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Precognition As a Form of Prospection: a Review of the Evidence

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Precognition As a Form of Prospection: a Review of the Evidence Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice © 2018 American Psychological Association 2018, Vol. 5, No. 1, 78–93 2326-5523/18/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cns0000121 TARGET ARTICLE Precognition as a Form of Prospection: A Review of the Evidence Julia A. Mossbridge Dean Radin Northwestern University and Institute of Noetic Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, California Sciences, Petaluma, California Prospection, the act of attempting to foresee one’s future, is generally assumed to be based on conscious and nonconscious inferences from past experiences and anticipation of future possibilities. Most scientists consider the idea that prospection may also involve influences from the future to be flatly impossible due to violation of common sense or constraints based on one or more physical laws. We present several classes of empirical evidence challenging this common assumption. If this line of evidence can be successfully and independently replicated using preregistered designs and analyses, then the consequences for the interpretation of experimental results from any empirical domain would be profound. Keywords: prospection, precognition, presentiment, anticipatory activity, retrocausality In this review, we discuss a set of controlled • Events in the physical world are mirrored experiments investigating what we will argue is an by our almost immediate perceptual recre- inherent human ability that allows for accurate ation of those events in essentially the same prediction of future events without inferential order that they occurred. means; in the vernacular this ability is known as • The recreation of physical events, first in precognition. While taking this line of research perception and later in memory, occurs in a seriously may seem beyond the pale to some, it is linear order based upon our original per- worth remembering that advances in psychology ception of events. Thus, given two events and physics have repeatedly demonstrated that and assuming perfect perception and mem- everyday intuitions about the nature of reality only ory, Event A is said to occur before Event partially reflect the nature of reality itself. It is B if at some point we remember Event A possible that such imprecise intuitions include the but we have not yet experienced Event B, concept of a fixed “arrow of time,” which Einstein and then later, after Event B occurs, we famously called a “stubbornly persistent illusion” remember both events. (Einstein & Hawking, 2007). • Event A may only be said to “cause” Event B if Event A precedes Event B. Everyday Intuitions About Events in Time • What we remember has occurred in the past. Common sense intuitions about events un- These everyday intuitions seem reasonable folding in time include the following: because they arise and are inculcated by innu- This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. merable conscious waking experiences (Moss- This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. bridge, 2015). However, as developments in Julia A. Mossbridge, Department of Psychology, North- psychology and physics have repeatedly shown, western University, and Institute of Noetic Sciences, Peta- even reasonable assumptions should be thor- luma, California; Dean Radin, Institute of Noetic Sciences. oughly checked using multiple methods to de- The first author was supported by Bial fellowship 97/16 and the second author by Bial fellowship 260/14. We thank termine if in fact they are correct. Caroline Watt and Imants Barušs for providing useful com- What methods can allow us to double-check ments on portions of this article. our intuitions about the nature of time? If our Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed everyday intuitions are correct and we assume to Julia A. Mossbridge, Department of Psychology, North- western University, Swift Hall, Room 102, 2029 N Campus that certain future events cannot be inferred Drive, Evanston, IL 60208. E-mail: [email protected] from present circumstances or extrapolations 78 PRECOGNITION AS A FORM OF PROSPECTION 79 based on past circumstances, and if we also cues (e.g., Bechara, Tranel, Damasio, & Dama- recognize that coincidences will occasionally sio, 1996), anecdotes alone cannot provide per- occur by chance, then the following predictions suasive evidence that precognition actually oc- should be borne out in carefully conducted ex- curs in dreams. periments: (a) Dreams will bear no relationship For scientifically valid evidence, we turn to to unpredictable future events beyond chance controlled experiments. Researchers have pub- levels; (b) individuals cannot consciously out- lished four well-controlled precognitive dream guess unpredictable future events at a rate experiments in peer-reviewed journals. By greater than chance; (c) behavioral measures “well-controlled,” we mean the following: (a) administered in the present will not be affected Participants were asked to attempt to dream by future events; (d) physiological measures about a target they would see the next day (i.e., will not be affected by future events; (e) events images, staged multisensory experiences, or in the future do not influence what occurs in the video clips); (b) a random-number generator present, except in cases of prospective planning was used to select one target from a pool of at (e.g., “I need to prepare for rain tomorrow, so least four available targets (e.g., a video clip of today I will purchase an umbrella”). a birthday party) and only that one target was Precognition is not required to guess that later shown to the dreamer; (c) on each trial the researchers have performed experiments that experimenters selected the target only after examine all of these predictions, nor that some dream reporting was complete and submitted to of these studies suggest that widely held intu- the experimenters, and before the experimenters itions about time are empirically falsifiable. read the dream reports; (d) independent judges Here we will describe and evaluate the literature naïve to the identity of the actual target judged in domains known as precognitive dreaming, the similarity between dream content and the forced-choice precognition, free-response pre- target; (e) judges’ responses were considered cognition, implicit precognition, and presenti- final. Researchers reported significant results ment. We will build from what we believe to be using binomial statistics (␣ϭ0.05, two-tailed the weakest to the strongest evidence for pre- tests) in three out of four of these studies (Krip- cognition. Along the way, and in a concentrated pner, Honorton, & Ullman, 1972; Krippner, form at the end of this review, we will suggest Ullman, & Honorton, 1971; Watt, 2014). The methodological improvements and future direc- fourth study (Watt, Wiseman, & Vuillaume, tions, as well as present some speculations 2015) did not show statistically significant re- about potential mechanisms. sults but the effect was in the predicted direction (ES ϭ 0.11; N ϭ 20 with one trial per person).1 Tests of Precognitive Dreaming Four other peer-reviewed experiments de- serve consideration (Luke, 2002; Luke & Zy- Anecdotal claims of precognitive dreams are ϳ chowicz, 2014; Luke, Zychowicz, Richterova, common, reported by 17–38% of survey par- Tjurina, & Polonnikova, 2012; Sherwood, Roe, ticipants (Lange, Schredl, & Houran, 2000; Simmons, & Biles, 2002), although they do not Parra, 2013). Many such claims have been re- fit our methodological constraints. The differ- ported, including dreams of historical figures ence is that in these additional studies, dreamers such as Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain. In viewed all items in the target pool after their the former case, on each of 3 nights before he This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. dreams had been recorded. This allowed each was assassinated, the bodyguard assigned to This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. dreamer to rank the similarity of all of the items Abraham Lincoln reported that the president in the target pool against his or her own dream mentioned dreams of his death (Lewis, 1994). content, which in turn simplified the judging of In the latter case, Mark Twain wrote that he dreamed of his brother’s death before his brother was tragically killed in a steamboat ac- 1 Another study (Schredl, Götz, & Ehrhardt-Knutsen, cident (Zohar, 1982). These stories are intrigu- 2010), which is sometimes mentioned alongside these other ing, but because of known frailties of memory, reports, did not make our list because although the specific target was selected after dreams were recorded, the prese- including confabulation and elaboration, and lected target pool contained only two targets, small enough because some events are predictable based on that the resulting outcome, while significant, is of question- nonconscious associations drawn from sensory able importance. 80 MOSSBRIDGE AND RADIN dream accuracy. But it also violated require- mospheric noise as the random source. The ment (a) above. This type of design may pose a judge then completed a preplanned outcome problem if dreams can indeed gather information measure, which was a ranking of the four clips about a future event. This is because all potential in the target pool ranging from 1 (most similar targets, rather than just the actual target, might to dream content)to4(least similar). After this confuse underlying precognition mechanisms in ranking process was completed and submitted, that they might send information about multiple the experimenters, who did not know the targets backward in time. This postulated “infor- judge’s ranking results, used the random num- mation confusion” could explain why none of ber generator to select one target video clip these studies produced a significant result. It is from the four ranked by the judge. The experi- worth reminding readers that the investigator’s menters then sent a website link to this one goal when exploring a hypothesis is to try to video clip to the dreamer.
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