Precognition

Precognition (from the Latin 'before', and 'acquiring knowledge') is the purported psychic phenomenon of seeing, or otherwise becoming directly aware of, events in the future.

There is no accepted scientific evidence that precognition is a real effect, and it is widely considered to be pseudoscience. Precognition violates the principle of causality, that an effect cannot occur before its cause.

Precognition has been widely believed in throughout history. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people believe it to be real; it is still widely reported and remains a topic of research and discussion within the parapsychology community.

Precognitive phenomena

Precognition is sometimes treated as an example of the wider phenomenon of prescience or foreknowledge, to understand by any means what is likely to happen in the future. It is distinct from premonition, which is a vaguer feeling of some impending disaster. Related activities such as predictive prophecy and fortune telling have been practised throughout history.

Precognitive dreams are the most widely reported occurrences of precognition. Usually, a dream or vision can only be identified as precognitive after the putative event has taken place. When such an event occurs after a dream, it is said to have "broken the dream".

In religion

In Judaism it is believed that dreams are mostly insignificant while others "have the potential to contain prophetic messages". Hinduism has a subsystem of psychology called Indian psychology with dreams believed to contain information about the future. There are seven classifications of dream or 'swapna', in which those which become 'manifest' are called 'bhāvita'. Precognition has a role in Buddhism with dreams believed to be 'mind-created phenomena'. Those dreams which 'warn of impending danger or even prepare us for overwhelming good news" are considered the most important.

History

Throughout history it has been accepted that certain individuals have precognitive abilities, and such visions have sometimes been associated with important historical events. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people still believe in precognition. A poll in 2005 showed 73% of Americans believe in at least one type of paranormal experience, with 41% believing in extrasensory perception.

Antiquity

Since ancient times precognition has been associated with dreams and trance states as well as waking premonitions, giving rise to acts of prophecy and fortune telling. Oracles, originally seen as sources of wisdom, became progressively associated with previsions of the future.Inglis (1986), Chapter on "Precognition"

Such claims of seeing the future have never been without their sceptical critics. Aristotle carried out an inquiry into allegedly prophetic dreams in his ''On Divination in Sleep''. He accepted that "it is quite conceivable that some dreams may be tokens and causes f future events but also believed that "most o-called propheticdreams are, however, to be classed as mere coincidences...". Where Democritus had suggested that emanations from future events could be sent back to the dreamer, Aristotle proposed that it was, rather, the dreamer's sense impressions which reached forward to the event.

17th–19th centuries

The term "precognition" first appeared in the 17th century but did not come into common use among investigators until much later.

An early investigation into claims of precognition was published by the missionary Fr. P. Boilat in 1883. He claimed to have put an unspoken question to an African witch-doctor whom he mistrusted. Contrary to his expectations, the witch-doctor gave him the correct answer without ever having heard the question.

Early 20th century

In the early 20th century J. W. Dunne, a British soldier and aeronautics engineer, experienced several dreams which he regarded as precognitive. He developed techniques to record and analyse them, identifying any correspondences between his future experiences and his recorded dreams. He reported his findings in his 1927 book ''An Experiment with Time''. In it he alleges that 10% of his dreams appeared to include some element of future experience. He also persuaded some friends to try the experiment on themselves, with mixed results. He noted a strong cognitive bias in which subjects, including himself, were reluctant to ascribe their dream correspondences to precognition and determinedly sought alternative explanations. Dunne concluded that precognitive elements in dreams are common and that many people unknowingly have them.Dunne (1927). He suggested also that dream precognition did not reference future events of all kinds, but specifically the future experiences of the dreamer. He was led to this idea when he found that a dream of a volcanic eruption appeared to foresee not the disaster itself but his subsequent misreading of an inaccurate account in a newspaper. Edith Lyttelton, who became President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), regarded his theory as consistent with her own idea of the superconscious. In 1932 he helped the SPR to conduct a more formal experiment, but he and the Society's lead researcher Theodore Besterman failed to agree on the significance of the results. Nevertheless, the Philosopher C. D. Broad remarked that, "The only theory known to me which seems worth consideration is that proposed by Mr. Dunne in his Experiment with Time." ''An Experiment with Time'' was widely read and "undoubtedly helped to form something of the imaginative climate of he interwaryears", influencing many writers of both fact and fiction both then and since. According to Flieger, "Dunne's theory was so current and popular a topic that not to understand it was a mark of singularity." Major writers whose work was significantly influenced by his ideas on precognition in dreams and visions include H. G. Wells television programme ''Monitor'' broadcast an appeal by the writer J.B. Priestley for experiences which challenged our understanding of Time. He received hundreds of letters in reply and believed that many of them described genuine precognitive dreams.Priestley (1964). In 2014 the BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Francis Spufford revisited Priestley's work and its relation to the ideas of J.W. Dunne.

In 1965 G. W. Lambert, a former Council member of the SPR, proposed five criteria that needed to be met before an account of a precognitive dream could be regarded as credible:
#The dream should be reported to a credible witness before the event.
#The time interval between the dream and the event should be short.
#The event should be unexpected at the time of the dream.
#The description should be of an event destined literally, and not symbolically, to happen.
#The details of dream and event should tally.

David Ryback, a psychologist in Atlanta, used a questionnaire survey approach to investigate precognitive dreaming in college students. His survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 percent reported some form of paranormal dream. He rejected many of these reports, but claimed that 8.8 percent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.

21st century

In 2011 the psychologist Daryl Bem, a Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, published findings showing statistical evidence for precognition in the '' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology''. The paper was heavily criticised and the criticism widened to include the journal itself and the validity of the peer review process. In 2012, an independent attempt to reproduce Bem's results was published, but it failed to do so. The widespread controversy led to calls for improvements in practice and for more research.

Scientific reception

Claims of precognition are, like any other claims, open to scientific criticism. However the nature of the criticism must adapt to the nature of the claim.Hyman (2007), page217.

Pseudoscience

Claims of precognition are criticised on three main grounds:
*There is no known scientific mechanism which would allow precognition. It breaks temporal causality, in that the precognised event causes an effect in the subject prior to the event itself.
*The large body of experimental work has produced no accepted scientific evidence that precognition exists.
*The large body of anecdotal evidence can be explained by alternative psychological mechanisms.
Consequently, precognition is widely considered to be pseudoscience. Alcock, James. (1981). ''Parapsychology-Science Or Magic?: A Psychological Perspective'' Pergamon Press. pp. 3–6.

Violation of causality

Precognition would violate the principle of antecedence (causality), that an effect does not happen before its cause. Information passing backwards in time (retrocausality) would need to be carried by physical particles doing the same. Experimental evidence from high-energy physics suggests that this cannot happen. There is therefore no direct justification for precognition from physics. Taylor, John. (1980). ''Science and the Supernatural: An Investigation of Paranormal Phenomena Including Psychic Healing, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, and Precognition by a Distinguished Physicist and Mathematician''. Temple Smith. p. 83. .

Precognition would therefore also contradict "most of the neuroscience and psychology literature, from electrophysiology and neuroimaging to temporal effects found in psychophysical research."

Lack of evidence

A great deal of evidence for precognition has been put forward, both as witnessed anecdotes and as experimental results, but none has been accepted as rigorous scientific proof of the phenomenon. Even the most prominent pieces of evidence have been repeatedly rejected due to errors in those experiments as well as follow-on studies contradicting the original evidence. This suggests that the evidence was not valid in the first place.

Alternative explanations

Various known psychological processes have been put forward to explain experiences of apparent precognition. These include:

* Coincidence, where apparent instances of precognition in fact arise from the law of large numbers.
* Self-fulfilling prophecy and unconscious enactment, where people unconsciously bring about events which they have previously imagined.
* Unconscious perception, where people unconsciously infer, from data they have unconsciously learned, that a certain event will probably happen in a certain context. When the event occurs, the former knowledge appears to have been acquired without the aid of recognised channels of information.
* Retrofitting, which involves the false interpretation of a past record of a dream or vision, in order to match it to a recent event. Retrofitting provides an explanation for the supposed accuracy of Nostradamus's vague predictions. For example, quatrain I:60 states "A ruler born near Italy...He's less a prince than a butcher." The phrase "near Italy" can be construed as covering a very broad range of geography, while no details are provided by Nostradamus regarding the era when this ruler will live. Because of this vagueness, and the flexibility of retrofitting, this quatrain has been interpreted by some as referring to Napoleon, but by others as referring to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, and by others still as a reference to Hitler.
*False memories, such as Identifying paramnesia and Memory biases, where the memory of a non-existent precognitive event is formed after the real event has occurred.Hines (2003). Where subjects in a dream experiment have been asked to write down their dreams in a diary, this can prevent selective memory effects such that the dreams no longer seem accurate about the future.
* Déjà vu, where people experience a false feeling that an identical event has occurred previously. Some recent authors have suggested that déjà vu and identifying paramnesia are the same thing. This view is not universally held, with others instead treating them as distinct phenomena.Herman N. Sno (1991);
The deja vu experience: Remembrance of things past?
, ''American Journal of Psychiatry'' 147(12):1587-95. DOI:10.1176/ajp.147.12.1587

Psychological explanations have also been proposed for belief in precognition. Psychologists have conducted experiments which are claimed to show that people who feel loss of control in their lives will turn to belief in precognition, because it gives them a sense of regaining control.

See also

* Inner eye
* Third eye
* Oneiromancy (Veridical dreaming)
* Retrocognition
* List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
* Dream

References

Notes

Bibliography

*
* Flieger, Verlyn; ''A Question of Time: JRR Tolkien's Road to Faërie'', Kent State University Press, 1997.
*
*
* Inglis, Brian. (1986). ''The Paranormal: An Encyclopedia of Psychic Phenomena''. Paladin (Grafton) 1986. (1st Edition Granada 1985)
* Priestley, J.B. ''Man and Time''. Aldus 1964, 2nd Edition Bloomsbury 1989.
*Wynn, Charles M., and Wiggins, Arthur W. (2001). ''Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends...and Pseudoscience Begins''. Joseph Henry Press.

Further reading

*Chris French. (2012)
"Precognition Studies and the Curse of the Failed Replications"
''The Guardian''.
*David Marks. (2000). '' The Psychology of the Psychic'' (2nd Edition). Prometheus Books.

{{Parapsychology

Paranormal terminology
Parapsychology
Prediction
Psychic powers
Pseudoscience
Spiritual faculties