Psychic powers might sound like the stuff of superstition, but science reveals evidence that humans might have some ability to see the future.
A supernormal phenomenon dubbed “precognition” intrigued Professor Daryl Bem, of Cornell University, and led him to conduct an eight-year study with nine different experiments, involving over 1,000 participants.
“Of the various forms of ESP or psi, as we call it, precognition has always most intrigued me because it’s the most magical,” Bem told Cornell Chronicle in December 2010. “It most violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most non-physicists don’t know about them.”
Bem, who studied physics before becoming a university professor of psychology, may have some psychic researchers pleased with his study, but it has confounded other, more dubious researchers, who are troubled by Bem’s methods — despite these being mainstream and widely accepted in the scientific community.
He became interested in studying precognition when he was asked to find flaws in one psychic researcher’s successful experiment but couldn’t.
“The research and this article are specifically targeted to my fellow social psychologists,“ Bem said. ”I designed the experiments to be persuasive, simple, and transparent enough to encourage them to try replicating these experiments for themselves.”
Cleverly, he devised a method which was to take “well-known phenomenon in psychology and reverse their time course.”
Typically, scientists would present stimuli first, then measure the response. But for his experiment, Bem did the opposite, taking readings before the stimulus was applied. He hooked the participants up to a piece of equipment similar to a lie detector to measure their emotional response. Each, sitting before a computer screen, was shown randomly selected images; most of which were normal but some were of erotic or extremely negative imagery, such as the aftermath of a bloody murder scene.
“Your physiology jumps when you see one of those pictures after watching a series of landscapes or neutral pictures,“ Bem said. ”But the remarkable finding is that your physiology jumps before the provocative picture actually appears on the screen — even before the computer decides which picture to show you. What it shows is that your physiology can anticipate an upcoming event even though your conscious self might not.”
The participants in the nine experiments, it was shown, were able to predict future events. In another experiment, subjects were presented a list of words on a monitor and then asked to retype them from memory after. The computer then randomly selected some of those words; the participants were asked to retype the ones they remembered in a practice run. The results revealed a marked correspondence with the words generated by the computer, indicating some form of perception of future events.
Only one of the nine experiments failed to validate Bem’s hypothesis that psychic phenomena do exist. He said the odds these results being merely the product of chance was 1 in 74 billion.
The psychology professor, who came to Cornell in 1978 and retired in 2007, said he rarely works on a single topic for eight years, as he did this time, “but this one was a biggie and seemed like an appropriate thing to end my career with. The journal in which it will appear is the same journal that published my very first article 50 years ago,” he added.
He undertook studying the supernormal because current research strongly supports that it’s real. “I went in optimistic that I would be able to find it with these experiments,“ he said. ”After I started getting positive results, my undergraduate research team seemed puzzled by my enthusiasm and said, ‘But didn’t you tell us you thought these would work?’
“I said yes, but when I actually see them work, that’s very different.”
