Precognition—Paranormal or Perfectly Normal?
If people can predict the future over the scale of very short time periods, should we be surprised. After all, many musicophiles are quite able to name a song after hearing just the first one to three notes of the first bar of a song. Does that mean that they’re psychic or does it mean that the brain is predicting things all the time and can quickly assess patterns and utilize them to predict future occurrences? Detecting randomness is very hard (Williams 2008). And moreover people constantly see patterns where there really are none—largely as a function of our bias to find patterns in Nature. There’s no reason that such an error couldn’t occur the other way around. If the experimenter hasn’t taken certain precautions to ensure that his stimulus is presented randomly, it’s quite possible for individuals to devise patterns. Jonah Lehrer over at the Frontal Cortex points to some new, intriguing research regarding precognition. Daryl Bem, of Cornell University has released a paper containing nine experiments that purport to show that people can predict the future. I think they can predict the future in these experiments, but I don’t think there’s anything special or mystical about it.
Crucially, none of these experiments force participants to project predictions terribly far into the future, nor are any of them “temporal” in nature. By that, I mean to say that while there is order to the stimulus, one would expect real precognition to have a component of time. Participants are guessing the next stimulus regardless of how long it takes to guess. Suppose instead that If a computer were randomly running through images on a screen, could a participant say what image would be on the screen at, say 2:00pm? Could they simply name a time and image? That’s a fairly different task than foreseeing a stimulus arriving in the order dictated by some underlying pattern. That’s a task that the brain has to accomplish all the time. Jeff Hawkins likes to use the example of the nefarious door handle mover (see his TED talk for more on prediction in the mind). You are so used to the process of opening your door to your home that you no longer consciously think about it. This lack of consciousness is in large part due to the fact that the brain possesses a wrote procedure that no longer requires regular observation. But if I were to move your doorknob an inch to the right, you would miss reaching for it. Alarms would go off and your brain would need to re-observe the situation to see what had changed about what it expected.
Typical rationalist closed system observation. The statement “one would expect…” says it all. Since “your expections” define you and your world view you’ll never experience anything “outside your closed system of rational thinking”. There’s so much more I could say, but why bother. Personally I get what your doing as I’ve an overly analytical brain. It’s only when you find a way to transcend this process of observation (many avenues) that you’ll have “a sense” that goes way beyond the concept of “knowing” and moves into the intangable realms. Sounds silly doesn’t it? Big time woo factor. But it it what it is. You either live in “this realm” or you don’t and most likely never will…hense this conversation is moot. I exist in both.
If you had read Bem’s study, or at least pages 11-12, you would know that Bem used one of two sources of randomness for the study: 1) The Araneus Alea I True RNG hardware random number generator 2) A PRNG algorithm designed by George Marsaglia of the Diehard Battery of Tests of Randomness fame
Both pass the Diehard Tests, a feat that even some hardware random number generators fail to do. Computers designed to crack crypto codes cannot discern patterns in sequences generated by Diehard RNGs, even over millions of bits. The human brain won’t be able to find patterns in that, ever, let alone over a few short trials.
Do your research.