Feeling the Future

Trawling through my morning reading, I came across this link: "Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!" Eye-catching? Yes. But, I always feel a little... skeptical about any headline for any scientific study that includes both an exclamation point and a question mark.

The actual meat of the article is a brief and breathless abstract of "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect", a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Dr. Daryl Bem, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Cornell University.

According to the Psychology Today article, Dr. Bem

took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology - studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times - and simply reversed their chronological order.

An interesting idea, I think you'll agree. There are obviously more details in the actual "Feeling the Future" paper. Here's the abstract:

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results; and, across all 9 experiments, Stouffer’s z = 6.66, p = 1.34 × 10-11 with a mean effect size (d) of 0.22. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.

I will admit that I have not read the 68-page paper in it's entirety. It's pretty technical, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a psychologist. What I do find interesting is, starting on page 48, his discussion of the issues of replication, including some of the potential difficulties in replicating a psychology experiment (as opposed to, say, a physics experiment) and what he did in his study to try and minimize those difficulties for other researchers. It's a breath of fresh air in this kind of work.

So, is this proof positive that psi abilities really exist? No. Of course not. It's a single study (well, it's a summary of 9 studies). It looks well conducted to my layman's eye, but all this study really establishes at this point is that there was some sort of behavior observed in the lab that, on the face, resembles psi abilities. Further study is required, along with serious attempts to falsify the hypothesis, before this can be said to constitute proof.

Nevertheless, I will say I'm excited about what I'm seeing here, and I can't wait to see what developments come out of this. Even if it turns out not to be psi, it certainly shows something interesting about the brain.