Cornell Precognition Experiment
November 7th, 2010From the Cryptogon Backchannel.
Via: H+ Magazine:
According to today’s conventional scientific wisdom, time flows strictly forward — from the past to the future through the present. We can remember the past, and we can predict the future based on the past (albeit imperfectly) — but we can’t perceive the future.
But if the recent data from the lab of Prof. Daryl Bem at Cornell University is correct, conventional scientific wisdom may need some corrections on this particular point.
In a research paper titled Feeling the Future, recently accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Bem presents some rather compelling empirical evidence that in some cases — and with weak but highly statistically significant accuracy – many human beings can directly perceive the future. Not just predict it based on the past.
A pre-publication copy of Bem’s paper is available on his website, and it should appear on the journal’s website shortly. The article is already attracting considerable attention, including a piece in Psychology Today. Also, Bem reports that he has already received hundreds of requests for “replication packages” — documentation and software allowing others to repeat the experiments he did. If you want to try to replicate the work yourself, replication packages for some of the experiments are already available at http://dbem.ws/psistuff.
If Bem’s results are indeed replicated, this will shock some scientists, but many others will say “I told you so.”
…
And what were the results?
1. “Across all 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1%.” (which is highly statistically significant given the number of trials involved, according to the calculations shown in the paper)
2. “In contrast, their hit rate on the non-erotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8. This was true across all types of non-erotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but non-erotic pictures, 50.2%.”
In other words the hypotheses made in advance of the experiment were solidly confirmed. The experiment yielded highly statistically significant evidence for psychic precognition. Much more than would be expected at random, given the number of subjects involved, the Cornell students were able to perceive the erotic stimuli from the future — but not, in this context, the non-erotic ones.
Research Credit: AF
I’ll try to keep this short – but it will be tricky.
A few years ago I was working on learning software involving neural networks. I studied lots of papers on ‘software’ brains, and also on biological brains, hoping to get some extra insights. What I found was very disturbing. The two things are only very loosely related in principle. They do not at all work in the same way, or lead to the same effects, or exhibit similar capabilities. They are not equivalent.
There is a very interesting, and incredibly simple little rule in every neuron of every bioligical brain – it is called “spike time dependent plasticity” or STDP. In plain english is the ‘training rule’ that strengthens neural connections when ‘causal’ things happen. e.g. when your eyes see something cutting you, and then you experience pain – a high level you have built an association with the action of cutting, and the sensation of pain. When A happens, B follows, and we learn it. This much we know.
What isn’t so well known is that STDP includes an equivalent ‘anti-rule’. This anti-rule attempts to weaken anti-causal associations.
Anti-causal… Pardon?
If you sense pain, and THEN something cuts you – in that order – this would represent an anti-causal association. We used to think the brain just ignores that as noise. It doesn’t. It detects the close proximity of the two events and anti-trains/weakens those brain connections, in an attempt to enforce a useful, logical time/sequence ordering in the brain.
The fun part comes when you start to think about what happens without the anti-rule. Do you simply become more suceptible to spurious religions? Or do you actually start to integrate unordered events which are currently being suppressed to let us function properly?
Go read and then go think. 🙂
Interesting comment, thanks. Very salient. Definitely a Crypoton Top Ten, in my book.
This response probably won’t make a lot of sense to some folks, but here goes:
…what you call the STDP anti-rule is basically a time dimension version of the well-known space dimension “surround inhibition”. Excitation is surrounded by inhibition, in general. Think of visual cortex contrast enhancement, for example.
There are many other examples (e.g. Dolby noise reduction is based on auditory surround inhibition in the frequency domain.)
One could call it an “anti-rule”, I suppose, but it’s simply contrast enhancement — by allowing excitation near the center, and active surround inhibition, you get “contrast enhancement.” This helps form categories. (This operates in motor circuits, as well. References abound. Ask any academic PT about antagonist inhibition during agonist excitation.)
Anyway…this is all happening in space — i.e. in the neuronal assemblies spatially close to the original input. Now think in terms of ‘time.’
My comment is that there is a temporal inhibition as well, and that’s what you are seeing in this “STDP anti-rule”. A simplistic version (very simplistic!) can be seen in the refractory behavior of neurons after firing.
The “fun part” as you say (and it *is* fun) is to think of what happens when spatial/temporal inhibition is effed with. Probably harder to form categories, I’d imagine, for starters. But the temporal effects are interesting to think about!
Thanks for that, c0rundum.
RMOHANX – thanks for the excellent response.
You’ve actually summarized it much better than I have as a ‘temporal contrast enhancement’ mechanism, which *is* how I interpreted it at the time. I immediately started hitting the why question (didn’t get terribly far with science papers after that. Some speculations but not a lot of solid material).
Why would neurons need to punish anti-causal events which are rare / impossible by definition? Really bizarre. Had to keep looking at it.
Anyway I did eventually solve this question (fairly sure I did anyway) by accident, while trying to solve another problem. The explanation would require a bigger post 🙂 and the answer of course just leads to more questions.
It *is* organisational and the brain won’t work without it, but….. the other effects / consequences this rule could be hiding are very interesting to think about and it quickly leads back to the quantum/temporal confusion over how we perceive the world.
@c0rundum
Kind words; thanks.
Re-reading my post, I wish I hadn’t
been typing quite so fast that I mis-wrote
“Crypoton”. Sheesh! Thank god Kevin’s not a
crotchety self-important typo-stickler,
otherwise he’d ban me from Crypto-commentology
forever.
I liked what you wrote because it clearly
raised that idea of activation/inhibition
in a real, applied fashion. It’s one thing
to study a bunch of applied neurophysiology,
and to follow the trendy brain-model-du-jour,
but it’s truly refreshing to think directly
about these issues. Important stuff.
I was stunned, recently, to read in Peter
Watson’s very grand history of thought and
invention, “Fire”, as the closing thought
in the very last paragraph of the very last
page of the book, that he suspects there
is no inner self..and hence no free will. This,
in a book about the creativity of human
cognition.
Scientists, too, talk about the role of
cognition and free will in humans. One excellent
survey article (also strongly questioning
free will) is by Anthony Cashmore, in the
Jan 2010 edition of PNAS Neuroscience. It’s
title: “The Lucretian Swerve”. Highly
recommended.
I raise these examples not to advocate against
free will (an idea I still cling to) but
rather because it may well be that in your
statement about “…confusion over how we
perceive the world…” the key word may well
be simply “perceive” and not at all “we”.
c0rundum, please post a link to your insights if they are written up somewhere. I’m interested in reading them, regardless of the length, if they’re available somewhere.
Thanks in advance.
I think it is very interesting that it was in the erotic arena where peoples correctly intuited the “future.”
This was interesting for me to read because I do believe humans know more than what we are credited. I believe that humans make a contract with “whomever” before they are born about what they will experience in this lifetime. I believe we pick our families, friends, jobs, you name it before we are born. And then we forget the whole deal before we enter the birth canal.
And then things happen when we remember stuff we agreed to do. And that is what frightens us, when we feel like we are remembering something. Or on the other hand, where we feel like we “know” somehow what is going to happen in the future.
I am not a science major per se, but I think it is very interesting that there is a scientific study out there that can replicate the findings that humans are prescient. INTERESTING that this study applies to erotica. We know how to move and groove I guess. Go figure.
Okay, I have identified a problem:
“40 of the sessions comprised 12 trials using erotic pictures, 12 trials using negative pictures, and 12 trials using neutral pictures. The sequencing of the pictures and their left/right positions were randomly determined by the programming language’s internal random function. ”
Unless it was using the Merssane twister, it is very possible that the people just found the repetition in the random function. I hope I am wrong about this though.
There are detectable physiological correlates.
See Dean Radin’s work on pupillary dilation, spontaneous blinking, and eye movements BEFORE images appear.
http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2009/08/intuition-through-time-what-does-seer.html
http://www.deanradin.com/papers/Who_seer_sees.pdf
equally interesting is Spottiswoode’s work showing that there is a relationship between one’s alignment with the galactic centre (via local sidereal time) and psychic ability.
http://www.jsasoc.com/docs/JSE-LST.pdf
princeton’s noosphere team have done some similar work and found that the EGGs (random number generators) show similar affects based upon orientation to the galactic centre. which is pretty stunning, really.
@Zenc
Thanks for the encouragement – I’ll definitely write up some detail on the specific things I found and blog or link them from here.
@RMOHANX,
re: ‘trendy brain-model-du-jour’ – yep the speculative writing can become tiresome when there is no clear way to get a handle on how something might *actually* work. I got involved in this from the practical side, trying to improve a piece of software. Wasn’t really my intention to get into biology problems. I did learn a lot though, was worthwhile.
re: ‘no inner self..and hence no free will.’
I had in my hands for a short while a book called ‘Catching Ourselves in the Act’ (ISBN-13: 978-0262082464) which discusses some experiments and problems involving the human trait of acting first, rationalizing later. It was discovered this occurs on the macro timescale (a type of rationalization we have all encountered – people explaining away bad choices) but also on the micro timescale (hand moving before decision is made to move it, later rationalized as intent). The argument is that our intelligent, conscious selves are pure rationalizing machines. It is a difficult book – heavy going, but there are some scary things in there which are well worth digging out. I would caution against any ‘single view’ that claims to explain everything, but it is another puzzle piece I believe.
Thanks again for the responses and the references. I’ll definitely look at those.
@Eileen
Here is a little game to play with a spouse/gf/bf (assuming you don’t plan to do anything else 🙂 and assuming you don’t get laughed at!).
One of you thinks of a colour or a strongly coloured image, and the other has to guess the colour. Keep trying it, even if the success rate is terrible. Try it particularly when you are both close to sleeping. This started as a laugh, and after a terrible first batch of games, started getting scary success rates into the 60-70% region, particularly when very relaxed/sleepy and in darkness (After a lapse of a couple of months, the success rate dropped back to 50-ish when resumed). Not saying it works – it’s not real science or statistics. We found it creepy.
It’s also a great way to get to sleep quickly, so it can have some practical use :-p some games didn’t finish.
@clive
Mersenne twister – hehe. I could tell a few funny stories about random number generators and people trying to use them. Point taken.
@Kevin
Will read, thanks. This is scarily close to some of the findings in ‘Catching Ourselves in the Act’ but the implications are wildly different 😮
@uranian
I didn’t know anything about this. And semiconductor random number generators? Will investigate. Thanks.
I have a good friend who happens to have a PhD in an area of inquiry that’s relevant to this story.
I wrote to him and asked what he thought about this. Here is his response:
He’s fooling himself and, it seems, everyone else too. When you see what is claimed to be a statistical effect at 53%, or 51% in some of his experiments, with effect size values (d) of 0.1, 0.22, this is snake oil shenanigans.
You can read a little about effect size on Wikipedia. The relevant sentence is below:
/*Given a sufficiently large sample size, a statistical comparison will _always show a significant difference_ unless the population effect size is exactly zero.* For example, a sample Pearson correlation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation> coefficient of 0.1 is strongly statistically significant if the sample size is 1000. * Reporting only the small p-value from this analysis could be _misleading_* if a correlation of 0.1 is too small to be of interest in a particular application.
/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size
There is a fine line in statistical analysis between false positives and false negatives. If your test is too stringent, you can get a false negative and miss some real effect. However, if your data is wildly variable (or has some other correlations in it) and your measured effect size is small, you could get a false positive. I believe this is the case with this guys data.
So, that 53.1% and effect size of .1 comes to this: either 1) this effect is real and he just obliterated our understanding of causality and the mind-body connection; or 2) he’s a nut, and there are serious flaws in his experiment and analysis. Personally, I pick number 2. By logic, we must assume ESP to be false until it is proven true. And it will take a lot more than 53.1% and d=.1 to convince anyone that it’s true.
Here’s an article with a skeptical view of effect size in ESP research history. It also discusses the author of this recent paper.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/new_analyses_raise_doubts_about_replicability_of_esp_findings/
@uranian
vis a vis random number generators…you might
have heard that the statistics of “random
radioactive decay” predictably alter
relative to solar flare status….
A few of these stories have been popping up
lately.