thisislondon.co.uk has this article:
Is this REALLY proof that man can see into the future?
(What about women?) Excerpts:
Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room… In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner… engaged in one of the most profound paranormal experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is possible to predict the future.
For the results – released exclusively to the Daily Mail – suggest that ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them ’see’ the future… “We’re satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens,” says Professor Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. “We’d now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it.”
And Bierman is not alone: his findings mirror the data gathered by other scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad…
Shortly after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage. It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease. It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that ’something’ was not right.
Comment by Yours Truly: I know this feeling very well!
One woman suffered crippling stomach pain while queuing for one of the ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center. She made her way to the lavatory only to recover spontaneously. She missed her flight but survived the day. Amid the collective outpouring of grief and horror it was easy to overlook such stories or write them off as coincidences. But in fact, these kind of stories point to an interesting and deeper truth for those willing to look.
If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability to divine the future. Well, strange as it seems, that’s just what happens. The aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unusually empty. All the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual number of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained away, but all four? And it wasn’t just on 9/11 that people subconsciously seemed to avoid disaster. The scientist Ed Cox found that trains ‘destined’ to crash carried far fewer people than they did normally. Dr Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, found exactly the same bizarre effect.
If it was possible to divine the future, you might expect those at the sharp end, such as pilots, to have the most finely tuned instincts of all. And again, that’s just what you see. When the Air France Concorde crashed in 2000, it wasn’t long before the colleagues of those killed in the crash spoke about a sense of foreboding that had gripped the crew and flight engineers before the accident. Speaking anonymously to the French newspaper Le Parisien, one spoke of a ‘morbid expectation of an accident’. “I had this sense that we were going to bump into the scenery,” he said…
The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many years the US military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme known as Stargate, which set out to investigate premonitions and the ability of mediums to predict the future. Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by the ability of ‘lucky’ soldiers to forecast the future. These are the ones who survived battles against seemingly impossible odds. Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings – and occasionally-actual glimpses of the future – could flow backwards in time to guide soldiers. It helped them make life-saving decisions, often on the basis of a hunch.
He devised an experiment to test these ideas. He hooked up volunteers to a modified lie detector, which measured an electrical current across the surface of the skin. This current changes when a person reacts to an event such as seeing an extremely violent picture or video. It’s the electrical equivalent of a wince. Radin showed sexually explicit, violent or soothing images to volunteers in a random sequence determined by computer. And he soon discovered that people began reacting to the pictures before they saw them. It was unmistakable. They began to ‘wince’ a few seconds before they actually saw the image.
And it happened time and time again, way beyond what chance alone would allow. So impressive were Radin’s results that Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prizewinning chemist, took an interest. He was hooked up to Radin’s machine and shown the emotionally charged images. “It’s spooky,” he says “I could see about three seconds into the future. You shouldn’t be able to do that.” Other researchers from around the world, from Edinburgh University to Cornell in the US, rushed to duplicate Radin’s experiment and improve on it. And they got similar results…
The odds against all of these trials being wrong are literally millions to one against…
Einstein described the distinction between the past, present and future as ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion’. To prove Einstein’s point, Bierman looked inside the brains of volunteers using a hospital MRI scanner while he repeated Dr Radin’s experiments. These scanners show which parts of the brain are active when we do certain tasks or experience specific emotions. Although extremely complex, and with each analysis taking weeks of computing time, he has run the experiments twice involving more than 20 volunteers. And the results suggest quite clearly that seemingly ordinary people are capable of sensing the future on a fairly consistent basis…
The problem with presentiment is that it appears so nebulous that you can’t rely on it to make reliable decisions. That may be the case, but there are plenty of instances where people wished they had listened to their premonitions or feelings of presentiment. One of the saddest involves the Aberfan disaster. This occurred in 1966 when a coal tip collapsed and swept through a Welsh school killing 144 people, including 116 children. It turned out that 24 people had received premonitions of the tragedy. One involved a little girl who was killed. She told her mother shortly before she was taken to school: “I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.”
So should we listen to our instincts, hunches and dreams? Some experts believe we may already be using them in our everyday lives to a surprising degree. Dr Jessica Utts at the University of California, who has worked for the US military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal research, believes we are constantly sampling the future and using the knowledge to help us make better decisions. “I think we’re doing it all the time,” she says. “We’ve looked at the data and it does seem to happen.”
So perhaps the Queen in Through The Looking Glass was right: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
