst, Roger. 2002. The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901. Oxford University Press.
Marks, David. The Psychology of the Psychic (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000).
Neher, Andrew The Psychology of Transcendence (1980). This Prentice-Hall book is out of print. Used copies may be available from Amazon.com. It was reissued in 1990 by Dover Books as Paranormal and Transcendental Experience.
Randi, James. Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books,1982), especially chapter 13, "Put Up or Shut Up," where he gives accounts of tests done on several psychics who have tried to collect the $10,000 Randi used to offer to anyone who can demonstrate any psychic power. So far, no one has collected, even though the offer is now $1,000,000!
Scott, Christopher. (1988). Remote viewing. Experientia, 44, 322–326.
Stein, Gordon. editor, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1996).
Stenger, Victor J. (2002). "Meta-Analysis and the File-Drawer Effect." Skeptical Briefs.
Vistica, Gregory. "Psychics and Spooks, How spoon-benders fought the cold war," Newsweek, Dec. 11, 1995, p. 50.
Vyse, Stuart A. Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (Oxford University Press 2000).
Wiseman, Richard and Matthew Smith, "Can Animals Detect When Their Owners Are Returning Home?" British Journal of Psychology, 89:453, 1998.
Wiseman, Richard and Ciarán O’Keeffe. 2004. "Testing Alleged Mediumship: Methods and Results," by (paper presented to the Parapsychological Convention).
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updated 07/07/09
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