Is this REALLY proof that man can see into the future?

The Daily Mail ^ | 4th May 2007

[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."

[Quix]

Thanks much will check whenh get home

[Joe 6-pack]

Allow me to first apologize for not responding to each of you individually, as is my normal habit, but it's been a busy weekend and I thought one "catch-all" reply may cover most of the points many of you brought up.

First, if you look at the second paragraph of my reply at #40, I don't discount, in whole or even in part, that there may be far more going on here than just the mere connecting of dots by a subconscious logic mechanism that we don't understand.

Second, I've never really liked the terms 'paranormal', 'supernatural', etc. as I believe all these things are part of a created universe which we don't entirely comprehend. Not too many centuries ago, humans generally accepted the *fact* that a solar eclipse was the result of a dragon or some other celestial beast gobbling the sun. We now know better, but to think that in the vastness of the universe, our understanding of all phenomena is really that much more complete than it was 500 years ago, is, I think, part of our inherent human vanity. I'm quite certain, a few hundred years from now, people will look back on many of our beliefs and explanations for natural events and find them just as preposterous as a dragon noshing on the sun (how's that for a prediction?). Just because we don't understand or can't explain why something happens doesn't mean it isn't entirely natural and/or explicable. My GOD and Creator made a wonderfully diverse and complex universe (or even if you will, multitude of universes), the workings of which are slowly revealed to us, but to think that things we can't explain are anything other than natural or His doing is an expression really, of how full of our selves we really are.

Thirdly, we in the west, tend to think of temporal things in a very linear, sequential pattern. This works OK to explain why we, and those around us get older, and the direct cause and effect of events we can directly influence and observe. I believe that our Creator transcends time and that his creation is not just the here and now, but also includes the thens, past and present and even the merely possible. Viewed in its totality like this, the occasional incidents of prophecy, foresight and precognition are amazing simply for the fact that they are not more common than reported, and a further indication of how little we know and are aware of the immensity of all creation, and our rare and infrequent experiences with predictive visions are merely a dipping of the toes in the ocean of created reality. Moreover, in a theological sense, our linear thought process creates doubts and questions like "why do bad things happen to good people," or notions like, "no good deed goes unpunished." There are indeed, consequences for our actions, but if time is not looked at as a simply linear progression but a more circular or all-encompassing cloud or sphere, we don't find ourselves wrestling (as vigorously, anyways) with such propositions.

I, of all people, would not presume to know the fullness of GOD's doings, or the nature of his workings, but have spent some time pondering these things, and more than arriving at any answers, I've tended to question things more deeply. I have concluded however, that we have a Creator of far more infinite complexity than we might hope to comprehend, and who has in fact, blessed us with a creation of which we are an integral part, even if we don't fully understand exactly how we interact with the rest of it, be that in a temporal, spiritual or physical manner.

Having said all that, I'll reiterate my initial assertion that much (certainly not all) of these seemingly precognitive incidents arise from knowledge we've collected and the exercise of human logic. With that in mind, my personal definition of "human logic" is not so much the cold, clinical Sherlock Holmes/Mr. Spock definition of the word, but more closely aligned with what most people would refer to as "intuition," a combination of interpolation, or extrapolation, and which is a uniquely human gift from GOD. So, rather than my initial reply to this thread being a mere write-off of a seemingly arcane phenomena, a "swamp gas" type explanation, if you will, I do think of it as having a Divine component, even if it is *merely* the exercise of a GOD-given gift that few of us have chosen to develop and exercise. In that regard, it is a very special thing, but rather than being eerie or mysterious, it may very well be something that is far more intimately known to us all, even if the majority of us don't even acknowledge it or even, in some cases (like many of our blessings from GOD), choose to deny it....

[redangus]

My late wife told me when we were dating that she was not going to live to 50. We were 19 at the time and her family had a history of long-life on both sides with many living into their 80-90’s. I told her she was mistaken and would be dancing on my grave someday. She died at age 46. Did she see the future I don’t know? But I will never forget that conversation.

I have a friend whose mother was spooky in her ability to foresee things including her daughter-in-laws death in a freak car accident in her driveway. She was unloading groceries whent he car slipped out of park, knocked her down and ran over her neck killing her instantly.

I believe that humans in general and some humans in particular have the ability to see or feel things in the future.

[Finny]

The plane landed in Denver without me....

Don't feel too bad. I would have done the same thing. =^]

[Finny]

What an interesting post. ... one of God’s gifts to us is the ability to eventually solve his mysteries scientifically, I believe ...

Me too. It is such a mystery how these thigns work. I have brothers who are identical twins and when they were kids, exhibited often an impossible mind-connect with each other. It makes you realize that God sets out lots of mysteries that you think you're crazy at first for even considering. But one can deny truth for only so long, I guess because truth has a funny way of happening whether you acknowledge it or not!

[Finny]

There will be a great calamity here because man trusted man and not God.

Yeah, but that's the same as pushing a coffee cup off a table and "predicting" it will crash on the floor. Gravity is still there, just like it was yesterday.

God's laws are gravity -- man's laws aren't. Thank God and pray for Christianity, the greatest and most proven force for human advancement in our possession.

[Finny]

Study MATTER WAVES and you’ll learn how “spooky action at a distance” comes from DeBroglie’s U=c^2/v equation...

Huh???? FWIW, for maybe 5 seconds before the Northridge Earthquake hit (I was about 25 miles southeast of Northridge), I was startled out of a deep sleep, began to discern the most frightening rumble like five million trains in the distance, and was already awake when it hit. I remember it as being the sensation of "feeling" the wave coming. I was out of bed like a jackrabbit when it jolted the apartment.

[Finny]

Totally off topic, but I've got to say it: I love your tagline:

"Liberals read Karl Marx. Conservatives UNDERSTAND Karl Marx." Ronald Reagan

[Hot Tabasco]

the US military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme known as Stargate,

I know that is a fact because I have been watching videos on the TV of their adventures.........

[Finny]

See my post 166. :^ )

[MARTIAL MONK]

At one time I worked in the office of a large building which contained dozens of pieces of constantly running machinery. There was a ubiquitous drone of motors and fans and whatnot running and kicking on and off which was background noise in whatever we were doing. We got used to it and became accustomed to speaking in loud voices over the din.

On occasion I would get an uneasy feeling and announce that "something's wrong". Without fail, we would check the equipment and find that some machine had quit working. Others in the office regarded me as somewhat strange but I was never wrong. Always there was some motor that had failed to kick on or off or just had ceased to function. I was able to discern that the total noise level or pitch was changed by the absence of one contributing noise source. I couldn't tell which individual piece it was but I could tell that the overall noise level had changed where others could not.

The maintenance guys gradually came to rely on my sense of "harmonics" to tell if everything was operating normally.

[Domestic Church]

My cousin was late to work on 9/11 and is alive today because of that as she worked in one of the towers that was hit. It was unusual for her to be late.

[Joe 6-pack]

The scary thing if you and I are correct is that we really have no idea how much we and our behavior our influenced by what goes on around us. Obviously we are conscious of a good bit of it, but not as much as we like to think.

I think the electromagnetic spectrum is a good example of this...If you look at how tiny a portion of it is actually visible to us, it can be daunting to think about how much is going on around us in the parts of it we can't see...and which undoubtedly have some effect on us. Even in the visible portion, our inability to resolve things at the microscopic level leave us blind.

Anyone who's ever been stricken by the flu virus certainly can attest to the fact that our lives can be heavily impacted by things we normally can't sense...

[mc5cents]

OK tell me what the lotto number is for tomorrow.

[guitfiddlist]

Gaia Man
User ID: 308
6/30/2005
2:46 pm EDT
To:
france
User ID: 1028
6/29/2005
4:17 pm EDT
And what do you see for France ?
Thank you very much

---

Dear Soul,
Like I wrote a few weeks ago about France. France is at the brink of big Political changes. The man who wanted to be The King of Europe is about to fall. Relations with England, The Netherlands, Italy and more countries in Europe will be worse and worse. The people of France will ask him to leave. A young man comes in his place. Relations with other countries will be better. France have to keep a clear eye on what is happening in different parts of Paris. The Jihad will come to France.

Gaia Man
User ID: 15345
7/9/2005
3:11 am EDT
To:
katm0855
User ID: 1511
7/8/2005
4:47 pm EDT
I get these strange feelings that something is going to happen to France. Like a terrorist attack. Whenever I see Jacque Chirac right now, I see pain and much sadness ahead.
Gaia Man,
I know that you posted about the Jihad going into France. Would you be so kinda as to go into that a bit more if you know of anything else?

---

Dear Soul,
About his sadness, its because he knows the time is approaching, a similar attack will hit France.
But it will be bigger. The Jihad has come to Europe with the attack in Madrid. He knows the Base is in Paris. He knows he will have to step down as a Leader, a younger man will come to replace him.

http://www.godlikeproductions.com/bbs/message.php?page=235&messageid=108334&showdate=4/22/07&mpage=1

[timer]

Half of your body is partices, called fermions : electrons, protons, neutrons. Each particle also is a WAVE, just like light(the electromagnetic spectrum is particles-bose photons that move like WAVES). Thus MATTER WAVES are the other, invisible, half of your body; sometimes called fermi waves.

You don’t SEE them(wavelength given by h/mv, 20 orders of magnitude shorter than 4000 to 7700 angstroms), you FEEL them as TIME; or the collapse of the wavefunction as physicists say. The speed of the matter wavecrest is given by U=c^2/v which can either be taken as c^2 mass-AREA or c^2 as momentum-LINE(9x10^16 km/sec).

Thus your body-matterwave-half felt the movement of matter in the quake even before the ground waves hit. Now, let’s see how your mind can expand to comprehend this.....

[Alouette]

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?

Those flights were selected by the hijackers precisely because they normally carried a low passenger load.

[MARTIAL MONK]

I expect to see huge advances in identifying those hidden influences in the near future. The tin foilers may be partially right.

I wonder just how much is within our cognative range but is either filtered out or relegated to background status, unrecognized. If we could learn to pick out and assign true import to what we do sense, human intellectual advancement would take an enormous leap.

I have personal story that is counterintuative and has puzzled me for thirty years. In 1973 I was talking to a group of friends and Lyndon Johnson's name came up in the course of the conversation. Out of nowhere I said "LBJ will not survive the day". Even I was surprised at the statement as he had been out of office for years, was low profile, and had not been in the news. Aside from a couple of startled looks the subject went no further. He died that afternoon.

[VRWCer]

Extremely well put! I couldn’t have said it better myself! That’s just about exactly the way I view this whole phenomena. Thank you for putting it so eloquently! :-)

[VRWCer]

I also have a cousin who narrowly avoided being a casualty of 9/11. She had moved from NJ to CA the year earlier, still working with the stockmarket as a compliance officer. She had plans to come home the weekend before 9/11, for a friend’s wedding. She actually was booked on flight 93 (the one that crashed in PA), but a couple of weeks before her scheduled arrival in NJ, her old boss from NY called and asked her to stay on a few more days to help her out with a project, and in exchange for her help, she offered to pay her way round trip. Of course she accepted the offer, and gave up her seat on the illfated flight. She was safely in midtown when the attacks began.