A few years ago, I read something by a statistician, who set out to find some proof of the (reputed) ability of the human mind to perceive future events (precognition). He reasoned that if people had some ability to forsee future events, then accidents (like plane crashes, railroad collisions, etc.), should show abnormally LOW numbers of victims-the people who had prcognitive ability would be warned and woud avoid taking those flights/trains. This seems reasonable to me-was such a study ever published? And, did the results imply that at least some people have some precognitive abilities? :eek:
There’re a lot of holes in that hypothesis. For one, what percentage of humans have precognitive ability? I tend to think 0% is the most correct answer, but even those who believe in such things tend to peg the percentage as being pretty low. Also, precognitive abilities, as described by those who believe in them, tend to be unreliable. They can’t be turned on and off at will, which makes it awfully convenient when they don’t work in a labratory setting. So, assuming that there is such a thing as precognitive ability, looking at the number of survivors from various accidents and disasters won’t tell you anything. By most accounts, there aren’t enough pre-cogs in the general population to make a statistically significant change in the body counts. If a particular route is high traffic, any pre-cogs who pass on taking that trip will likely be replaced by a non-pre-cog, thus keeping the body count maxed out. Because the ability doesn’t always work, a pre-cog might never get a premonition of doom before boarding a soon-to-be-crashing aircraft. And, of course, there will be some portion of people who are precognitive who don’t recognize that ability within themselves and shrug off the premonition, and die in the resulting accident.
Then while you may be able to find people who avoided disaster by some feeling, it’s hard to interview the people who avoided perfectly safe situations by being similarly abso-tivly sure something bad would occur.
As Miller says, there are a lot of holes in this.
Assuming precognition exists, why not just ask people to tell you when they get it?
Assuming precognition exists, why don’t people who foresee a crash warn others?
There may also be a statistical correlation between low numbers of passengers and increased chance of crashes (unpopular time of travel and pilots are tired). Any statistician would know you have to remove such factors before making a correlation.
I’ve been googling for the last half hour or so trying to answer the OP’s question (or rather, to find the study in question), without much luck.
However, the nutcase crowd is out in full swing on this one. Here’s my favorite site so far: Institute for Precognitive Studies.
Since I was looking for studies about accidents, I came across a number of sites talking about “Precognitive Guilt” (they didn’t call it that, that I can remember), about the guilt of knowing an accident will take place but being unable (or just didn’t) warn people about it. Assuming it (the guilt, not the precognition) is real, it’s an interesting phenomenon: real guilt over the effects of an imagined ability.
Since I can’t find a cite, I’m going to go with opinion to answer the OP: If such proof had really been found, it would alter out understanding of physics so fundamentally (information travelling backwards in time and all) that we would have heard about it. In any event, a single study isn’t going to “prove” anything to scientific standards, and others have already pointed out some of the flaws in the study’s form, anyway.
However, assuming the OP’s memory is correct, I’m glad to see the fringe science crowd at least studying some of their fantastically fictional phenomena, rather than just declaring them to be true because “wouldn’t it be cool if it were?”
I knew this thread was gonna be started.
My favourite is this one, which IIRC even has some loopy university prof behind it (hence the .edu domain). In fact, re-reading the OP, I bet it was this he’d heard about. (See the link on The EGG Story).
They basically “interpret” their data after the fact, and match it to whatever they decide was an “important” event at the time. The Wikipedia page on it is fairly reasonable (today).
And harder still to interview those that felt perfectly safe to travel, then died in a horrible accident.
If only that were true! Maybe then I could sleep!
Don’t get me wrong: my credence level for the paranormal is so close to zero that it makes virtually no difference, and I’ve always been a strong supporter of groups like CSICOP. But something sure seems to travel backwards in time! Even if you don’t buy into the transactional interpretation of QM, raw, pre-interpreted QM seems very much to show that a particle’s history is created or changed by observation alone. Thereby implying some extremely bizarre kind of backwards time travel.
At a CSICOP conference in Boulder many years ago, James Randi was showing me around and introducing me to all kinds of people I’d never imagined ever meeting (what a treat!) One of them was whom Randi considered one of the very, very few respectable paraphysicists alive (whose name I can’t recall just now, but it was German (Schmidt?)), who believed he was getting tiny, tiny effect sized but genuine positive results from a random (not pseudo-random) number machine that was ostensibly influenced by an observer’s thoughts. One variation of his experiments he’d either already done or was considering (I can’t recall which) was that he’d run the random output to tape and only then allow subjects to try to influence the results on the physical tape, essentially in the past!
At the time I thought that was laughable and ridiculous, but since that time I’ve come to understand QM better and have realized that QM doesn’t laugh with me. At least not about the backwards in time aspect of “creating” the tape’s history retroactively/retrospectively from the present.
But I guess this isn’t the place to debate all that. I’m planning a GD thread about it, but it’ll probably be a while yet. I just wanted to make that observation about the kinda-sorta-maybe time-travel aspect of QM.
But to quote Mr. Gumby: “My bwain hurts!”
I have another criticism of the study.
Suppose there is an airline that has a wonderful safety record (Qnts) and another with a dreadful one (**rfl*t).
How full do you think Qantas planes will be?
How full will Aeroflot be?
How many accidents will Qantas have?
How many accidents will Aeroflot have?
So the less popular airline will have more accidents with less passengers on board each time. Why would this prove anything to do with precognition?
I quite agree, for precognition to exist (in truth) would require a complete rewriting of the laws of Physics. i don’t know how anyone could sense future events, unless;
-the future is pre-ordained
-OR, certain individuals ahve the ability to influence events
I think that what is called “precognition” might actually be the second case: if we accept that complex events (like the movement of the stock market) result from the gyrations of unstable systems (ht e “butterflies wings” effect, could it be possible that small acts may cause huge outcomes?
take the airplane crash scenario: a person receives a premonition that the air flight he is going to take will crash. he communicates his fear to the flight attendent (unconsciously). She becomes concerned, and decides to order a second cabin check-and it is found that the main door is not sealing correctly-the captain calls a mechanic to check the door-and the mechanic reports that the door would have blown open at altitude, causing a crash!
Is this an explanation of “precognition”?
This reminds me of another experiment, the name of which I can’t recall right now, where data from a random source was analysed for anomalies and these were matched up against ‘significant world events’. IIRC it was sponsored by a reputable university, but I think the significance of the events was pretty laughable and looked very arbitrary.
Ah, this was it:
ralph,
although it’s interesting to discuss possible psychic powers, wouldn’t it be better to actually observe them first?
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say “no.”
Something along the lines of Cassandra Syndrome perhaps?
Father John Bosco ( founder of the Saliesian order) was a 19th century Italian priest. he was an energetic advocate of the poor, and founded a series of trade schools for the children of the poor. from the time he was about 25, Fr. Bosco had a huge number of very vivid dreams-in these dreams he was shown:
-the building of a new city in Brazil (the capital Brasila), which was not built until 1958! (Fr. Bosco had this dream ca. 1880)
-the Saliesian schools in Boston, NYC, and Los Angeles ( again , long before a the first Saliesian priest ever set foot in the USA).
-a horrific dream of WWI-Fr. Bosco experienced this dream over 20 years before WWI broke out!
So, do some people have the ability to peer beyond the veil of time?
Of course not.
In studies of this nature – and I include the PEAR studies at Princeton – the effects measured are so tiny as to be close to the “noise” level of the data. It is difficult to separate randomness from significant numbers. And with such a low level of outstanding data, if any, the possibilities of other factors influencing the outcome is greater than ever. That’s what makes such studies unreliable, especially when such a scientific-overturning premise is proposed.
And don’t forget that “significant” numbers may have been found, not by advance planning, but by after-the-fact data mining. Given any set of data and not restricted by what is being looked for, you can find all sorts of interesting correlations and anomolies. These tend to disappear upon replication.
As it stands now, if we limit ourselves to research data with any semblance of controls / consideration for more likely & mudane explanations, there is zero substantiating evidence supporting precognition.
And there will not be any until Sunday, April 12th, 2015, when…ouch! OK, OK, leaving now…