Precognition and Porn

New evidence for PSI?
David Sutton (Fortean Times, November 2010)
(Three Lions/Getty Images)

It’s rare for academic parapsychological research to garner coverage in the mainstream press. But a paper by Professor Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University has managed to cause something of a stir outside the usual circles.

Perhaps that’s because its author, unlike his mostly cautious and often actively sceptical academic peers, claims to have produced results suggesting that humans are capable of such PSI feats as precognition and premonition.

A curtain covered a pornographic image randomly selected by the computer. This should have given subjects a 50 percent chance of finding it. Statistically speaking, their hit-rate was impressive, significantly above chance. Their hit-rate on the neutral, non-erotic pictures was not. Similar above-chance results were found in eight of the nine experiments.

Prof. Bem carried out a series of nine different experiments involving over 1,000 volunteer students. He has published the results in a paper entitled “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,” which will appear in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [the gold-standard in social psychological research].

Bem, a self-described maverick, started out as a physicist but switched fields in the 1960s, becoming a social psychologist. He has held senior posts at Cornell, Stanford, and Harvard. He has published widely on self-perception, personality theory, and sexual orientation. He also has a long-standing interest in PSI. This paper is the culmination of eight years of research.

Bem defines PSI as “anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms.” He chose to study “precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process.”

His methodology was simple, testing for “anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses” by “time reversing” well-established psychological effects “so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur.”

One experiment involved the students being shown a long list of words and being asked to remember as many as possible. They were then asked to type a selection of words randomly selected by computer from the original list. In an apparently striking example of causality seemingly working in reverse, the students proved significantly better at recalling words they would later type.

In another experiment, devised to test precognition, Bem provided his volunteers with the following instructions: More>>