New studies show people can anticipate future events

[Simulist]

All of the moments of precognitive recognition which I have experienced in my life have revolved around with subjects of erotic desire,

Same here.

Same here. But those "subjects of erotic desire" have at least twice included communal work projects (theatre pieces) I was involved in, and (so to speak) in love with. For instance: once, and for no apparent reason, I had a very strong & unprecedented feeling of dread. I just knew something bad was going to happen. This feeling - this "knowledge" - was followed, seconds later, by a bullet through the window.

I think anything you're strongly libidinally involved with for a fair period of time will tend to heighten your perceptions in all kinds of ways. And there is a kind or degree of physical exhaustion that induces or permits a weird mental wakefulness, a kind of ego-depletion that's conducive to "opening up".

I never thought of it that way, but ego-depletion is an excellent model for the conditions that facilitate psi!

And, actually, ego-depletion also seems to enhance both erotic experiences and successful romantic relationships.

Could that be because the ego forms a wall around our awareness, preventing us from seeing as fully as possible?

[LilyPatToo]

Ego depletion--that's interesting. It was during the years when I was most endangered that my psychic abilities manifested the most strongly and frequently. I've suspected since then that, in me at least, they are survival-linked. But, once switched on, they functioned in all sorts of situations--I was especially attuned to foreseeing auto crashes for a while, all of which involved strangers with no connection to me at all. Some of them were in the form of vivid, detailed dreams, but others happened when I drove over the exact place where the crash was about to occur. A woman scientist enrolled me in a dream/precognition experiment she was running back then (late 60's-mid-70's timeframe) and told me that my accuracy rate skewed her numbers. At the time, I was being severely abused and I've never come anywhere close to that level of frequency or accuracy since.

All this makes me very skeptical of the use of doing experiments like the one being discussed. However precognition works, it seems unlikely that it will show up in a lab setting, testing students or random volunteers. But I would love to see the results using genuinely gifted psychics. Does anyone else remember the related study (on mediums) done by a Dr. Schwartz a while back? I think the book was called The Afterlife Experiments or something like that. Was his methodology debunked in the end? Over the years, I came in contact with really gifted psychics whose abilities, unlike mine, were accessible most of the time. Those are the people I'd love to see tested for precognition. It's real, but whatever it is, our science isn't there yet.

LilyPat

[slomo]

All of the moments of precognitive recognition which I have experienced in my life have revolved around with subjects of erotic desire,

Same here.

Same here. But those "subjects of erotic desire" have at least twice included communal work projects (theatre pieces) I was involved in, and (so to speak) in love with. For instance: once, and for no apparent reason, I had a very strong & unprecedented feeling of dread. I just knew something bad was going to happen. This feeling - this "knowledge" - was followed, seconds later, by a bullet through the window.

I think anything you're strongly libidinally involved with for a fair period of time will tend to heighten your perceptions in all kinds of ways. And there is a kind or degree of physical exhaustion that induces or permits a weird mental wakefulness, a kind of ego-depletion that's conducive to "opening up".

I never thought of it that way, but ego-depletion is an excellent model for the conditions that facilitate psi!

And, actually, ego-depletion also seems to enhance both erotic experiences and successful romantic relationships.

Could that be because the ego forms a wall around our awareness, preventing us from seeing as fully as possible?

Yes, but what I like about the term "ego-depletion" is the "depletion" part, the idea that the maintenance of those walls requires a certain amount of energy (or something analogous to energy) that gets depleted.

[MacCruiskeen]

Yes, but what I like about the term "ego-depletion" is the "depletion" part, the idea that the maintenance of those walls requires a certain amount of energy (or something analogous to energy) that gets depleted

.

And these Objective Scientific Test situations promote the exact opposite: a nervous desire to do well, to succeed, to pass the exam: the investment of psychic energy in the maintenance, defence & actual expansion of the ego.

Maybe this is [part of the reason] why the results of these tests are regularly so disappointing.

[slomo]

Yes, but what I like about the term "ego-depletion" is the "depletion" part, the idea that the maintenance of those walls requires a certain amount of energy (or something analogous to energy) that gets depleted

.

And these Objective Scientific Test situations promote the exact opposite: a nervous desire to do well, to succeed, to pass the exam: the investment of psychic energy in the maintenance, defence & actual expansion of the ego.

Maybe this is [part of the reason] why the results of these tests are regularly so disappointing.

I think so, but another reason (I think) is that there is an intentionally evasive element to the phenomenon. Connected to the larger Intelligence of the Universe, of Reality Itself, psi is necessarily of an order higher than human consciousness (at the individual level as well as, probably, the collective human consciousness). The moment you try to test It, It becomes the Trickster.

[Pele'sDaughter]

I may have a strong intuition about something that's coming. I could say I know what it is, but I can't due to the limitless possibilities that spread out from there depending on countless possible intervening factors. That's what I always feel even when it's an imminent event, so I just get ready to react to some of the outcomes I think are probable. In my opinion there's always an uncertainty factor that prevents an infallible prediction. That seems normal to me and I wouldn't expect anything else.

[norton ash]

I may have a strong intuition about something that's coming.

I think most of us here do. Lately, for me the zeitgeist has been speeding up in a harmony of discord like the accelerating strings and sounds at the end of "A Day in the Life"... then there's a breath... then the one big final chord and echo.

From the news I hear, to the people I talk with, to the clouds in the sky and the changing weather, to the signs and wonders, to the puzzlement indifference acceptance

haul water, chop wood.

[LilyPatToo]

The most gifted psychic I've ever known told me that over her long life (she was elderly by the time I met her) she'd observed that events seem to fall into 2 categories--some can be accurately foreseen and others are dependent upon intervening circumstances. And that the farther away the incidents were in time, the more likely they were to fall into the latter category.

My own foreknowledge was mostly limited to events very close in time--a few minutes or hours to a few days away from my perception of them--so I'm not sure whether she was correct or not. I also have wondered many times whether part of her astonishing ability to read people didn't come partly from some kind of telepathy, combined with an ability to extrapolate. But not all--some of her predictions were detailed and spot-on and couldn't have been inferred from present circumstances at all.

It's a shame that there are so many frauds working the psychic angle and so many self-deluded New Agers polluting the data, too. Because I can't see a way to truly study pre- or retro-cognition or clairvoyance without testing the genuinely gifted people.

Still thinking about ego depletion. I think it's true that the current testing methods can't help but engage the ego and destroy whatever subtle mental state is needed to tap into the stream of time. But if a test subject is a pro and has done the work for a long time, they're likely to have found ways around that problem...

LilyPat

[JackRiddler]

.

MacC, it's so good to see you, and so sad at the same time not to actually be seeing you. I'm not sure if we've had any communication since the time in Berlin, but I fell into exhaustion the night before my flight and couldn't hit the anarch scene.

I remember a non-erotic thing that happened to me in Germany, in Cologne, many years ago. Perhaps the personal dimension was my best friend at the time, a hardcore alkie, and we did share one of those unspoken het-male erotic tensions. Out of nowhere one evening I had the damndest thought, which came like the ringing of a bell: "Dean Martin must be dead by now." Now I was aware that Dean Martin was, in fact, not dead, unless I'd missed some fresh development, and I must confess the health of this fine but to me not all that beloved singer had never been a concern or anything I'd given a prior thought. Accordingly it dropped back out of my thoughts. Two mornings later the BILD headlines (news was slower in those ancient times of the 1990s, remember?) informed me that, in fact, Dean Martin had died just about in the same hour as I'd thought his demise was due. Now I can class this without losing any ego as a coincidence. You have 10,000 sudden thoughts about contingencies every day so sometimes they'll happen to match something actually occurring just at that moment. Except for the loud and final pop with which this weird thought had come, very unlike the involuntary idle musings about Abe Vigoda or Amy Winehouse or Cheney or whoever.

slomo, lilypat et al.: Thanks for your accounts.

Something's there, and it's going to have a basis, but is also elusive to means of measurement and conscious control. It's crazy to think a serious empirical view of it can be gained by the present methods of quantified social psych. More serious are attempts to set up mind-circumstances where the reception becomes more frequent or pronounced, and your path, slomo, makes sense, in an area where we don't have a map for making sense of anything.

The difficulties with rigorous science approach is that it requires skepticism as default, but making psi work (instead of having it non-sequitur its way in, singing "Sway" with cocktail in hand and the Rat Pack in tow) almost certainly requires complete openness to the idea. You have to believe in it. This is susceptible to self-delusions, pitfalls and exploitation, and sorry, but it's a very safe Bayesian guess to expect that false positives are the case with 98 percent of publicly claimed psi phenomena (not including the random-seeming sudden premonitions we have all had).



.

[justdrew]

maybe...

So this article is only talking about one possible interpretation of the results... Here's another which I can illustrate by re-writing this first bit form the article:

Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also determine future experiences. This ability for the brain to "predestine the future" is often referred to as reality creation.

having 'remembered' something makes the randomization systems' quantum function slightly more likely to collapse one way. It's not 100% determinative because the rememberer's recollection isn't the only factor 'observing' the outcome of the random selection.

They could try altering lottery statistics ala PEAR for their next feat
not that PEAR ever attempted that to the best of my knowledge.

[slomo]

maybe...

So this article is only talking about one possible interpretation of the results... Here's another which I can illustrate by re-writing this first bit form the article:

Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also determine future experiences. This ability for the brain to "predestine the future" is often referred to as reality creation.

having 'remembered' something makes the randomization systems' quantum function slightly more likely to collapse one way. It's not 100% determinative because the rememberer's recollection isn't the only factor 'observing' the outcome of the random selection.

They could try altering lottery statistics ala PEAR for their next feat
not that PEAR ever attempted that to the best of my knowledge.

This is a problem that has vexed me since I first started accepting the reality of, well, whatever this is, psi I guess. When we experience precognition (and I am convinced that we all do, to a greater or lesser extent), are we "remembering" a pre-destined future, or are we creating it in advance using unknown faculties? It's really hard to say, because I can't imagine what would have caused me to dream up a "red socks" future that became manifest much later when I decided to move to New England, but on the other hand, in my psi class (mentioned in an earlier comment) we do talk about reality creation, as if we had free will to determine outcomes. My current way of resolving the conflict is to assume that we are multidimensional beings, unable to fully perceive our extension in time, and that we have the ability to navigate through 4-dimensional space-time towards preferred realities. But this is barely comprehensible to me. From a practical perspective, maybe it doesn't matter, and that successful navigation occurs when we believe (possibly erroneously) in freewill and actively try to create a desired reality.

[JackRiddler]

Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also determine future experiences. This ability for the brain to "predestine the future" is often referred to as reality creation.

But... But... That would mean...

I KILLED DEAN MARTIN! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

[justdrew]

Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also determine future experiences. This ability for the brain to "predestine the future" is often referred to as reality creation.

But... But... That would mean...

I KILLED DEAN MARTIN! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

aw don't sweat it, I'm not sure your involvement with the random system (Deano dies or not) would have been sufficient to have any impact at all, and even if so, it would be only a very small influence dwarfed by many closer 'observers'. Maybe you helped cause the newspaper editor to run the news front page though.

---

it's an angle they could use to further probe the effect, might give a way to magnify the observability of the effect.

[JackRiddler]

.

Okay, so I'm clean on Dean. But I did kill Sinatra.

I've got a much better and to me conclusive precog story, but it's very personal and I'm not inclined to tell it just now.

.

[justdrew]

.

Okay, so I'm clean on Dean. But I did kill Sinatra.

I've got a much better and to me conclusive precog story, but it's very personal and I'm not inclined to tell it just now.

.

Sinatra or Santa? Schrodinger's Santa may exist until you wait up all night for him

re precog stories... same here. I still wonder if seeing it fated it to come true or what. I doubt I'll collapse my own uncertainty about that anytime soon.