

Is Precognition Real? - fbea
http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-cornell-university-lab-releases-powerful-new-evidence-human-mind-can-

======
araneae
I went to Cornell and I'm one of the many students that participated in this
guy's experiments (although not this particular one with the erotic pictures.
I got regular pictures.)

I can tell you that every semester that I was there he was running a version
of the "Are you psychic?" experiment. I'm sure he's been doing it every
semester for a very long time. Undoubtedly there have been loads of
experiments where it didn't pan out. (If you're curious about my results, I
got 54% and a cheerful grad student greeted me after the fact by saying
"congrats! you're psychic!")

The fact is, if you run an experiment like this enough times you are going to
get a significant result eventually. That's why you have alpha values. If it's
at .05, that means that 5% of the time you're going to get a false positive. I
think that's what this is.

~~~
carbocation
54% correct out of how many, if you remember? Figuring out the degree to which
this deviates from a null expectation should be pretty straightforward.

~~~
araneae
I'm sure he gives the size in the paper somewhere. I expect it was probably
similar to what I did. It was 5 years ago and the pictures weren't numbered so
I really have no idea.

~~~
carbocation
The paper says it's 36 trials. 30% of experiments with 36 dichotomous
decisions where the answers are chosen randomly would be expected to have
20/36 correct (= 56% correct) or better.

------
ced
As this article points out, the problem with these studies is not statistics.
The issue is non-reproducibility, and the ever-present possibility of
deception (fraud, incompetence, cheating participants, etc.) Studies
"demonstrating" ESP are probably as old as science itself.

On the other hand, I've heard one eminent psychology professor at McGill tell
us that "there's something there", and that he had personally tried a few
seemingly conclusive experiments. Unfortunately, there have been so many ESP
cranks before, that no modern-era psychologist would dare touch that field for
fear that their career be forever sidetracked.

Also relevant, regarding the claims of homeopathy:

 _What about a memory of water? Is it possible? In 1988 the scientific journal
Nature, had received an article written by celebrated French scientist Jacques
Benveniste. He claimed to have found the evidence that made a homeopathy
scientifically credible. Benveniste experimented with very dilute solutions.
To his surprise, his research showed that even when the allergic substance was
diluted down to homeopathic quantities, it could still trigger a reaction in
the basophils. Nature's editor Sir John Maddox decided to publish a paper, but
under one condition, to be allowed to Nature's team of investigators to
inspect Beveniste's laboratory. When Maddox named his team, he took everyone
by surprise. Included on the team was a man who was not a professional
scientist: magician and paranormal investigator James Randi. Randi and the
team watched Benveniste's team repeat the experiment. They went to
extraordinary lengths to ensure that none of the scientists involved knew
which samples were the homeopathic solutions, and which ones were the controls
- even taping the sample codes to the ceiling for the duration of the
experiment. This time, Benveniste's results were inconclusive, and the
scientific community remained unconvinced by Benveniste's memory of water
theory._

<http://www.wavemagazine.net/arhiva/12/science/homeopathy.htm>

<http://www.wavemagazine.net/arhiva/12/science/homeopathy.htm>

------
jerf
I consider myself a true skeptic, in the sense outlined in that article; no, I
don't really currently believe in systematic psi effects, but yes, there is a
threshold of evidence that will convince me.

That said, to engage in a bit of meta-skepticism, I see an article like this
about every three years or so, and so far nothing's come of any of them that I
am aware of. And by "like this", I mean the whole article, appeals to skeptics
to be "true" skeptics and not just unthinking unbelievers (which is a real
thing, certainly), acknowledgments of the poor history of the field but
assertions that it's different this time, trotting out various people with
various credentials who assert there's something there... I'll wait for the
consistent replication.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Would you be "skeptical" if a meta-analysis of physics paper showed a
statistically significant outcome of a particular unexpected particle being
created in different high-energy atomic collisions? Or would you look for
where the theories are wrong that didn't predict the outcome?

~~~
jerf
The only answer to your question I can imagine would really be "it depends".
I'd probably wait for more data to come in on the grounds that I don't have
any compelling need to make a decision anyhow, so whatever you're trying to
get at this is probably not a great question to do it with. I am interested in
particle physics but only as a passive observer.

(Further edit: Oh, you're probably trying to say I shouldn't be skeptical in
light of the meta-analysis. The correct thing to do here is to do some more
experiments that continue to show the effect shown in the metaanalysis,
there's too many ways a metaanalysis can screw up. Particle physics is a
_really_ different world than psi research. If it remains, great. I'm actually
not too invested in the "time flows in one direction" theory, because in point
of fact relativity itself disproves it even before you get to quantum
mechanics; it is at best partially ordered and in fact some things happen in
quite counterintuitive ways in straight-up relativity even though they
ultimately resolve into something that matches our intuitive understanding of
time. In ways that would exceed an HN posting to describe, though, I think
that relativity ultimately forbids reverse-time information flow even more
strongly than you'd think as a result, not less strongly. I'd suggest googling
up "Reflections on Relativity" and be prepared to spend some serious hours
with it; it is not light reading.)

------
sp4rki
Call me skeptic but none of the experiments or the so called "significant
laboratory evidence of psi" are conclusive at all. Premonition deals mostly
with feeling something before it happens and precognition deals with seeing
things before it happens. I believe the former is side effect of a mind that
analyzes and understands patterns with fairly good accuracy, while the latter
is nothing than pure coincidence. It's easy to say random things like "my dog
is looking at a turtle" 100 times and get some percentage correct, but I bet
you that if I asked you about it, you would only remember the correct ones and
mostly discard all the times you where wrong.

Hell not only do it all the time, I did it three times in the last hour while
I was taking a shower. I "saw" my dog pee on the studio, I "saw" my
significant other arrive with chicken, and I "saw" a call from my sister. I
leave the room and my dog peed on the studio, my girlfriend is eating some
roasted chicken and my sister called me while I was reading this article. Does
it mean I'm a psychic? _HELL NO!_ I've done that same exact thing before,
probably by analyzing patterns, and have been utterly wrong.

Believing in this stuff would mean that our futures are ruled by some kind of
destiny, which is fine for Prince of Persia, but really makes absolutely no
contribution to our collective sanity.

 _Wohooo I just imagined my girlfriend is going to come out of a giant cake
wearing a spandex catsuit. I hope I hit this one too!_

------
tokenadult
Earlier and more varied discussion here:

<http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=188366>

On an email list of local psychologists, one psychologist pointed out that the
showings of different stimuli were almost certainly not random in the way that
Bernoulli trials would have to be for the calculation of statistical
significance to be correct. I'll try to paraphrase some of his words below:

We have to find out whether or not Bem was really using Bernoulli trials. Did
he allow for cases comparable to having an experimental subject guess heads
versus tails in a sequence of twelve coin tosses, when heads might come up
twelve times in a row? Did he also allow stimuli to alternate back and forth,
like a coin toss sequence of H T H T H T H T H T H T? Many times when
experimenters try to make sure sequence LOOKS random, it actually makes a
sequence more predictable by excluding some possibilities. This always makes
the sequence more predictable.

If an experimenter shows subjects sequences that are meant to look random, but
for every subject there are just as many "off" states as "on" states, in
twelve trials, then there are fewer possible sequences. With Bernoulli trials,
there would be 2^12 = 4096 possible sequences of 12 trials, but with
"balanced" choices of stimuli there would be only 12-choose-6 = 942.
Experimenter-designed sequences can also create dependencies so that knowing
any part of the sequence helps to predict the rest of it. A subject who
guessed that over twelve trials in a sequence there are equal numbers of
trials in each of two states would be right 64.3 percent of the time, on
average, not 50 percent.

The psychologist went on to note that such studies are very hard to design
properly, but so far information isn't available on how the study was done to
that level of detail. He thinks it is more likely than not that the
experimenter gave his subjects clues to the structure of the sequences of
trials he set up, and that he set up conditions for which performance above
the 50 percent accuracy level is expected and not remarkable.

~~~
Fargren
From the article : "The sequencing of the pictures on these trials was
randomly determined by a randomizing algorithm … and their left/right target
positions were determined by an Araneus Alea I hardware-based random number
generator."

At the very least they were using Araneus Alea wich is a hardware random
number generator, so the numbers were not predictable. It's possible that the
"randomizing algorithm" did something dumb and made the sequence not random,
but I doubt it. I'm downloading the replication package to see if it has the
source code. If it doesn't, that's a pretty big red flag for me.

I think that it's more likely thet the sudy was done so many times that it
eventually gave significant results than it is that the sequence was not
random. Or maybe prescience is real to some degree, or the study is a
statistical glitch.

EDIT: the replication package doesn't have the source code for the progrma
that randomizes the sequence.

~~~
tokenadult
Thank you for pointing to that statement from the article. I'm still pondering
what scope that statement leaves for imbalance in the number of pictures of
one kind or another during the trails with each experimental subject.

------
powera
It's ridiculous that such an article could get published in the first place,
though it seems the magazine is "new-age". They admit that all the evidence
doesn't support the point they are arguing for:

"But the long history of parapsychology lab research, going back far before
Bem to Rhine’s ESP work in the 1930s, shows that when you bring psi into the
lab, it tends to become more of a systematic statistical biasing factor than a
source of individual mind-blowing “miracle events.”" - in other words
"Evidence of PSI is indistinguishable from stochastic noise".

"The chief bugaboo of scientific psi research has been replicability. It has
proved frustratingly difficult to precisely replicate the results of many psi
experiments." - In other words, the studies rely on chance events to get
results in the first place.

"Perhaps the experiments ... will finally resolve this problem and provide
robustly replicable experiments demonstrating psi phenomena. I certainly hope
so." - And the author is biased. How is this worth discussing?

------
prknight
A lot of commenters don't appear to have read the paper on which the article
is based on - critiquing at its best. Some factoids of note:

The Bem study isn't unique, there have been 1000s of studies exploring psi
that have arrived at significant results. Look up Dean Radin for starters in
case you're interested.

The Bem study is unique in that it is getting published in a mainstream
journal, which is unusual since the mainstream psychology community doesn't
believe or like the idea of researching psi, i.e. most consider it impossible.
But that mainstream attitude is just that, an attitude.

Bem is fairly unusual as most researchers that do psi-research are considered
on the fringe of the community and don't get in to the mainstream journals.

Researchers that do explore psi risk their reputations and careers.

Bem started out as a skeptic when he was invited to critique another
researchers psi experiments. He's a well reputed researcher who has
contributed his own theories that have been a real contribution to the field
of psychology(non-psi related), something few scientists achieve in their
careers.

So far, 2 papers have been written in response to Bem's study, as noted by
another commenter. The first uses the Bem study to argue an entirely different
agenda: the need for changes in the way general studies use statistics. The
core of their argument would affect hundreds of thousands of papers across the
entire field of psychology (and others). How valid the authors points are in
relation to the Bem study is open to debate.

In the 2nd paper by other authors, it was attempted to replicate their
findings. If you read the paper, you can't even tell how closely they followed
Bem's original experiment, ie. what software did they use, how did the users
install it etc? (and they didn't replicate all of Bem's experiments). One big
warning bell is that they used internet participants, which is a shoddy way to
do a psi experiment, or most any experiment for that matter.

For those that critique the design: Bem took 9 classic psychological
experiments that the field is extremely familiar with and reversed them.
Designing a good psi-experiment is incredibly hard and a lot more thought and
scrutiny than the average experiment. Using classic experiments makes a great
deal of sense.

@araneae: Welcome to psychology research. Almost all the experiments, findings
and studies that make it into journals were paved in copious amounts of
(pilot)studies and experiments that yielded no results. Such is the nature of
doing research in the field of psychology. Designing a psi experiment that
stands up to scrutiny requires even more work, failures etc.

The concept of backward causation has been verified in other fields, like
quantum biology and from a physics point of view, it is widely accepted both
by theory and empirical study. It's not that big of stretch of the imagination
that the most sophisticated organ that we have encountered in the universe
(our brain) might be capable of it.

Fact #389: number one reason start ups fail and random critiques are flawed:
they're based on relentlessly operating on unproven, unverified assumptions.

------
abeppu
Is anyone else highly skeptical of the bar chart indicating that just > 50% of
professors in 'natural science' disciplines believe in ESP and that social
science (except psychology) and humanities professors are even worse?

~~~
redthrowaway
In fairness, those numbers are from 1979. I'm still skeptical, but the
information in 30 years out of date.

------
yatsyk
replication of experiment shows failure:
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1699970>

~~~
Alex3917
FWIW the author only tested one of the nine experiments. The replication
experiment was also done using volunteers over the Internet, meaning it wasn't
a true replication. (Not Ivy league students, further away from the random
number generator, etc.) Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if any of them can
be replicated in the future.

------
mrleinad
"A 2002 survey by the US National Science Foundation shows that 60% of adult
Americans agree that some individuals possess psychic powers."

Yeah.. and 60% also believe in angels..

~~~
T-hawk
Well, to much of this audience, "the ability to do long division" would
probably qualify as a psychic power.

------
nkurz
I look at this study and think "If this effect was real, it would change the
world as we know it. It would definitely win the Nobel prize, and once
understood could almost certainly be harnessed to produce almost infinite
riches."

This doesn't in and of itself affect the probability that it's a true effect,
but why would you publish this study based on such a limited single trial if
you truly believed you had discovered such a world changing thing? Wouldn't
you at least run a second trial to confirm? Wouldn't you drop everything you
were doing to try to firm it up so solidly that no rational person could doubt
that you had just changed history?

This leaves me to conclude that even the original author does not believe it
to be true. For if he believes he's made a discovery of this magnitude and is
still standing up in front of Psych 101 courses giving the same lecture he's
given for the last 20 years instead of pursuing this with every ounce of his
being, he would be a fool. I do not believe he could be so large a fool, ergo,
the effect is merely a statistical mirage.

------
carbocation
Given the prior expectation of approximately zero, the posterior remains
approximately zero. Fantastical claims require durable evidence that can be
repeated by different people at different times in different places.

~~~
Alex3917
There was actually prior expectation. To quote the article:

"Bem was unable to find any fatal flaw in Honorton’s work. He became more and
more interested in extending his research focus from personality and social
psychology to psi research. In 1994, Bem and Honorton co-authored a landmark
article on psi in the mainstream psychology journal Psychological Bulletin.
The article described the results of a thorough statistical meta-analysis of
eleven ganzfeld studies. (A meta-analysis involves combining data from a
series of similar experiments conducted over a period of time, to come to an
overall conclusion.) The result of the meta-analysis was striking: subjects
obtained overall target “hit” rates of approximately 35 percent, far above the
25 percent that chance performance would predict."

~~~
carbocation
Based on economics, and the fact that nobody is exploiting this for massive
gains, I'd say that the prior expectation for this being anything but an error
or a fraud is much lower than you seem to be implying.

~~~
Alex3917
Well how exactly would you exploit being able to see porn from the future 53%
of the time? My understanding is that there is a ton of military research also
indicating a weak psi effect, as seen in The Men Who Stare At Goats, but I
don't think they've found any use for it. I'm not a true believer by any
means, but I don't think it's especially unreasonable for there to be some
sort of weak psi effect either. You should skim over a copy of Stan Grof's
book When The Impossible Happens. Most of the chapters aren't at all
convincing, but there are a few things that jump out as being kind of
interesting. At the very least reading stuff like that helps one to develop a
more noetic understanding of the history of thought.

~~~
carbocation
From the perspective of information, the bits that you have decoded into
pornography could be decoded differently into another coherent image.
Therefore, the fact that the particular choice of decoder produced pornography
should not much matter.

The military uses for this are obvious; the military abandoned it because it
could not produce results.

And even if this only works for porn, that's fine. I could make a killing
betting mathematicians and scientists that I could pick the porn > 50% of the
time.

What do you propose to be the propagator of information? Photons? If so, what
is the receptor? If not, then what? Also, how is this information propagated
from the source? If propagated through time, how does this reconcile with the
forward-propagation in time of everything else that has ever been observed?

~~~
Alex3917
"The military abandoned it because it could not produce results."

According to the movie, the military originally abandoned the research because
of internal conflicts, and they have in fact since resumed research again. Not
sure what the veracity of this is, but they stated it as being a true fact at
the end of the film.

"What do you propose to be the propagator of information?"

Terence McKenna once said, "Not only is reality stranger than we suppose, it's
stranger than we can suppose." Betting on current scientific paradigms as
accurately portraying reality is a suckers bet every time. I have no idea
where the information would come from, though presumably it would come from
the same place that consciousness comes from.

The reason HN is mostly logical positivists is because it's dominated by
engineers and people with engineer-like personalities, and that's what most
engineers think science advocates. (Even though most scientists themselves
don't believe this, and post modern philosophy makes pretty short work of it.)

~~~
carbocation
The records show that this was transferred to the CIA in 1995 and
discontinued. If they secretly continued it, they sure did a great job in the
run-up to 9/11.

If these guys are open with their data, it will be rather straightforward to
identify the error that they committed that led to these results. If not, a
few other people will try to replicate their results and fail. At least some
things in their field of study are always consistent.

Also, I'm a scientist, not an engineer.

Oh, also, let's be clear here. If what these fellows propose is true, then
they will have simultaneously discovered both of the following:

    
    
      1) Reverse causality
      2) Evidence for biological receptors for the mediator of reverse causality
    

It's basically hilarious, except for the fact that the money that funds this
could be spent more productively on literally anything else. In general,
parapsychology consists of the practice of accidentally or willfully
misunderstanding the scientific method.

~~~
Alex3917
"If what these fellows propose is true, then they will have simultaneously
discovered 1) Reverse causality 2) Evidence for biological receptors for the
mediator of reverse causality"

If either is true, then history suggests that we'll later look back and
realize that we already had a ton of evidence for both of these hypotheses,
but that it was all being used instead as evidence that the old paradigm was
correct.

"If these guys are open with their data, it will be rather straightforward to
identify the error that they committed that led to these results."

Maybe. With a lot of these studies it hasn't been obvious if there has been an
error or if so what it was, which is why the field keeps going.

"Parapsychology consists of the practice of accidentally or willfully
misunderstanding the scientific method."

The hypotheses put forward by parapsychology might well be false, but that's
no reason to trash talk the researchers. I don't think there's any reason to
think they're less intelligent, competent, or ethical than any other
researchers, and a lot of them are highly respected, e.g. Stan Grof.

~~~
carbocation
Time and again, researchers in this field have shown that they cannot or
choose not to conduct reproducible science. In its decades of existence,
parapsychology has never had a reproducible finding that cannot be explained
by common physics or psychology. J Archibald Wheeler was right to try to eject
parapsychology from the AAAS.

Why do you say that Stan Grof is associated with parapsychology? I had only
heard of him in connection to psychedelic research previously, which is
something else entirely.

~~~
Alex3917
He co-founded the field of transpersonal psychology, which is very similar.
His research in this area was highly regarded even by Carl Sagan, who was
probably the most famous skeptic of his day. He was especially interested in
birth memories, memories of past lives, and also syncronicities.

~~~
carbocation
Interesting. I wasn't familiar with transpersonal psychology before, but the
wikipedia article on the topic specifically cautions against conflating
parapsychology with transpersonal psychology. Consequently, I don't think that
what I've said could reasonably be interpreted as an attack on people who you
say are reputable, like Stan Grof.

Transpersonal psychology sounds harmless: a soft science that makes soft
claims. Unless they barge onto the scene and start claiming that spirituality
has a physical basis that (only) they can perceive, I'm probably not going to
have any concerns with what they do.

In contrast, parapsychology makes claims about the physical world that would
have real impact if true, but in the end what they claim is never true. If
they've simply been suffering from "bad luck" for the past several decades, I
think that real scientists can be forgiven for having a hard time
distinguishing that run of bad luck from from incompetence or fraud.

One thing is true: on HN, you and I always seem to get into very interesting
discussions (from my perspective, at least). I hope that my stern words for
the field of parapsychology don't cloud the fact that I wish you well.

~~~
Alex3917
Yeah good discussion, I wish you well also. Anyway time for bed, but
definitely go check out some of Grof's work. He seems to be really interested
in reincarnation, which to me seems a step beyond psi in terms of
plausibility. You almost couldn't have reincarnation without psi, or at least
whatever underlying mechanism was powering it.

------
tomfakes
On a quick scan of the start of this article, the one thing that jumped out
was that the pictures were randomized using the programming language's native
random number generator.

I didn't see what language was used here, but it could be they just found a
flaw in that code?

~~~
1010011010
"The sequencing of the pictures on these trials was randomly determined by a
randomizing algorithm … and their left/right target positions were determined
by an Araneus Alea I hardware-based random number generator."

<http://www.araneus.fi/products-alea-eng.html>

~~~
tomfakes
I missed that part. I only saw the part about the programming language's RNG -
which set off a red flag for me.

------
rdamico
If I'm reading this article correctly, it claims that there is statistically
significant evidence that:

1) Precognition (at least when it comes to guessing where erotic photos will
show up on a computer screen) is a real phenomenon

2) Precognition abilities are related to changes in the Earth's magnetic field

This certainly sounds hard to believe, but IF these experiments do turn out to
be repeatable in the future (that remains to be seen), what effect would this
have on our fundamental understanding of how the world works? It's pretty
mind-blowing.

~~~
limist
It is (potentially) mind-blowing. Our models, understandings, and predictive
capability w.r.t. time, space, matter, energy, and causality would need
revising. Jobs and reputations would be lost; new theories, paradigms,
technologies, and industries would be born. That's all happened before, and
one can look forward to it happening again. ;)

------
redthrowaway
Even assuming that there were some precognition effects, we're talking about
digital pictures displayed pseudo-randomly. What exactly are the subjects
purported to precognit? The electrical states of ram circuits? Are they
purported to have a built-in jpeg decompression algo in their brains, that
allows them to know which images are erotic?

If the goal of the study is to show that people are able to access purportedly
unknowable information, then this is a terrible design. There should be some
much more easily knowable condition than binary memory states. If, on the
other hand, they are trying to show that effect can precede cause, then
physicists should be running the experiment, not psychologists. Introducing
people to the equation introduces too much error.

~~~
colanderman
I presume they would be expected to precognit the future emotional state of
their own brain.

------
rms
Some other discussion here:
[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/315/goertzel_on_psi_in_...](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/315/goertzel_on_psi_in_h_magazine/)

------
Tycho
Gosh. So from the one experiment that article described, people had
premonition/precognition about an upcoming event when it had 'psychological
valence.' Ie. when they were about to see an erotic picture, but not when they
were about to see a picture from a less remarkable category (in the control
experiments).

What I'd be interested in is if the level of premonition success showed any
difference if the next picture was being selected in real time by another
person, and not by a random computer algorithm.

------
ricaurte
It would be interesting if they combined these types of studies with brain
scans to see if there are any patterns within the human brain during positives
and negatives. This would help to find if there is a neurological basis for
precognition, or if it is all really just random chance.

------
stavrianos
<http://xkcd.com/808/>

