Anomalous Anticipation of random Future Events - Precognition and Psi Phenomena are Proven Real

Precognition is one of several phenomena in which individuals appear to have access to “nonlocal” information, that is, to information that would not normally be available to them through any currently known physical or biological process. These phenomena, collectively referred to as psi, include telepathy, access to another person’s thoughts without the mediation of any known channel of sensory communication; clairvoyance (including a variant called remote viewing), the apparent perception of objects or events that do not provide a stimulus to the known senses; and precognition, the anticipation of future events that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process.
---
In 2011, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a report of nine experiments purporting to demonstrate that an individual’s cognitive and affective responses can be influenced by randomly selected stimulus events that do not occur until after his or her responses have already been made and recorded (Bem, 2011).
---
As of September, 2013, two years after the publication of Bem’s article (“Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect”), we were able to retrieve 69 attempted replications of his experiments and 11 other experiments that tested for the anomalous anticipation of future events in alternative ways. When Bem’s own experiments are included, the complete database comprises 90 experiments from 33 different laboratories located in 14 different countries.
---
Bem’s (2011) experiments can be viewed as direct descendants of the presentiment experiments. Like them, each of his experiments modified a well-established psychological effect by reversing the usual time-sequence of events so that the participant’s responses were obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occurred. The hypothesis in each case was that the time-reversed version of the experiment would produce the same result as the standard non-time-reversed experiment. Four well-established psychological effects were modified in this way.

Experimental tasks that required “fast-thinking” responses produced larger and more significant effect sizes than did “slow-thinking” tasks that allowed participants time to implement conscious cognitive strategies (see Kahneman, 2011).
---
An organism is more likely to make responses that have been positively reinforced in the past than responses that have not been reinforced. The time-reversed version of this effect tested whether participants were more likely to make responses that would be reinforced in the near future.
---
The full database comprises 90 experiments conducted between 2002 and 2013. These originated in 33 different laboratories located in 14 countries and involved 12,406 participants. Fifty-one (56.6%) of the experiments had been published in peer reviewed journals or conference proceedings. The complete database of experiments with corresponding effect sizes and category assignments is presented in the Appendix along with a forest plot of the individual effect sizes and their 95% Confidence Intervals.

...The primary question addressed by the meta-analysis is whether the database provides overall evidence for the anomalous anticipation of random future events.

...A subsidiary question is whether independent investigators can successfully replicate Bem’s (2011) original experiments. As shown in the second row of Table 1, the answer is again yes.

Perhaps the most reasonable and frequently cited argument for being skeptical about psi is that there is no explanatory theory or mechanism for psi phenomena that is compatible with current physical and biological principles. Indeed, this limitation is implied by the very description of psi as “anomalous,” and it provides an arguably legitimate rationale for imposing the requirement that the evidence for psi be “extraordinary.”

We would argue, however, that this is still not a legitimate rationale for rejecting all proffered evidence a priori. Historically, the discovery and scientific exploration of most phenomena have preceded explanatory theories, often by decades or even centuries (e.g., the analgesic effect of aspirin; the antidepressant effect of electroconvulsive therapy; and Maxwell’s field equations of electricity and magnetism, which were formulated centuries after the phenomena were first explored). The incompatibility of psi with our current conceptual model of physical reality may say less about psi than about the conceptual model of physical reality that most non-physicists, including psychologists, still take for granted—but which physicists do not.

As is well known, the conceptual model of physical reality changed dramatically for physicists during the 20th Century, when quantum theory predicted and experiments confirmed the existence of several phenomena that are themselves incompatible with our everyday Newtonian conception of physical reality. Some psi researchers see sufficiently compelling parallels between certain quantum phenomena (e.g., quantum entanglement) and characteristics of psi to warrant considering them as potential explanations for psi phenomena (Radin, 2006).

...As physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman (1994) advised (in reference to the 'impossibilities' quantum physics display), “Do not keep saying to yourself…‘but how can it be like that?’ because you will get…into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that” (p. 123). Meanwhile the data increasingly compel the conclusion that it really is like that. Perhaps the same could now be said about psi.