About Mark Mahin
A lifelong student of astronomy, technology and futurology, Mark is the author of the science-related book Anthropic Fine Tuning and Other Cosmic Topics, as well as 50 Illustrated Science Fiction Stories and the illustrated science fiction novel Mankind Reborn, each available for $1 on www.amazon.com. Email: marjinsopmar@gmail.com
- The reason this man is important to our projects here at the National Dream Center is that he has written about several rigorous, scientific studies that suggest precognition is real. Yes, I know…this isn’t news to a lot of you, but if you want serious, hard-core evidence that future-think is a valid phenomenon, then the following article is right up your alley!
- ReBlogging:
“Feeling the Future” Study Replicated, as Skeptics Fume
SNIPPET:Several years ago Cornell professor emeritus Daryl Bem published the paper Feeling the Future in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The paper reported the results of controlled experiments which seemed to suggest the existence of precognition, the ability of humans to detect the future in a paranormal way. There were voices of outrage that an Ivy League university could have been involved with such a finding, which was denounced as pseudoscience. In the next months skeptics trumpeted one or two unsuccessful attempts to replicate the experiments.A few weeks ago, however, Bem and others published a meta-analysis looking at 90 different experiments on precognition done in 33 laboratories. They found that Bem’s sensational experiments had been well replicated. It seems that there are two ways of doing Bem’s experiments, a “fast protocol” and a “slow protocol.” It seems that when you use the fast protocol, trying things just as Bem did, the effect does reproduce well. The paper found that to explain the results as a coincidence, one would have to believe in a coincidence with a chance of about 1 in 10 billion.Bem’s original “Feeling the Future” study was not at all a unique bolt-from-the-blue, but merely something in the same vein as quite a few previous studies (and many human experiences) indicating that something like precognition can occur. A particularly astonishing case is related here. Other similar experiments have shown a phenomenon called presentiment, an anomalous unexplained tendency of the human body to react to a stimulus before the stimulus has been presented. Here is a link to a meta-analysis of such experiments, showing an effect extremely unlikely to have occurred by chance.I personally don’t like the idea of precognition, and prefer to believe that it doesn’t exist, simply because it is easier to understand a universe in which time behaves like a roll of film in a movie can, with a nice clear separation between each frame in the movie and the frame that came before it. But I don’t let my conceptual preferences guide my assumptions about whether precognition is likely or possible.
- Continue reading here
