Weird stuff - paper suggesting evidence of precognition in mainstream journal?

Its a very interesting article actually. I saw it on New Scientist app.
Scientist heads would pop if it were true though, that the outcome has already effected the judgement.
It could explain a few strange things though, like knowing when some ones going to turn up randomly to thinking your phones going to ring and it does.
 
Could be merely a big coincidence. I would be interested about the statistics side of it, as in how they deemed the results to be statistically significant.

Nevertheless, it is a fascinating study and I'm glad people can actually approach something like this in a serious manner. If it is indeed true, I see no reason why a solid scientific theory can't be developed around it at some point in the future.
 
The fact it's statistically significant, that it's coming out in a top psychology journal and that some sceptics can't find much wrong with it says to me that this is certainly interesting and worth exploring further.
 
titaniumx3 said:
Could be merely a big coincidence. I would be interested about the statistics side of it, as in how they deemed the results to be statistically significant.

Nevertheless, it is a fascinating study and I'm glad people can actually approach something like this in a serious manner. If it is indeed true, I see no reason why a solid scientific theory can't be developed around it at some point in the future.
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Says in the article how it's statistically significant, right? It's higher than coincidence and I don't think it's very likely to have 1000 coincidences in a row...
 
I'd've been more happy with it if they'd mentioned some kind of control test. It could well be that there's a statistically significant chance of guessing the correct words on the list or guessing the sexual position without actually later knowing what you were supposed to guess later, which might suggest a different cause for the phenomenon than precognition. Then again I've not actually read the paper so I could be waffling for no apparent reason.

Edit: For example, it could be that the act of the subject guessing a certain list of words actually affects the probability of certain words appearing on the 'correct' list.
 
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I guess the best way to find that out is to read the paper when it's published. No point in speculating, eh?
 
Woody__ said:
I guess the best way to find that out is to read the paper when it's published. No point in speculating, eh?
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I saw it with my precogniti-wait.

Alternatively, I feel that my saying this may affect the future outcome of the studies following it, hence there may be a statistically significant reason for me speculating. :p
 
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I've always observed stuff like this. People thinking they've predicted the future because something they thought was going to happen, happens.

If you think about something mundane - like your phone's about to ring - and it doesn't, you forget that you had that thought because nothing came of it and it was insignificant. Everyone has 100s of thoughts like this a day: I'll turn on the TV and it'll be adverts; the doorbell is about to ring; tomorrow I'll be in a car accident. When all of these things don't happen, it's no big deal and you forget about it. But when they DO happen, you remember that you thought about it before the event. Forgetting all the thousands of other things your mind's tried to predict and failed, you think you've seen the future and that you knew this event was going to occur.

It's just coincidence. However some people would rather believe it's them being prophetic. Which is of course a much more interesting thought.

Up until now I'd always just shrugged this off as people wanting to believe something is more fascinating than it actually is. But 53% isn't 50%... To reiterate people above, yeah, I'd like to see some more mass tests done by other institutes before reading any significance into this. However it certainly is interesting.
 
Assuming that there is no flaws in the experiment and it's results can be replicated reliably and consistently, I wonder what would be more interesting:

a) Humans have some form of precognition.

or

b) Things are not as random or chaotic as they seem.
 
Interesting and, more importantly, done properly. Some of it sounds more like a two-way association than cause and effect (e.g. associating kittens and prettiness) but some of it doesn't.

It might be chance or unintended biases in the experiments, but publication will answer that question because other researchers will test the experiments.

It might be some unusual aspect of the human mind, not precognition. An assessment of probability, an awareness of patterns (human brains are very strongly geared to that), some oddity about how we process things.

It might be precognition, in which case we may as well all kill ourselves now. Although we wouldn't be able to, as if precognition exists no-one is able to make any choice about anything. The future can't be seen unless it's fixed and if it's fixed choice is impossible.

It might be a variety of things, but it's definitely interesting.

Shame it won't stop the anti-science conspiracy theorists claiming that <insert baseless idea here> is deliberately suppressed by the conspiracy of science despite all the evidence (that doesn't really exist at all). Even the most unorthodox ideas will be accepted in science if the evidence is behind them - that's inherent in science.
 
For me, the real impressive thing about it was how he reversed tried and tested psychology experiments. It seems like a simple thing, but by doing so it makes it easier to replicate and hopefully someone will be able to do so after it's been published.

If we say, for arguments sake, that it points to some kind of "precognition" (for lack of a better term) what happens next? New science? Exciting stuff.
 
So if these results do prove to indicate a human ability for precognition. Is this because the human brain can predict what is about to happen, or because - on a more scientific, quantum/dimensional level - everything that will occur actually already has and our mind can just tap into some universal meta-memory.

Surely you've all heard of the big crunch: that when the universe stops expanding it will begin to shrink. It's not impossible - some will say it's inevitable - that time will travel backwards too and we'll re-encounter what has already happened. Even though to us it will feel perfectly natural. When you really get down to it, on the big scale, there is no reason that entropy must travel forwards. I think humans have arbitrarily assumed that cause leads to effect because that's all we know.
 
Another step along New Scientists descent to absurdity.

In another study, Bem adapted research on "priming" – the effect of a subliminally presented word on a person's response to an image. For instance, if someone is momentarily flashed the word "ugly", it will take them longer to decide that a picture of a kitten is pleasant than if "beautiful" had been flashed. Running the experiment back-to-front, Bem found that the priming effect seemed to work backwards in time as well as forwards.
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So rather than interpret that the logical way, ie the word taking longer to comprehend because the image conflicts with it, they come up with some crazy pre cog theory. :rolleyes:
 
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Energize said:
Another step along New Scientists descent to absurdity.



So rather than interpret that the logical way, ie the word taking longer to comprehend because the image conflicts with it, they come up with some crazy pre cog theory. :rolleyes:
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Maybe I'm getting this wrong, but the they were still being asked to describe the image, not the word. So in the experiment, they found that participants were taking longer than 'normal' to say an image of a kitten was beautiful, even though the word ugly was flashed after the image was shown.

How do you explain that?
 
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