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PRECOGNITIONFiona Steinkamp

Do some people have a paranormal power to ‘see’into the future? There are innumerable anecdotes ofevents foretold, of course. But is there any scientificevidence of the ability? Fiona Steinkamp, a leadinginvestigator of the paranormal, believes there is.

Lots of people would like to be able to foresee future events.Just think of what you could do. You could win the lottery, oryou could warn of future disasters and prevent them fromhappening.

Although this sounds as if it belongs to the realm of sci-ence fiction, many ordinary people report having had suchexperiences. For most people, these experiences come justonce in a lifetime and, often, they are not particularly in-formative. For example, take the following account:

When I was newly married I got homesick one day.I just had to go home. Billy fussed a little, but gave into me and ordered the one and only taxi to take meto the morning train. I remember how joyful I was andhow I danced about the house waiting for the taxi.Billy and the driver teased me, but I was too happy tocare. Just as he bought the ticket, cold fear grippedme. I started to cry. ‘Give him back the tickets,’ Isaid. ‘Please, Billy, we can’t go on this train.’ Billywent into one of his rages, but the ticket man reachedout and took the tickets. ‘Do as she says. Always doas she says.’ We got into the taxi and all the way tothe hotel they asked me why. I did not know. I justcried. At dinner that night there was a commotion.The taxi man was coming toward me, pushing peo-ple to one side and upsetting chairs. He cried, ‘Howdid you know not to go on that train? It wrecked atthe next town. The car you always ride in turned overand everyone was killed.’

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However, some experiences can be surprisingly full of detail,as illustrated by the one below:

I was working as a street car operator. I dreamed Iwas operating a car on the ‘W’ line going south on FStreet. I pulled up at Avenue 26, loaded passengersand waited for the signal to change. I proceeded andcrossed the intersection with F street crossing Av-enue 26. A short block south of Avenue 26 there isan exit for automobile traffic only. The exit goes ontoF Street and it is a one-way exit, but it is possible,and too often done, to make an illegal left-hand turnand go south on F Street.

Now back to the dream: As I crossed the intersec-tion, I saw a northbound ‘5’ car approaching. I wavedto the motorman and went on. Suddenly, withoutwarning, a big truck, painted solid bright red, cut infront of me obstructing my view of the exit, and thetruck, making the illegal turn, could not see my carbecause of the other street car. There was a terrificcrash […] the truck was overturned. There had beenthree people in the truck – two men and a woman.The two men were sprawled on the street, dead, andthe woman was screaming in pain. The woman lookedat me with the largest bluest eyes I had ever seen.She repeatedly shouted at me, ‘You could haveavoided this.’

I was quite shaken by the dream.I reported for work and for one reason or another I

was given a run on the ‘W’ line. I had put the dreamout of my mind. On my second trip, I pulled up toAvenue 26 just as in the dream and loaded passen-gers. I was waiting for the signal to change, still notthinking of the dream, when I suddenly became sickat my stomach. As I left the interchange, I saw, justas in my dream, a ‘5’ car. Now I was definitely sick.As I waved to the motorman, the dream came to me.

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I immediately shut off the power and applied thebrakes. A truck, not a big truck completely red as inmy dream, but a panel delivery truck with space foradvertising on the side painted over with bright red,shot directly into my path. Had I been moving at all, Iwould have hit it.

There were three people in the truck, two men anda woman. As the truck passed in front of me, thewoman leaned out of the window and looked up atme with the same startled, large blue eyes I had seenin my dream, and she waved her arm hand, thumband forefinger circled in the familiar ‘okay’ gesture.

On the face of it, these accounts are impressive. In theparapsychological literature, experiences in which some-one has apparently foreseen a future event without the useof the normal five senses or clever guesswork are calledprecognitive experiences. But can people’s experiential ac-counts be used as evidence for the paranormal?

There are a number of problems with appealing to peo-ple’s experiences as evidence for precognition, for exam-ple. Firstly, nothing extraordinary may be happening at all.For instance, if someone often dreams of plane crashes,sooner or later it is likely that an actual plane crash willoccur within one or two days of that person having one ofthose dreams. The dreamer may subsequently believe theyhave foreseen a future event, when really the correspond-ence was just coincidence. Indeed, any apparently precog-nitive experience may potentially be due solely to coinci-dence, because we don’t know how likely a given dream isfor a given person. Nor can we calculate the probability of agiven event occurring in the world at a particular time. Coin-cidence is always a possible explanation.

Secondly, once someone sees a connection between theirpremonition and the later event, in their excitement theymay mistakenly believe that there had been more corre-sponding details in their dream than there actually were.

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The dreamer may even unwittingly forget all the small de-tails in the dream that did not later match up with the futureevent. When you hear the report second-hand, you hearonly what that person remembers of the premonition andthe future event. This is not necessarily an objective or reli-able account.

Thirdly, you cannot know whether there were subtle cuesin the environment which may have led the person quitenormally to have had that apparent precognition. For instance,in a survey I conducted, one participant wrote:

In the autumn of 1957 I had a very vivid dream offlying over a wide green valley with here and therecolumns of smoke arriving from what appeared to bebush fires. About two months later I was flying out toKenya and somewhere over Uganda looked out on toa valley which appeared to be identical to that whichI had seen in my dream. Even the location of thebush fires appeared in reality to be the same as inthe dream.

This might appear to be a good instance of a precognitiveexperience. Surely it is unusual for anyone to go to Kenyaand the bush fires, with the location of a particular fire, are aspecific detail. However, the participant concluded the de-scription of the experience with the following paragraph:

However, maybe the dream did not come out of theblue. Ten years earlier I had flown down to Nairobiand perhaps I had a residual memory of seeing thesame or similar valley.

With this further information, the experience sounds a lotless impressive. In this instance the participant had thoughtcritically about their apparent premonition. However, manypeople may simply be unaware that their ostensibly precog-nitive experience has arisen from forgotten background in-

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formation or subtle cues in the environment. It is impossibleto know which other, unreported factors may have played arole in bringing about any given ostensibly precognitive ex-perience.

There is therefore always reason to doubt whether a per-son’s experience really did directly tap into a future event.However, this does not mean that these experiences shouldbe ridiculed or ignored. Surveys of such experiences haverevealed some interesting and replicable findings. For in-stance, precognitive experiences are reported mostly bywomen, frequently occur in dreams and are about eventsthat cannot realistically be prevented by an individual per-son. However, these findings do not let us know whether theexperiences really are precognitive; they simply inform usthat these types of experiences have very specific charac-teristics and, perhaps, that the people who report them areparticular types of people. Thus, although some peopleclearly interpret their experiences as paranormal, it is lessclear whether their interpretation is correct. It appears thatone can neither prove nor disprove whether these experi-ences have a genuinely paranormal origin.

Experimental work into the paranormal started because itwas recognized early on that experiences could not provideproof of the paranormal. Experiments have many advantagesover experiences in determining whether it might be possi-ble to foresee future events without use of the normal fivesenses or clever guesswork.

A typical forced-choice precognition experiment might in-volve someone seeing the backs of three cards on a compu-ter screen (see diagram 1, first screen, on next page). Theparticipant has to guess which card will later have a circleon it. The participant makes the guess and the guess isstored on the computer. The computer then randomly se-lects one of the three cards, saves its choice onto disk andgives that card a green circle. The computer compares itschoice with that of the participant to see if the two match. Itthen displays its choice to the participant and informs them

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123456123456123456123456123456123456

select which square willlater have a circle in it

123456123456123456123456123456123456

123456123456123456123456123456123456

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how they did (diagram 1, second screen). The participantcan then see if they guessed correctly or if they got it wrong.

Here, we know, firstly, that the participant will get a cor-rect guess by chance one in three times. It is therefore pos-sible to determine statistically whether participants areguessing the correct card more often than would be expectedby chance. Secondly, the participant is not able to changetheir mind after they have selected a card. It is not the par-ticipant who decides whether they guessed correctly. Thirdly,there is no possibility of any normal, sensory cueing. Thusthe experiments do not have the problematic aspects thatexperiences have. If you would like to have a go at this typeof experiment yourself, you can visit http://moebius.psy.ed.ac.uk/~fiona/fifiintro.html

Do experiments like these show any evidence of precog-nition? Freeman conducted a series of successful experi-ments in the 1960s with school children. It did indeed ap-pear that precognition was possible under controlled condi-tions. The children tended to guess correctly more oftenthan you would expect by chance alone.

However, should you believe me when I inform you of this?People can have selective memories about experimentalevidence, just as they can with their personal experiences.If I want to believe in the paranormal, I might simply forgetabout the experiments that didn’t quite work out and be par-ticularly impressed by those that had striking results. HenceI will remember those experiments by Freeman and forgetthe unsuccessful ones by Blackmore.

FIRST SCREEN SECOND SCREEN

Diagram 1. Example of a simple forced-choice experiment.

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SORRY!Wrong guess!

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Similarly, if I were a strong disbeliever in the paranormal, Imight tell you only about the experiments that failed andbrush aside any evidence of good results.

One way of getting an overview of all experimental evi-dence in a given area – both that in favour of and that againstthe hypothesis – is a technique called meta-analysis. Thisenables researchers to gather all available experimental dataand to arrive at a statistic that tells us whether the experi-ments as a whole are successful. So far, all meta-analysesof precognition experiments have revealed overall positiveresults, indicating that precognitive ability may be possible.The analyses have generally shown that the results are notdue to poorly-conducted experiments or to forgotten unsuc-cessful studies.

The experimental evidence therefore indicates that somereal-life experiences could theoretically be due, at least inpart, to information being gained psychically.

However, some people might bring purely philosophicalarguments into play. For instance, some might argue thatprecognition is logically impossible. If a person could fore-see a future event, then that future event has had an effectbackwards in time. The future event is seen now, in thepresent. Yet causation usually works not from the future tothe present but from the present to the future. Usually, I firstturn on the tap and this causes water to come out. It is notthe case that water first comes out and this subsequentlycauses me to turn on the tap. The problem is, if such phe-nomena are possible, how is it that they occur? At this pointin time, there is no universally agreed answer.

Parapsychology will doubtlessly remain a controversial fieldfor years to come. It is the controversy that makes it sointeresting. Potentially, it is a field in which individuals canmake real contributions. And it is also not so easy to dis-miss as some would have you believe.

Fiona Steinkamp is research fellow at the department ofpsychology, University of Edinburgh.