I can see the future

Maverick psychologist Daryl Bem (see here) is about to publish a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see here) entitled, "Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect". When translated into English, this paper provides evidence that we can see into the future. New Scientist covered this story in November 2010 (see here).

In summary, it describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather than before it. In one 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.

The effects he recorded were small but statistically significant. In another test, volunteers were told that an erotic image was going to appear on a computer screen in one of two positions, and asked to guess in advance which position that would be. The image's eventual position was selected at random, but volunteers guessed correctly 53.1 per cent of the time.

That may sound unimpressive – truly random guesses would have been right 50 per cent of the time, after all. But well-established phenomena such as the ability of low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks are based on similarly small effects, notes Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who has also blogged about Bem's work at Psychology Today.

Obviously the jury is still out on this controversial, yet fascinating study, but kudos to Bem for devising such an ingenious way of exploring the topic using true scientific methodology in a field that has been notoriously in the fringe. Even if this study isn't the smoking gun on precognition, it's acceptance for publication and peer review in such a reputable journal is nothing short of a ground-breaking achievement.