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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%.”