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CONTENTS

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* (Top)
* 1Precognitive phenomena
Toggle Precognitive phenomena subsection
* 1.1In religion
* 2History
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* 2.1Antiquity
* 2.217th–19th centuries
* 2.3Early 20th century
* 2.4Late 20th century
* 2.521st century
* 3Scientific reception
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* 3.1Pseudoscience
* 3.2Violation of causality
* 3.3Lack of evidence
* 3.4Alternative explanations
* 4See also
* 5References
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* 5.1Notes
* 5.2Bibliography
* 6Further reading

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PRECOGNITION

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paranormal sight of the future
Not to be confused with Precognition (Scots law).

Part of a series on theParanormal
show
Main articles
* Astral projection
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* Breatharianism
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* Paranormal fiction
* Paranormal television
* Precognition
* Preternatural
* Psychic
* Psychic reading
* Psychometry
* Reincarnation
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* Retrocognition
* Spirit photography
* Spirit possession
* Spirit world
* Spiritualism
* Stone Tape
* Supernatural
* Telekinesis
* Telepathy
* Table-turning
* Ufology

Reportedly haunted locations:

* India
* United Kingdom
* United States
* World

show
Skepticism
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* Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
* Debunking
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* James Randi Educational Foundation
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show
Parapsychology
* Anomalous experiences
* Apparitional experiences
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* False awakening
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* Anomalistics
* Argument from ignorance
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* Urban legend

* v
* t
* e

Precognition (from the Latin prae- 'before', and cognitio '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.[1] Precognition violates the
principle of causality, that an effect cannot occur before its cause.[2]

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[EDIT]

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.[3]
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".[4][5]

"Joseph's Dream", a painting by Gaetano Gandolfi, c. 1790. According to the Book
of Genesis, God granted Joseph precognition through prophetic dreams and the
ability to interpret the dreams of others.

IN RELIGION[EDIT]

In Judaism it is believed that dreams are mostly insignificant while others
"have the potential to contain prophetic messages".[6] According to the Book of
Genesis, God granted Joseph precognition through prophetic dreams and the
ability to interpret the dreams of others.[7]

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'.[8]

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.[9]

HISTORY[EDIT]

Throughout history it has been believed that certain individuals have
precognitive abilities, or that certain practices can induce such experiences,
and these visions have sometimes been associated with important historical
events.[3] Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people still believe in
precognition.[10][11] A poll in 2005 showed 73% of Americans believe in at least
one type of paranormal experience, with 41% believing in extrasensory
perception.[12][13]

ANTIQUITY[EDIT]

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.[3]

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 [of future events]" but also believed that "most
[so-called prophetic] dreams 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.[14]

17TH–19TH CENTURIES[EDIT]

The term "precognition" first appeared in the 17th century but did not come into
common use among investigators until much later.[3]

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.[3]

EARLY 20TH CENTURY[EDIT]

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.[15] Dunne concluded that precognitive elements in
dreams are common and that many people unknowingly have them.[16][17] 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.[16] Edith Lyttelton, who became President of the Society for
Psychical Research (SPR), regarded his theory as consistent with her own idea of
the superconscious.[18] 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.[19][20] 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."[21] An Experiment with Time was widely read and "undoubtedly helped to
form something of the imaginative climate of [the interwar] years", influencing
many writers of both fact and fiction both then and since.[22] According to
Flieger, "Dunne's theory was so current and popular a topic that not to
understand it was a mark of singularity."[23] Major writers whose work was
significantly influenced by his ideas on precognition in dreams and visions
include H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley and Olaf Stapledon.[24][25] Vladimir
Nabokov was also later influenced by Dunne.[26]

In 1932 Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped, murdered and buried among
trees. Psychologists Henry Murray and D. R. Wheeler used the event to test for
dream precognition, by inviting the public to report any dreams of the child. A
total of 1,300 dreams were reported. Only five per cent envisioned the child
dead and only 4 of the 1,300 envisioned the location of the grave as amongst
trees.[27]

The first ongoing and organised research program on precognition was instituted
by husband-and-wife team Joseph Banks Rhine and Louisa E. Rhine in the 1930s at
Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory. J. B. Rhine used a method of
forced-choice matching in which participants guessed the order of a deck of 25
cards, each five of which bore one of five geometrical symbols. Although his
results were positive and gained some academic acceptance, his methods were
later shown to be badly flawed and subsequent researchers using more rigorous
procedures were unable to reproduce his results. His mathematics was sometimes
flawed, the experiments were not double-blinded or even necessarily
single-blinded and some of the cards to be guessed were so thin that the symbol
could be seen through the backing.[28][29][30]

Samuel G. Soal, another leading member of the SPR, was described by Rhine as one
of his harshest critics, running many similar experiments with wholly negative
results. However, from around 1940 he ran forced-choice ESP experiments in which
a subject attempted to identify which of five animal pictures a subject in
another room was looking at. Their performance on this task was at chance, but
when the scores were matched with the card that came after the target card,
three of the thirteen subjects showed a very high hit rate; Rhine now described
Soal's work as "a milestone in the field".[31] However analyses of Soal's
findings, conducted several years later, concluded that the positive results
were more likely the result of deliberate fraud.[32] The controversy continued
for many years more.[31] In 1978 the statistician and parapsychology researcher
Betty Markwick, while seeking to vindicate Soal, discovered that he had tampered
with his data.[32] The untainted experimental results showed no evidence of
precognition.[31][33]

LATE 20TH CENTURY[EDIT]

As more modern technology became available, more automated techniques of
experimentation were developed that did not rely on hand-scoring of equivalence
between targets and guesses, and in which the targets could be more reliably and
readily tested at random. In 1969 Helmut Schmidt introduced the use of
high-speed random event generators (REG) for precognition testing, and
experiments were also conducted at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
Lab.[34] Once again, flaws were found in all of Schmidt's experiments, when the
psychologist C. E. M. Hansel found that several necessary precautions were not
taken.[35]

SF writer Philip K Dick believed that he had precognitive experiences and used
the idea in some of his novels,[36] especially as a central plot element in his
1956 science fiction short story "The Minority Report"[37] and in his 1956 novel
The World Jones Made.[38]

In 1963 the BBC 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.[39][10] In 2014 the BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Francis
Spufford revisited Priestley's work and its relation to the ideas of J.W.
Dunne.[40]

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:[41]

1. The dream should be reported to a credible witness before the event.
2. The time interval between the dream and the event should be short.
3. The event should be unexpected at the time of the dream.
4. The description should be of an event destined literally, and not
symbolically, to happen.
5. 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 during the 1980s. His
survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 per cent reported some
form of paranormal dream. He rejected many of these reports, but claimed that
8.8 per cent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.[42]

21ST CENTURY[EDIT]

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.[43] The paper was heavily criticised, and
the criticism widened to include the journal itself and the validity of the
peer-review process.[44][45] In 2012, an independent attempt to reproduce Bem's
results was published, but it failed to do so.[46][47][48][49][50] The
widespread controversy led to calls for improvements in practice and for more
research.[51][52]

SCIENTIFIC RECEPTION[EDIT]

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.[53]

PSEUDOSCIENCE[EDIT]

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.[1][54][55]

VIOLATION OF CAUSALITY[EDIT]

Precognition would violate the principle of antecedence (causality); that is,
that an effect does not happen before its cause.[56][53] 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 a physics-based approach.[2]

Precognition would therefore also contradict "most of the neuroscience and
psychology literature, from electrophysiology and neuroimaging to temporal
effects found in psychophysical research."[57]

LACK OF EVIDENCE[EDIT]

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.[58][59]

ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS[EDIT]

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.[60][61]
* Self-fulfilling prophecy and unconscious enactment, where people
unconsciously bring about events which they have previously
imagined.[citation needed]
* 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.[citation
needed]
* 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.[62]
* 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.[63] 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.[64]
* 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.[65] This view is not universally
held, with others instead treating them as distinct phenomena.[66]

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.[67]

SEE ALSO[EDIT]

* List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
* Oneiromancy: Divination using dreams.
* Remote viewing
* Retrocognition: Direct knowledge of past events at which one was not present.
* Third eye: Organ of mystical vision.

REFERENCES[EDIT]

NOTES[EDIT]

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30. ^ Hines (2003), pp. 78–81.
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32. ^ Jump up to: a b Hyman (2007).
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39. ^ Inglis (1986) p.90.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY[EDIT]

* Dunne, J. W. (1927). An Experiment With Time. A. C. Black.
* Flieger, Verlyn; A Question of Time: JRR Tolkien's Road to Faërie, Kent State
University Press, 1997.
* Hines, Terence (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books.
ISBN 978-1-57392-979-0.
* Hyman, Ray (2007). "Evaluating Parapsychological Claims". In Robert J.
Sternberg; Henry L. Roediger; Diane F. Halpern (eds.). Critical Thinking in
Psychology. Cambridge University Press. pp. 219–223. ISBN 978-0-521-60834-3.
* 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. ISBN 978-0-309-07309-7