Is this evidence that we can see the future?

[Turborama]

By http://www.newscientist.com/search?rbauthors=Peter+Aldhous">Peter Aldhous

Extraordinary claims don't come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven't yet happened can influence our behaviour.

Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal.

What's more, sceptical psychologists who have pored over a http://www.dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf">preprint of the paper (PDF) say they can't find any significant flaws. "My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can't be true," says http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Psychology/people/facultypage.php?id=10378">Joachim Krueger of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-among-many/201010/why-i-dont-believe-in-precognition">blogged about the work on the Psychology Today website. "Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn't see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order."

Critical mass

The paper, due to appear in the http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/psp/">Journal of Personality and Social Psychology before the end of the year, is the culmination of eight years' work by http://www.dbem.ws/">Daryl Bem of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "I purposely waited until I thought there was a critical mass that wasn't a statistical fluke," he says.

It describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather than before it.

Full article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-evidence-that-we-can-see-the-future-to-be-published.html

ETA Here's an article about it on Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-social-thinker/201010/have-scientists-finally-discovered-evidence-psychic-phenomena">Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!

[brettdale]

1. Since no one that can see in the future

Can provide me with lotto numbers, I dont tend to believe it.

[sabrina 1]

9. But how do you know that people who DO win the lottery

weren't provided with the winning numbers by some 'message' from the future?

Just because you haven't received a message doesn't mean others haven't! Lol!

Now my brain hurts. This kind of thing is so incomprehensible to me. Probably because the part of our brains that could absorb this kind of concept, are too underdeveloped at this point in time. Maybe nature only allows us to use the parts of our brains we need and sometime in the future, we will evolve.

[Warren DeMontague]

2. All I'm going to say is, the smartest people in the world fully admit they don't understand time.

Sure, we all think we know what it is. But what the fuck is it?

[Quantess]

3. Fascinating!

Time exists so that everything doesn't all happen at once.

[pinboy3niner]

4. This is old news

We've been affected by knowledge of the future for decades already...




:evilgrin:

[Duer 157099]

5. I *knew* it!!

I did!

[tridim]

6. Everything is our universe is fuzzy in all directions

Time, space, energy, particles, light, gravity and consciousness. All fuzzy things.

It's amazing that our brains can make sense of it at all.

[Rex]

7. I guess time has less grip over cyberspace.

[tridim]

8. Thinking about this more, and I think I use it while learning guitar.

I'm teaching myself, so most of my practicing is what I call "noodling around". Just playing around with notes in a specific key, searching for cool sounding riffs. When I find one that sounds good, I always stop and practice it a dozen times so it gets burned into my quick recall memory.

Now, why did I play that riff in the first place?

Maybe we all do this subconsciously with other things in life?

[Scuba]

10. Hmmm. Interesting analogy. I'll have to put it to the test.

[yodermon]

11. paging James randi... n/t