Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!

[xes]

Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in one of the most prestigious psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to "see into the future" is often referred to as psi phenomena.

Although prior research has been conducted on the psi phenomena - we have all seen those movie images of people staring at Zener cards with a star or wavy lines on them - such studies often fail to meet the threshold of "scientific investigation." However, Bem's studies are unique in that they represent standard scientific methods and rely on well-established principles in psychology. Essentially, he took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology - studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times - and simply reversed their chronological order.

For example, we all know that rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall in the future, but what if the rehearsal occurs after the recall? In one of the studies, college students were given a list of words and after reading the list, were given a surprise recall test to see how many words they remembered. Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words on the list as practice words and the participants were asked to retype them several times. The results of the study showed that the students were better at recalling the words on the surprise recall test that they were later given, at random, to practice. According to Bem, practicing the words after the test somehow allowed the participants to "reach back in time to facilitate recall."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...finally-discovered-evidence-psychic-phenomena

using my powers, i can already "see" the first few replies in this thread

 

[BigTom]

interesting but little point in commenting until the article is published, and I'm always a little bit about articles that are released to the press before being published in a peer-reviewed journal.

 

[Bob_the_lost]

No
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[fogbat]

No
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I knew you were going to say that.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

Our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to "see into the future" is often referred to as psi phenomena.

There is the problem right there. Yes I can anticipate future events. Later today I will pick up my daughter and I anticipate that she will a bit moody before bedtime. I will wake up tomorrow and I anticipate that I will be a bit sleepy still and not want to get out of bed, but I will anyway.

That is not 'seeing into the future' or a psi phenomena, that's called using past experience to anticipate the future. Great study.

 

[TruXta]

Read the study first before rendering a verdict will you? Or at least one of the many well informed commentaries that can be found on the internetz. What you're on about has no bearing on the experiments reported on.

That said touting this paper as some kind of final proof is obv BS, it needs loads of replication by independent labs. Which given previous ESP research history is unlikely to be forthcoming.

 

[Santino]

No.

 

[TruXta]

To the nay-sayers - do you think you'd ever accept any evidence that ESP-type phenomena are real, or do you think that they are ruled out in principle?

 

[Crispy]

To the nay-sayers - do you think you'd ever accept any evidence that ESP-type phenomena are real, or do you think that they are ruled out in principle?

Nothing in our current knowledge would allow for such phenomena, IMO, but evidence can't be ignored. When there's good evidence, let me know.

 

[The Groke]

To the nay-sayers - do you think you'd ever accept any evidence that ESP-type phenomena are real, or do you think that they are ruled out in principle?

When there is trustworthy, peer reviewed, high quality evidence for such, then I would take it seriously.

 

[TruXta]

When there is trustworthy, peer reviewed, high quality evidence for such, then I would take it seriously.

In that case this paper would count. It's trustworthy (good methodology), peer reviewed (one of the top psych journals), high quality "evidence" (it's suggestive of something but not really evidence, since evidence proper necessitates a testable causal theory that explains the how, not just the what).

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Nothing in our current knowledge would allow for such phenomena, IMO, but evidence can't be ignored. When there's good evidence, let me know.

Yep. We also clearly need to allow for alternative explanations of the evidence. These results are strikingly similar to some effects observed at the quantum level. We shouldn't be too surprised really if such strangeness can also manifest itself at the classical level of explanation.

 

[TruXta]

I'm extremely wary of that quantum bizniz to explain these kinds of things. As I said above, this isn't evidence as such, it's more like phenomenology in the physics sense, where you do experiments mostly to observe what happens and then starting developing a proper theory. There's no proper testable causal theory as to how ESP would work, hence this isn't evidence.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I'm not saying it is an explanation, but it is strikingly similar to observed quantum phenomena, such as causing interference in a wave pattern by interfering with the waves after the interference pattern has been observed, which also have not been explained, btw.

What we are lacking, imo, is a proper understanding of the nature of time. It isn't what we perceive it to be – the 'time' that we perceive is a construction of our consciousnesses and it is very hard to conceptualise the deeper reality that our consciousnesses are modelling.

 

[TruXta]

Agree on the time bit. In a classical linear universe precognition cannot by definition exist. Loosen that restriction and things get weird quickly.

 

[Lord Hugh]

Will check the paper and see if the in-press version is available online tomorrow. I doubt that the psychic explanation holds much (any) sway, but we'll see.

 

[TruXta]

There's at least 2, maybe 3 replication studies done already, unsurprisingly they don't show any significant results. But in a way that's good, as one of Bem's goals was exactly to create an experimental paradigm that was easily replicable.

 

[Knotted]

I'm not saying it is an explanation, but it is strikingly similar to observed quantum phenomena, such as causing interference in a wave pattern by interfering with the waves after the interference pattern has been observed, which also have not been explained, btw.

What we are lacking, imo, is a proper understanding of the nature of time. It isn't what we perceive it to be – the 'time' that we perceive is a construction of our consciousnesses and it is very hard to conceptualise the deeper reality that our consciousnesses are modelling.

It's only superficially similar to quantum phenomenon. Quick test - you can't use quantum phenomenon to do super-luminal signally, however if you tell someone a code which they then recall yesterday to someone in the next room you can signal to the person in the next room yesterday. I'm not sure what experiment you are thinking of but quantum phenomena are subtley weird and any talk of actual waves is an interpreation not an empirical phenomenon.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I'll try to dig it out – can't find it at the moment. I can tell you what I remember of it to give you the idea.

It involves a variation on the double-slit experiment using a half-silvered mirror. The individual photons (for sake of argument let's describe it like this) are fired along a path at which there is a half-silvered mirror, through which, presumably, half pass and half are reflected. Half of these then pass on through a double-slit and an interference pattern builds up on a detector screen. But if you then place a detector to find photons that have been reflected, and place the detector in such a way that the photons ought to reach it after the photons causing the interference pattern have hit the screen, the interference pattern disappears.

I'm writing that from memory, so the details may not be quite right, but the principle is, and it does fuck with our idea of time. It seems that from the photon's point of view, it is everywhere it is going to be at the same time, or more properly at the same spacetime. That's hard to square with our idea of time and space, but it leads to the conclusion, I think, that the way we view a photon travelling – that it is in different places at different times – is an artefact of our perception. In reality, it must be occupying the same point in spacetime, and it is just our changing place in spacetime, and the way that we perceive spacetime not as it is but as split into space and time, that creates the impression that it is moving over time at speed c.

The conclusions this leads to are legion, but one such is that a star emitting light over the other side of the galaxy and that light hitting our retinas so that we perceive it are the same event. They occur at the same point in spacetime. When we say that we are seeing 'back in time' when we look into space, that is only true from our perspective as constant travellers in spacetime. The deeper reality is somewhat different.

Now, in principle at least, this experiment could be set up so that the detector is placed such a long way from the screen with the interference pattern that it could be conceived that the pattern appearing/not appearing is determined by an event that happens long after it has been decided. But again, this only appears to be the case because of our misapprehension about spacetime. In reality, there would be no way for a person at point A, where the detector is placed, to communicate with a person at point B, where the pattern is noted, fast enough to tell them the result of the detector before the pattern has emerged/not emerged. You can't go back in spacetime, it would seem, and the principle of action–causation is not violated.

The puzzle for me is the idea of simultaneity within the same frame of reference. It seems that it is more appropriate to speak of the light being emitted by the star and it hitting my retina as simultaneous events, or even that this is itself one event – the transfer of energy from one point in spacetime to another, and that this is all any event is. Even thinking of spacetime as containing 'points' is probably itself flawed...

 

[Crispy]

I'll try to dig it out – can't find it at the moment. I can tell you what I remember of it to give you the idea.

It involves a variation on the double-slit experiment using a half-silvered mirror. The individual photons (for sake of argument let's describe it like this) are fired along a path at which there is a half-silvered mirror, through which, presumably, half pass and half are reflected. Half of these then pass on through a double-slit and an interference pattern builds up on a detector screen. But if you then place a detector to find photons that have been reflected, and place the detector in such a way that the photons ought to reach it after the photons causing the interference pattern have hit the screen, the interference pattern disappears.

Wow. Would love to read more on this experiment. Let me know when you find a link

 

[Knotted]

I should probably go into what you've written above, but my point was a very quick and dirty one. Without going to into the deeper reality and just sticking with what can be measured and what informatic resources we can access with quantum phenonmena, everyone agrees that there can be no superluminal signalling regardless of how they interpret quantum mechanics and that includes those who are inclined to take an explicitly non-local interpretation of quantum mechanics. It perhaps looks like you can get it, but it just doesn't come out mathematically. In short super-luminal signalling requires more than non-locality, even including reverse time causality (like the transactional interpretation). In these non-local interpreations interpretations it is like the non-local causality is there but we can't access it or use it - measurement kills the magic as it were.

This "psychic" experiment seems to be breaking the laws of physics and that includes quantum mechanics.

 

[Knotted]

I seem to remember this experiment being reported in the New Scientist, but if I remember correctly it was only being proposed and hadn't actually been tried.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Wow. Would love to read more on this experiment. Let me know when you find a link

I'll try to remember where I read it. It was in a book, but I can't remember which book. I'll let you know if I remember.

The principle is as I describe it, though, and as Knotted says, it doesn't actually make possible 'superluminal signalling' directly. However, I would say this: we already know that algae 'use' the properties of quantum entanglement to transmit energy efficiently. If algae use it, I would suspect that its use is ubiquitous. I suspect that this is the key to unravelling the so-called 'binding problem' of consciousness: the fact that there simply isn't enough time for the signals to travel all around the brain to 'bind' experiences together and form our conscious representation. But we do not represent this underlying reality to ourselves in our conscious experience because its representation would be of no value to us at the level of experience that consciousness needs to concern itself with, so it is invisible to us, just as atoms, molecules, and even bacteria, were invisible to us until we found clever ways to detect them.

We're clever, humans. We're finding ways to see beyond the things that we've evolved to see.

 

[Knotted]

I should say that there are some things which quantum phenomenon do allow us to do that we can't do "classically". Some algorithms are absolutely more efficient on qunatum computers. What's probably relelvant for brain function, is that searchs are order square root of n rather than n on a quantum computer.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Ok, there is no direct evidence for this, but I strongly suspect that the reason neurons fire simultaneously in 'brain waves' is precisely so that the moving electrons become entangled. If so, the possibilities are far more impressive than merely a square root's worth improvement. All the entangled particles will be momentarily connected. They will then decohere into one particular path, and in effect the brain has been able to 'scan' itself outside time – all at once. That's what happens with algae. There is a momentary coherence and all possible paths for the energy from photosynthesis to travel along are available at once. When the paths decohere, just that which entails the least energy loss is taken. It's remarkable – it is more efficient by several orders of magnitude.

* I even strongly suspect that it is this 'outside of timeness' that gives us our sense of subjective self, that it is the key to understanding the existence of awareness. Of course, I have no proof.

 

[Crispy]

you've been thinking too much mate

 

[littlebabyjesus]

There's quite a bit more to my theory.

But I'll leave it there.

 

[Knotted]

Quantum computation is far more impressive than square root speed ups, that is until you make your measurement. Quantum mechanics as described by the wave function is ludicrously powerful, but then the damn wave function collapses whenever you want to make use of it. That's the problem. Added to that the results are random so you have to run it many times to get a reliable out come.

There is real reason to be sceptical about any large scale quantum phenonmena happening in the brain - it requires quantum coherence which is extremely fragile - it's the same phenomenon behind super-conductors. It helps if it's cold. This is the problem they have with building quantum comptures - you just can't get the qubits you know.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Yes, and that's why it is so remarkable to have found it in algae.

Here's a report on it. It happens, and at the temperatures of life!

I'm very sceptical about the subject of the OP, btw. I suspect it is something that will not be repeated, just a fluke that seems to show a pattern to us pattern-seeking creatures, but in fact does not.

But this is good, repeatable and repeated science.

 

[Knotted]

I recommend you read Michael Nielsen and Issaac Chuang's book Quantum Computation and Quantum Information. It gives you the basics including a crash course in linear algebra.