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Precognition (from the Latin prae-, "before" and cognitio, "acquiring knowledge"), also called prescience, future vision, future sight is an alleged psychic ability to see events in the future.

As with other forms of extrasensory perception, there is no reliable scientific evidence that precognition is a real ability possessed by anyone and it is widely considered to be pseudoscience. Specifically, precognition appears to violate the principle that an effect cannot occur before its cause.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people believe precognition is real; it is widely reported and remains a topic of research and discussion within the parapsychology community.

History

Antiquity

Since ancient times, precognition has been associated with trance and dream states associated with phenomena such as prophecy, fortune telling and second sight. These phenomena were widely accepted and reports have persisted throughout history, with most instances appearing in dreams.^[1]

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. His criticism of these claims appeals to the fact that "the sender of such dreams should be God", and "the fact that those to whom he sends them are not the best and wisest, but merely commonplace persons." Thus: "Most [so-called prophetic] dreams are, however, to be classed as mere coincidences...".^[2]

17th–19th centuries

The term "precognition first appeared in the 17th century but did not come into common use among investigators until much later.^[1]

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.^[1]

Early 20th century

In the early 20th century J. W. Dunne, a British 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. Dunne concluded that precognitive elements in dreams are common and that many people unknowingly have them.^[3][4] He suggested also that dream precognition did not reference any kind of future event, 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.^[5][3] In 1932 he helped the Society for Psychical Research to conduct a more formal experiment, but he and the Society's lead researcher failed to agree on the significance of the results.^[6][7] 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."^[8]

In 1932 Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped, murdered and buried among trees. The psychologists Henry Murray and D. R. Wheeler tested precognitive dreams by inviting the public to report any dreams of the child. A total of 1,300 dreams were reported. Only five percent envisioned the child dead and only 4 of the 1,300 envisioned the location of the grave as amongst trees. This number was no better than chance.^[9]

The first ongoing and organized research program on precognition was instituted by Joseph Banks Rhine in the 1930s at Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory. 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.^[10][11][12]

Samuel G. Soal 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.^[13] Rhine now described Soal's work as "a milestone in the field".^[13] However analyses of Soal's findings, conducted several years later, concluded that the positive results were more likely the result of deliberate fraud.^[14][14] The controversy continued for many years more.^[13] In 1978 the statistician and paragnost^{[clarification needed]} Betty Markwick, while seeking to vindicate Soal, discovered that he had altered his data to create all the extra hits and give the study its statistical significance.^[14] The untainted experimental results showed no evidence of precognition in the hits or the ratios.^[13][15]

Late 20th century

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.^[16] 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.^[17]

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.^[18][19] In 2014 the BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Francis Spufford revisited Priestley's work and its relation to the ideas of J.W. Dunne.^[20]

David Ryback, a psychologist in Atlanta, used a questionnaire survey approach to investigate precognitive dreaming in college students. His survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 percent reported some form of paranormal dream. He rejected many of these reports, but claimed that 8.8 percent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.^[21]

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:^[1]

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.

21st century

In 2011 the psychologist Daryl Bem, a Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, published findings showing statistical evidence for precognition in an upper tier journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.^[22] The paper was heavily criticised and the criticism widened to include the journal itself and the validity of the peer review process.^[23][24] Public controversy over the paper continued until in 2012 the results were published of an independent attempt to reproduce Bem's results, which failed to do so.^{[25][26][27][28][29]}

Scientific criticism

Claims of precognition are criticised on two main grounds:

• There is no known scientific mechanism which would allow precognition and it appears to break known scientific laws.^[30]


• There is no accepted scientific evidence that precognition exists.

Consequently, precognition is widely considered to be pseudoscience.^[31][32][33]

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.^[34]

Violation of natural law

Precognition would violate the principle of antecedence (causality), that an effect does not happen before its cause.^[35][34] Information passing backwards in time 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 physics."^[36]

Precognition contradicts "most of the neuroscience and psychology literature, from electrophysiology and neuroimaging to temporal effects found in psychophysical research."^[37] It is considered a delusion by mainstream psychiatry.^{[citation needed]}

Lack of evidence

A great deal of evidence for precognition has been put forward, both as witnessed anecdotes and as experimental results, but none has yet been accepted as rigorous scientific proof of the phenomenon.^{[citation needed]}

Alternative explanations

Various known psychological processes have been put forward to explain experiences of apparent precognition. These include:

• 
  Selection bias where people remember the "hits" and forget the "misses", remember coincidences more often than other non-coincidences, or when they were correct about a future event rather than instances when they were wrong. Examples include thinking of a specific person before that person calls on the phone. Human memory, it is argued, has a tendency to record instances when the guess was correct, and to dismiss instances when the guess was incorrect.


• 
  Unconscious perception by which people unconsciously infer, from data they have unconsciously learned, that a certain event will probably happen in a certain context. As with cryptomnesia, when the event occurs, the former knowledge appears to have been acquired without the aid of recognized channels of information.


• 
  Self-fulfilling prophecy and Unconscious enactment in which people bring events that they have precognized to pass, but without their conscious knowledge.

Some psychologists have explained the apparent prevalence of precognitive dreams in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto subsequent events.^[38] In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future.^[39] Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.^[40]

Dreams which appear to be precognitive may in fact be the result of the law of large numbers.^[41]

Suppose that you can remember ten incidents from a night's dreaming, at least when prompted by a similar incident occurring a day. Now consider how many incidents occur during a day, including those you read about in the paper, watch on television or hear from your friends. There are a vast number and it is highly probable that from time to time one of them will, at least to some extent, resemble one of those from your dreams. When one or more of these coincidences occur, people are likely to conclude that dreams foretell the future.

— Sutherland, Stuart, Irrationality: The Enemy Within (1994).^[42]

Cultural impact

Popular belief

Activities such as prophecy and fortune telling have been practised throughout history and are still popular today.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people still believe in precognition.^[19][43]

Some surveys have been carried out on psychological reasons for belief in precognition. A 1978 Gallup poll found that 37% of Americans surveyed believed in precognition.^[44] According to psychologists Tobacyk and Milford, belief was greater in college women than in men, and a 2007 Gallup poll found that women were more prone to superstitious beliefs in general.^[45] A 2013 study discovered that greater belief in precognition was held by those who feel low in control, and the belief can act as a psychological coping mechanism.^[46]

Literary references

J. W. Dunne's major work 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.^[47] Major writers whose work was significantly influenced by his ideas on dream precognition include H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley and Vladimir Nabokov.^[48][49]Philippa Pearce's 1958 childhood fantasy Tom's Midnight Garden won the British literary Carnegie Medal.^[50]

See also

• Déjà vu


• Fortune-telling


• Inner eye


• 
  Oneiromancy (Veridical dreaming)


• Retrocausality


• Retrocognition


• Second sight


• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience

References

Notes

Bibliography

• 
  Dunne, J. W. (1927). An Experiment With Time. A. C. Black. 
  


• 
  Inglis, Brian. (1985). The Paranormal: An Encyclopedia of Psychic Phenomena. Paladin.


• 
  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
  

Further reading

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Premonition.

• 
  Chris French. (2012). "Precognition Studies and the Curse of the Failed Replications". The Guardian.


• 
  Thomas Gilovich. (1993). How We Know What Isn't So: Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-911706-4
  


• 
  Terence Hines. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-979-4
  


• 
  David Marks. (2000). The Psychology of the Psychic (2nd Edition). Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-798-8
  


• 
  Richard Wiseman. (2011). Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-75298-6
  

External links

• 
  Robert Todd Carroll. (2013). "Precognition and Second Sight". The Skeptic's Dictionary.


• Nicolas Gauvrit. (2011). "Precognition or Pathological Science? An Analysis of Daryl Bem’s Controversial Feeling the Future Paper". The Skeptics Society.


• Robert Novella. (2000). "The Power of Coincidence: Some Notes on "Psychic" Predictions". Quackwatch.


• Stephanie Pappas. (2012). "Controversial Psychic Ability Claim Doesn't Hold Up in New Experiments". LiveScience.