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A friend of mine is a little witchy, a little woowoo. She gets “feelings” before something happens. Me, I roll my eyes. Something is always going to happen. The claim is too easy.
Deep down, though, I am jealous. Trapped inside my head since, oh, third grade, I have no gut feelings. No hunches, no prophetic dreams, no instincts or reflexes. I never developed them. As a result, my only bridge to the future is worry, and thanks to a vivid imagination, my worries are too lurid to take seriously.
My friend takes all her feelings seriously. That itself may be her secret. She has learned, by taking note of the times she is right, to trust her gut. Is that trust accurate or misplaced? I no longer care. When she is making a decision or facing a crisis, she has more to draw upon than I do. Her way of proceeding offers shortcuts to her own truest emotions (I can lie to myself about mine), and she has an entirely different realm to consult. She pays closer attention to the subtleties in her responses to the world because she believes they are significant. Next to this spooky process, my factual lists of pros and cons look weak and milky. Not only do they leave me unsure what will happen next, but they tell me nothing about what I ought to prefer.
Precognition is, of course, paranormal, a realm best suited to drunken inquisitions of one’s childhood Ouija board or scary movies on stormy Friday nights. But really, if there is a normal, why would there not be a paranormal? The category is defined, quite simply, as powers of the mind that go beyond the normal. Any other human ability—singing, running, playing chess—has a jaw-dropping upper range of extraordinary proficiency. Why not cognition? And if there are paranormal ways to think, could they not include precognition?
Time is doubtless more complicated than it seems. In the West, we think of time as an arrow, shot forward along a line. But Einstein called this a “stubbornly persistent illusion.” Maybe time is not linear at all, and events can be foreseen before they happen. A tingle runs down my spine as I type those words—yet I do not believe them. I am stuck with the arrow, unable to imagine time turned upside down or inside out. Still, I find myself nodding at a remark in the sober Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Whilst few philosophers believe that this power exists, the question of whether it is even possible that it should exist raises deep questions about time, causation, and the fixity or otherwise of the future.”
In the 1990s, Dr. Dean Radin, parapsychologist and professor at the University of Nevada, began to test his belief that consciousness is not linear, not separate, but a fluid universal phenomenon. Who knows, maybe something slips now and then and we see the future, because the brain has gotten quantum-entangled with itself. Radin set out with a hypothesis: if consciousness transcends time, reactions to a stimulus will occur before the stimulus actually appears. Measuring physiological responses with an EEG, he found that when people were expecting a positive image, there was little reaction, but when they correctly predicted a negative image, their brain activity spiked in advance.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. This could just be guesswork, not “predictive anticipatory activity.” After a certain number of happy images, you start to dread the next one, bound to be negative soon…. Nonetheless, the results were deemed statistically significant and have been replicated nearly three dozen times. And the underlying possibilities were not exactly new. The belief that humans can predict the future, or the notion that time folds in upon itself—these ideas have threaded through different cultures for thousands of years. The most sophisticated science fiction—a genre that has shown a disconcerting knack of coming true—plays with the same themes, melding minds together and letting time run backward.
Bah! we say, waving such ideas aside as escapist entertainment, superstition, fakery, or wishful thinking. We like to think we are shaping our own fate every day, not living along some preordained and knowable arc. As for precognition, my own hunch is more organic: I think my friend’s presentiments are intuitions and seasoned guesses that rely on clues so subtle, she does not register them consciously. I also think that in retrospect, once we know what comes next, we often feel like we reached a strong emotional conclusion earlier than we did, the way I am now sure I fell in love with my husband in the first five minutes of our meeting.
What is intriguing about precognition research, though, is the pattern that has been discovered in what are called “anomalous experiences.” These experiences include telepathy, visions, out-of-body experiences, and, most relevant in this case, precognition, premonition, or prophetic dreams. Abe Lincoln dreaming of his death on each of the three nights before his assassination. Mark Twain dreaming of his brother’s death just before a tragic steamboat accident took the brother’s life. As it turns out, certain people have more anomalous experiences than the norm. These experiences feel rich with significance, but they are highly subjective and impossible to fact-check. As a result, anomalous experiences go undocumented in modern scientific literature, and research into them is scant—even though roughly half of all adults in the U.S. and Europe report having had at least one.
Now, researchers are finding a cluster of traits they call “subconscious connectedness” in those who have more anomalous experiences. If you have a high degree of subconscious connectedness, then what happens outside your conscious awareness is interwoven with your conscious thoughts. Brain activity at the surface of your mind interacts freely with nonconscious activity. You can be so fully absorbed in something that the world drops away. You are able to let down your guard and be hypnotized. You are also able to dissociate, cutting off from what troubles you. You have a vivid imagination and are adept at fantasy. You empathize easily with others’ emotions. You hear music in machine noise or other rhythmic sounds. ou can feel like you are tasting food you see in a photo. You can perform familiar tasks on auto-pilot, literally absent-mindedly. You engage regularly in creative, artistic activities. You are intuitive, sometimes superstitious. And you have more anomalous experiences than the rest of us do.
But why? “Greater openness to, and reliance on, hunches or intuition,” researchers suggest. “Increased proneness to narrowed attention focus or spontaneous dissociation from the here-and-now; amplified tendency to detect meaningful patterns in random or very complex stimuli.” Thoughts and emotions are likelier to trigger physical responses and vivid imagery. Does this mean these people are lying, spinning tales of precognition because they are creative and imaginative and fascinated by the workings of their own mind? Not necessarily. The presence of subconscious connectedness “does not in any way invalidate the possibility that some of those experiences constitute bona fide perception of subtle aspects of objective reality,” notes Dr. Olafur S. Palsson, a clinical psychologist and emeritus professor of medicine at the UNC School of Medicine. “It would seem quite possible that having greater access to nonconscious information processing in everyday life sometimes enhances detection of information not available to others.”
Whatever the truth, I want to learn to trust the hidden layers of my own perception. Only recently have we realized, thanks to neuroeconomists, how hard we lean on nonconscious processes when making choices. What happens deep inside us, well outside our conscious awareness, is far more helpful than the usual conscious approach when we need to remember something, make a decision, or solve a complicated problem. Trust your gut, we urge one another. If in the process you bend time and foretell the future, that will be a bonus.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
