((I wasn’t completely sure where to put this one, it seems to belong in IMO but I also want honest truthful answers as well… I’m sure if it’s in a wrong spot it’ll be moved ))
I’ve always had the thought that everyone has a the very least a small amount of psychic abilities from seeing things to hearing things. Does anyone else think this, as well?
Here are my own personal experiences with this: (sorry these are anecdotal at best, but they are what I want to use to explain)
When I was a bit younger I would suddenly think of a t.v. show’s episode that I hadn’t seen in a long time (obviously these were reruns) and the next time I would see the show, that episode would air. (Now I realize this is probably more on the ends that somewhere in the back of my mind I knew the order of the episodes of that t.v. show and therefore knew that that one would air next)
(I don’t know about this one, you make the judgement call for me) I was at a friend’s of the families and I was sitting on a fire escape near the other house, this fire escape was on another building that over looked a field. This happened to be during Easter and my Aunt and Uncle had shooed us kids away so they could hide eggs. Anyways I don’t remember anything else that happened, just that I was sitting there. Next I knew we were called over and I was told I wasn’t allowed to hunt the eggs because I had been watching my Aunt and Uncle hide them. I was mad because I had NOT been watching them at all, and yet they both said I was. (Turned out I was allowed to hunt for whatever reason) But when we were leaving I noticed an odd mark on my wrist -right wrist I think- small dots, no bigger than a freckle, and spaced to make an exact diamond shape on my wrist. The dots disappeared later -they never hurt, nor did they ever itch, or feel like bumps.
My senior year in High school my boyfriend would come and pick me up on some days after school. This one day a friend of mine had begged a ride home from us. We agreed and we started out.
We got to the first road that would take us to her house but she didn’t want to go that way, she wanted to go the longer way. I was dead-set against it. I wanted to take the first road, Lindsay did not. We argued for a few seconds, then finally my boyfriend tired of us arguing, Lindsay got her way and we went the long way.
Well… this way had (has) a lot of winding curves and also has a small bridge. So happens that it had recently (within the week) ice/snowed, and my boyfriend hit a bad patch on the road, lost control of the car, we skidded, hit the guard rail of the small bridge, tore off the front fender of his car and we stopped. (thankfully none of us was hurt besides a small bruise for Lindsay, the Air Bag for me, and my boyfriend hit the side of his door).
Anyways, I find it interesting that I was so against going that way when normally I wouldn’t have cared.
I was probably not older than twelve, in sixth grade. I had been chatting in a chat-room for a small time and was becoming friends with a lot of the people there. This one day at school, for no reason I could figure out I was having an awful day. Just absolutely terrible.
When I got home, I logged on, like I usually did and there another friend from the chat-room messaged me before I even go to the room. Telling me that one of the regular chatters had passed away in his sleep. He was thirteen years old and had HIV. None of us knew it except for a few that had stayed later the night before (I was not one of them) and he had told those that had stayed that night.
(last one) it was the day of 9/11, I was walking from my first period class to my second, so probably around 9 or 10 am on that day and all of a sudden I got this feeling that something was wrong, something had just happened. My highschool had (has) an open lay out, so when you walk from one class to the next you’re outside, I doubt completely that it was something easy like I over heard a radio a teacher had on. When I got to my second class, that’s when I heard.
So those are mine. Here’s the main questions: how probable is something like this? I know some police will use psychics for some things, how reliable is that, and how much trust do they put into those people?
Not to mention having things like twins’ knowing when another twin is hurt, or a mother knowing about their child.
In 1988 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences gave a report on the subject that concluded there is “no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.”
A detailed study of Sylvia Browne predictions about missing persons and murder cases has found that despite her repeated claims to be more than 85% correct, “Browne has not even been mostly correct in a single case.”
How probably is it people will have a number of coincidences happen through their life and remember them? And that statistically some people will have more coincidences than others? Very likely.
0% probable. It’s been tested and proven to be false repeatedly. Over and over.
Police, generally, don’t use psychics. The ones that do are fools. The psychics they hire don’t do anything other than guess, and they’re usually wrong.
Twins don’t know when the other is hurt. That just…doesn’t happen.
Your stories don’t even make sense even if you were psychic. How do diamond dots on your arm correlate to Easter egg hunts? They don’t, except in your mind when you want them to be related. And assuming you have a car accident one day, if you argued about which path to take, then by your logic there’s a 100% chance that at least one of you is psychic. Had you wrecked going the other route, would you have called your friend psychic? Third, people have bad days all the time without people dying on them. Does someone die every time you have a bad day? If not, why does this coincidence mean you’re psychic? If you’re not psychic, does that mean people have to wait for you to have a good day before they’re allowed to die?
You don’t even have to go through your stories to find some subconscious reason for knowing things- they don’t even reach that level of spooky. They’re obviously mere coincidence.
So you can continue to think “that everyone has a the very least a small amount of psychic abilities” if you want to (and you obviously do), but you’ll still be wrong.
From what I recall reading, it’s not that the police who respond to these psychics are fools, it’s that they are required to follow up on every lead, no matter how crazy the person is on the phone. That’s how psychics claim they have been assisting the police.
There’s a thread in another forum in which the poster claimed she prayed really, really hard and then God sent her subtle clues of proof. Therefore God exists.
That’s not reasoning or logic. It’s confirmation of what you already want to believe by putting order on the randomness of everyday life. It’s exactly what you’re doing as well.
Humans are innately pattern-makers. They will take any random set of data and try to have it make sense by imposing a story on it. This happens every day to every one in a thousand different ways. Psychics and woo-woo artists depend on this for suckers. But mostly we sucker ourselves. Randomness is too hard and scary for people to cope with.
I had this EXACT thing happen to me when I was younger. It was weird. I had this unexplainable connection to Gilligan’s Island. I would think of a scene then often within 2 days, or even that same day the same show would air. When I’m asked if I have psychic abilities this is one of the situations I bring up.
Of course it helps that there were only 98 episodes, and that I saw at least 5 episodes a week and I probably had at least 15 memories that I recalled every week. But I swear, I’m totally psychic, and if you don’t believe me you just don’t have an open mind.:dubious:
Rather than true or false, how about unproven? Confirmation bias best describes what I think is happening. You remember the times your psychic premonitions turn out to be correct and simply forget the times they don’t. It’s very, very human.
Even if someone has sought and interpreted evidence in a neutral manner, they may still remember it selectively to reinforce their expectations. This effect is called “selective recall”, “confirmatory memory” or “access-biased memory”. Psychological theories differ in their predictions about selective recall. Schema theory predicts that information matching prior expectations will be more easily stored and recalled. Some alternative approaches say that surprising information stands out more and so is more memorable. Predictions from both these theories have been confirmed in different experimental contexts, with no theory winning outright.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Your examples are entirely unremarkable. (And #2 doesn’t even make sense to me.)
How many times do you think about a TV episode and it doesn’t come on next? How many times do you feel like something is wrong but nobody you know had died, and no terrorist attacks have occured?
We are all constantly having thoughts and emotions while various things contantly happen to us and around us. It is inevitable that on occasion our thoughts or feelings or imaginings will happen to appear very similar to something that actually happens. This is called coincidence, and has absolutely nothing to do with psychic ability.
I’m a TV psychic too. But it seems to only happen when I’m really actively watching a show, like 5-10 episodes a week. I’d bet that I really have a handful of episodes rolling around in my head at any one time, and the one “hit” is the one that amazes and astounds me.
But more than 98 episodes. This used to happen to me with MASH.
There are certainly lots of people who think so. However, you will find (already have found) that the members of this discussion board tend to be skewed towards the skeptical, or at least those who require scientific proof of such claims. And there isn’t any scientific proof.
The mind is a funny thing. All sort of random things will run through it and every once in a while, one of these random things matches up with something that really happens. But it’s not repeatable. Nobody’s ever been able to even choose cards with success much better than random chance.
You might be interested in the work of James Randi or Michael Shermer. Granted, they are somewhat predisposed to think that paranormality is all hokum but they use objective methods rather than rejecting claims out of hand. Randi in particular does serious study of such claims and gives folks ample opportunity to demonstrate their ability in a controlled test, which nobody has ever passed.
I’ll never forget when I was driving my car back in 1973 (OK, my mom’s car) and I was singing “Smoke on the Water.” Then I turned on the radio and they were playing Smoke on the Water! Of course, that was a long time ago, it was a big hit overplayed by all the rock stations, and I sing in the car all the time. So this one event doesn’t indicate that I have ESP.
I read an article in Skeptical Enquirer by a fellow who had watched and followed up on every episode of one of the TV “real psychic” shows. The actual success rate for the psychic was ZERO. Yet they renewed the show…
What does this example have to do with anything? Why would you think that dots on your wrist had anything to do with the other stuff in that story, and why does it have anything to do with being psychic?
Stuff like this happens to everybody at some point. It’s not psychic anything. It’s a coincidence, and it only seems interesting because when you don’t see the coincidence, you don’t remember it. Most of your examples aren’t that unusual or remarkable (to the extent I can understand what you’re saying).
The first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m., the second hit at 9:03, and the third plane hit the Pentagon at 9:37, and by 10 one of the WTC towers was collapsing - so it’s very possible you did overhear somebody talking about it. If not, you had a bad feeling for no particular reason and you remember it because something bad actually was happening. I expect that you’ve had “a feeling that something was wrong” lots of times and you don’t remember most of them.
))