A debate rages as to whether there is evidence for an ability to predict the future, either in science laboratories or amongst psychic predictions found in everyday life.
Precognition, psychic predictions, fortune-telling and prophecy are all terms to describe knowledge of future events. In scientific laboratories evidence of precognition remains elusive, controversial and complicated. Psychic predictions are easier to understand but no less elusive.
Psychic Predictions
Spare a thought for Herve Vandrot, the amateur French fortune-teller who, despite some particularly bad press following his failure to predict a minor personal disaster, has continued in his endeavours to predict the future. His unfortunate incident is not an isolated one however. Each year, amusingly, there are lists of predictions put forward by renowned psychics that never come true. For example, in 1996, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry reported on the psychic prediction that Jim Carrey will get an Oscar after his face freezes in a twisted expression and that Barbara Walters will be kidnapped by Middle East terrorists!
Frequently, when there is a catastrophic disaster, a slew of psychics come forward saying that they had a vision predicting it. There are hundreds of declared predictions about wars, serial killers, earthquakes, and plane crashes. Parapsychologists seriously question this sort of evidence. It’s anecdotal, which has its own problems, but frequently recorded predictions are wrong (where’s Jim Carrey’s Oscar?), or they are reported after the predicted incident.
Precognition in the Laboratory
Parapsychology defines precognition as advanced knowledge of future events. The science attempts to study fortune-telling either by testing theories about the mechanics or simply searching for proof. J. B. Rhine, the father of parapsychology in the 1930s, examined precognition using the traditional Zener cards – each card having one of five symbols on one side: a cross, star, wavy lines, circle and square. He would normally have one person in a room predicting the symbols and another person in a different room later recording randomly chosen symbols. He was careful to reduce the possibility of people using any of their ‘normal’ five senses to find out the correct answer. Rhine reported repeated success with his experiments, and although this earlier research has been severely criticised, later work in Princeton University provoked greater debate.
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) group, now closed down, conducted hundreds of tests on precognition (or Remote Perception, as they called it) in addition to almost 30 years spent studying psychokinesis (PK). One way of testing precognition was to have a person describe a location where another person would visit at some prearranged future time. The results are compelling but PEAR’s work has been picked apart by some scientists on statistical grounds, for example Ray Hyman in his book entitled The Elusive Quarry (Prometheus Books, 1989). There is also some fascinating, yet equally controversial and highly debated, evidence for precognition in dogs which has been conducted by biologist and ex-Cambridge University fellow, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Dr. Sheldrake feels that there is strong evidence to suggest that some dogs intuitively know when their owners are coming home.
So there is, perhaps, scientific proof of precognition. But it’s a provocative area since the tentative results for it in the lab do not reflect the claims of psychics and their predictions that are given on a daily basis in the real world. Oh, and what about Herve Vandrot, the psychic mentioned at the beginning? Herve Vandrot’s only crime was not being able to predict that if he left his crystal ball on his windowsill it would result in a fire that would burn down his, and two other, flats.
Further Reading
The Conscious Universe: The scientific truth of psychic phenomena, Dean Radin, (HarperCollins, 1997).
The Elusive Quarry: a Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research, Ray Hyman (Prometheus Books, 1989).
