Posted on 05/05/2007 8:00:52 AM PDT by fanfan
Do some of us avoid tragedy by foreseeing it? Some scientists nowbelieve that the brain really CAN predict events before they happen
Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room. The gentle whirring of machinery can be heard faintly in the background.
He smiles and presses a grubby-looking red button.
In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner. If it wasn't for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker across the woman's face, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just a normal health check.
But this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is possible to predict the future.
For the results - released exclusively to the Daily Mail - suggest that ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them 'see' the future.
Such amazing studies - if verified - might help explain the predictive powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such Extra Sensory Perception, deja vu and clairvoyance. On a more mundane level, it may account for 'gut feelings' and instinct.
The man behind the experiments is certainly convinced. "We're satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens," says Professor Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam.
"We'd now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it."
And Bierman is not alone: his findings mirror the data gathered by other scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad.
Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University, says: "So far, the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.
"In fact, it's not clear in physics why you can't see the future. In physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect."
Virtually all the great scientific formulae which explain how the world works allow information to flow backwards and forwards through time - they can work either way, regardless.
Shortly after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage.
It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease.
It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that 'something' was not right. Nobody vocalised it but shortly before the attacks, people started altering their plans out of an unspoken instinct.
One woman suffered crippling stomach pain while queuing for one of the ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center.
She made her way to the lavatory only to recover spontaneously. She missed her flight but survived the day. Amid the collective outpouring of grief and horror it was easy to overlook such stories or write them off as coincidences.
But in fact, these kind of stories point to an interesting and deeper truth for those willing to look.
If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability to divine the future. Well, strange as it seems, that's just what happens.
The aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unusually empty. All the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual number of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained away, but all four?
And it wasn't just on 9/11 that people subconsciously seemed to avoid disaster. The scientist Ed Cox found that trains 'destined' to crash carried far fewer people than they did normally.
Dr Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, found exactly the same bizarre effect.
If it was possible to divine the future, you might expect those at the sharp end, such as pilots, to have the most finely tuned instincts of all. And again, that's just what you see.
When the Air France Concorde crashed in 2000, it wasn't long before the colleagues of those killed in the crash spoke about a sense of foreboding that had gripped the crew and flight engineers before the accident.
Speaking anonymously to the French newspaper Le Parisien, one spoke of a 'morbid expectation of an accident'.
"I had this sense that we were going to bump into the scenery," he said.
"The atmosphere on the Concorde team for the last few months, if one has the guts to admit it, had been one of morbid expectation of an accident. It was as if I was waiting for something to happen."
All of these stories suggest that we can pick up premonitions of events that are yet to be.
Although these premonitions are not in glorious Technicolor, they are often emotionally powerful enough for us to act upon them.
In technical parlance it is known as 'presentiment' because emotional feelings are being received from the future, not hard facts or information.
The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many years the US military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme known as Stargate, which set out to investigate premonitions and the ability of mediums to predict the future.
Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by the ability of 'lucky' soldiers to forecast the future.
These are the ones who survived battles against seemingly impossible odds. Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings - and occasionally-actual glimpses of the future - could flow backwards in time to guide soldiers.
It helped them make life-saving decisions, often on the basis of a hunch.
He devised an experiment to test these ideas. He hooked up volunteers to a modified lie detector, which measured an electrical current across the surface of the skin.
This current changes when a person reacts to an event such as seeing an extremely violent picture or video. It's the electrical equivalent of a wince.
Radin showed sexually explicit, violent or soothing images to volunteers in a random sequence determined by computer.
And he soon discovered that people began reacting to the pictures before they saw them. It was unmistakable. They began to 'wince' a few seconds before they actually saw the image.
And it happened time and time again, way beyond what chance alone would allow.
So impressive were Radin's results that Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prizewinning chemist, took an interest. He was hooked up to Radin's machine and shown the emotionally charged images.
"It's spooky," he says "I could see about three seconds into the future. You shouldn't be able to do that."
Other researchers from around the world, from Edinburgh University to Cornell in the US, rushed to duplicate Radin's experiment and improve on it. And they got similar results.
It was soon discovered that gamblers began reacting subconsciously shortly before they won or lost. The same effect was seen in those terrified of animals, moments before they were shown the creatures.
The odds against all of these trials being wrong are literally millions to one against.
Professor Dick Bierman decided to take this work even further. He is a psychologist who has become convinced that time as we understand it is an illusion. He could see no reason why people could not see into the future just as easily as we dip into memories of our past.
He's in good company. Einstein described the distinction between the past, present and future as 'a stubbornly persistent illusion'.
To prove Einstein's point, Bierman looked inside the brains of volunteers using a hospital MRI scanner while he repeated Dr Radin's experiments.
These scanners show which parts of the brain are active when we do certain tasks or experience specific emotions.
Although extremely complex, and with each analysis taking weeks of computing time, he has run the experiments twice involving more than 20 volunteers.
And the results suggest quite clearly that seemingly ordinary people are capable of sensing the future on a fairly consistent basis. Bierman emphasises that people are receiving feelings from the future rather than specific 'visions'.
It's clear, though, that if ordinary people can receive feelings from the future then perhaps the especially gifted may receive visions of things yet to be.
It's also clear that many paranormal phenomena such as ESP and clairvoyance could have their roots in presentiment.
After all, if you can see a few seconds into the future, why not a few days or even years? And surely if you could look through time, why not across great distances?It's a concept that ties the mind in knots, unless you're a physicist.
"I believe that we can 'sense' the future," says the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Brian Josephson.
"We just haven't yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.
"People have had so called 'paranormal' or 'transcendental' experiences along these lines. Bierman's work is another piece of the jigsaw. The fact that we don't understand something does not mean that it doesn't happen.'
If we are all regularly sensing the future or occasionally receiving glimpses of it, as some mediums claim to do, then doesn't that mean we can change the future and render the 'prediction' obsolete?
Or perhaps we were meant to receive the premonition and act upon it? Such paradoxes could go on for ever, providing a rich seam of material for films such as Minority Report - based on a short story of the same name - in which a special police department is able to foresee and prevent crimes before they have even taken place.
Could such science fiction have a grain of truth in it after all? The emerging view, Bierman explains, is that 'the future has implications for the past'.
"This phenomena allows you to make a decision on the basis of what will happen in the future. Does that restrain our free will? That's up to the philosophers. I'm far too shallow a person to worry about that."
The problem with presentiment is that it appears so nebulous that you can't rely on it to make reliable decisions. That may be the case, but there are plenty of instances where people wished they had listened to their premonitions or feelings of presentiment.
One of the saddest involves the Aberfan disaster. This occurred in 1966 when a coal tip collapsed and swept through a Welsh school killing 144 people, including 116 children. It turned out that 24 people had received premonitions of the tragedy.
One involved a little girl who was killed. She told her mother shortly before she was taken to school: "I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it."
So should we listen to our instincts, hunches and dreams? Some experts believe we may already be using them in our everyday lives to a surprising degree.
Dr Jessica Utts at the University of California, who has worked for the US military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal research, believes we are constantly sampling the future and using the knowledge to help us make better decisions.
"I think we're doing it all the time," she says. "We've looked at the data and it does seem to happen."
So perhaps the Queen in Through The Looking Glass was right: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
Call Mulder and Scully!
I would tend to agree Joe, but I saw him exactly as he appeared on that day, toddling down the hall of the new house,(which I had not seen until we started shopping for a home a year after the dream), and turning to look at me EXACTLY the same way it all appeared in the dream.
That was the moment I remembered the dream.
Thank goodness I had told my husband about the dream when it happened, or I might have questioned my own sanity.
Along these same lines, it's occurred to me that when I throw a ball, for example, I am performing a highly complex calculus and instructing a myriad of muscles to carry out the results of that calculus, and I'm doing it without even conciously thinking about it. The same thing could be happening.
One little paranormal piece has always intrigued me. It's when you're thinking about calling someone on the phone and then it rings and it's the person you were thinking about calling.
I've had this happen when the other person dialed my number and phone didn't even have a chance to start the ring sequence. I just picked up the phone and started dialing dt-dt-dt-dt-dt-dt-dt only to hear the person I was calling say, "Hello? Is someone on the line? I didn't hear the phone ring."
I heard an interesting statement on the radio the other day. I don't even remember the context but it got me thinking. Is it possible for the human brain to understand itself? Or would it have to somehow transcend itself to be able to do so?
I don't believe in the supernatural. I like Heinlein's statement "Any technology (or concept) sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."
Deep within the brain of most humans, resides the Moron chip. This chip, when working properly, is constantly observing the person's behavior. In the event of dangerous or stupid behavior, it will go into alarm mode. Historically, this chip may be what helped the smarter cavemen to not become "food" or "stuff on a rock".
Godel's incompleteness theorem would suggest the answer is no. It would have to transcend itself.
At the same time, Godel proved that the human mind can intuit things to be true that a computer can never prove. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and mathemetician Roger Penrose has written extensively on the subject.
The ability to extrapolate past trends may indeed account for some reported incidents of premonition, but there are also very real reported instances of premonitions associated with the human spirit, separate from the human soul or rationalism or even the bodily senses.
Some suggest these predetermined events are influencable by our thinking, decisions and behavior. Meanwhile, other instances suggest they might be foreordained regardless our influence.
Here is an example.
I had a great, great aunt who apparently had a spiritual gift from God the Holy Spirit to dream some events before they occurred, such as deaths in the family. When her niece married, she attended the wedding reception and made quite a scene, demanding her niece and husband not go on their honeymoon. They had tickets to go on a Carribean cruise, but Auntie had a dream wherein she saw the newlywed husband fall into the ocean, sink, and she could see through his eyes of his decent and drowning in the ocean as he looked up into the sky from beneath the waves. She therefore, was very incessant to the family at the wedding that they not go on their honeymoon cruise.
Everybody at the wedding apparently looked at one another thinking, “yeah, grandma, sure, whatever you say,..” but to her insistence, they promised not to go.
Well, time wore on and the later in the month when their cruise date approached, the niece acquiesced to not go from the insistence of her husband so as not to create bad relations within the family. Now the husband attended a weekly poker game. That week, his poker buddies decided they would go deep sea fishing the next day and tried to get the newlywed husband to join them.
He declined, mentioning that he would never be able to live it down if he went deep sea fishing on the same week he was canceling his honeymoon cruise so as not to go to sea. One of his buddies though took advantage of the situation and offered to take his spot on the deep sea fishing trip if he would fill in for him at the volunteer fire department that week.
The young husband concurred figuring it would help obligate him so he and his newlywed wife wouldn’t be tempted to do anything else to go to sea.
That week as the young man took the other’s post as a volunteer fireman, a call came in to go down to the wharf and put out a fire on a freighter, but not much of a threat, but seemed to be smoldering. They responded as the first team with some 30 others, all from the Monsanto plant nearby.
The ship they met at the wharf was the Grandcamp, docked in Texas City in April 16th, 1947, later known as the first blast in the Great Texas City Explosion. The young man wasn’t found after the explosion, but his body washed ashore about a month later and was identified from dental records. It appears he was either blown out to the Gulf at the first explosion and/or further carried by the tidal wave shortly thereafter.
What was sortof interesting about this premonition, is that seemingly no matter what one did to avoid the intended fate, the result still occurred.
I knew you were going to ask this, but had to wait,...besides if we told you the answer, we'd violate the prime Directive. <;^)
Many years ago when my husband and I were out on a date I had this very scared feeling come over me about him. We were parked in front of my home at the time and I was going home for the evening. I asked him to be very careful on his way home. I think he got scared a little because I was serious,so he drove slowly as he approached the intersection down the street from my home.And he waited just that extra second even though he had the green light ,just enough for another car to come flying through a red light. If he would’ve went through it as he should have he could’ve been killed or the very least seriously hurt. There have been other times such as this but I am not sure how it works or why then and not other times.
At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.
But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.
The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.
There exists a very real spiritual domain out there which is made knowable by God the Holy Spirit to believers via unique spiritual gifts given to the believer upon saving faith. Those who have never placed faith in God through faith in Christ do not have such a regenerated human spirit, so they will naturally percieve by means of the five senses and rationalism, appealing to science, physics, medical theory, etc., but things of the spirit will seem to be simply foolishness or misplaced trust without verifiability.
Other spiritual creatures exist such as angels, both fallen and elect. We are warned that fallen angels are under the command of the Devil, Satan, the Adversary, also described as a Malevolent Deceiver.
Each believer has a plan for him which God has predetermined regarding our logistical support. As long as we remain in fellowship with Him, we may be in the proper time and place to work according to His Will, by His plan, fulfilling good works which He has already prepared rewards and crowns for us to receive in heaven at the bema seat of Christ.
Not all of us have the same spiritual gifts, any more than we fill the same spot in His plan. We are, however, believers 24/7. The real challenge is to remain in prayer and in fellowship with Him in all things and at all times, persevering so as to be at the right time and place as He chooses to place us to fulfill His plan.
There are plenty of spiritual deceivers out there seeking to redirect our thinking or attention from Him to them or other distractions. Meanwhile there also are many elect angels also observing and performing a myriad of duties which we never identify.
Ever notice how sometimes we hit all the stop lights while traveling through multiple cities and they aren’t tied together? Or the times we are delayed by 2 minutes and by happenstance avoid the 6 car fatal pileup 30 miles away?
If events were as controlled only by men and chance, the world would be a much different place.
Before I even read the rest of the article, this line allows me to see into the future and realize that the answer to come shall be bunk. The rights to one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time wouldn't be sold off to a newspaper for a quick check.
My dad had told me me about something like this. He was about to turn right on red and everything looked clear but he didn't. Suddenly a car broadsided another pushing right in front of him. If he had turned he would have been in the accident.
I have had way too many things happen to dismiss psychic phenomena. To my family these kinds of things are just normal.
My husband is one who says that some people are just more aware than others.
Physical laws do not ascribe a "direction" to time as such. If you took a bottle of perfume and uncorked it. A "movie" made showing the individual molecules of liquid would show totally random motion. The molecules would collide and rebound following the laws of physics and there direction would be random. Some lighter molecules would be struck by heavier and would gain velocity as momentum was conserved. Eventually some of these molecules would pass through the surface interface and be released as a gas. These gas molecules would still be moving in a random fashion, colliding and rebounding from the walls of the bottle. Eventually some would pass through the neck of the bottle and escape to the room at large. At all times the movement was random.
If you reviewed shorter portions of our film showing an individual molecule in its random motion you could not determine by observation if the film was being projected forward or backward. Yet experience tells you that you will never see a bottle slowly filling with perfume in the real world. When viewed from beginning to end you would see the liquid level drop in the bottle as expected.
We determine the direction of time by observing the change in entropy of the system under observation. Left to itself, entropy always increases. For those who care, entropy can be described as the "disorderliness" of a system. Solid substances are more orderly then liquids which are more orderly then gases which is the progression of ice to water to vapor.
Perhaps if we are looking at a short enough interval into the future the vector of time becomes ambiguous much as the short segments of the film made in our "mind experiment".
Regards,
GtG
PS "I sense a great disturbance in the force!"
Yes, or you think of someone you haven't seen in years, and then run into them a few days later.
That happens to my husband all the time, and he doesn't believe in "this stuff" at all.
Liberals still have that.
Nice home page.
My Mother explained death to me this way......
A man heard that death was coming for him at home, so he sold everything, and moved to a new town.
At the new house he answered a knock on the door, to find death standing there, waiting for him
He asked Death how this could be, he had moved etc.
Death replied "I was always supposed to meet you here".
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