“Let me see your palm. Hmm…interesting. Someone from your past will return to you this year. And you will have some conflict at work, but you will eventually find a balance and strong financial stability.” It’s the classic psychic experience: vague information, a conflict to overcome, and an eventual happy ending (that will be $50, please). While it’s easy to poke fun at the psychic experience, researchers over the past decade have weaved together a different picture of precognitive abilities—gaining direct knowledge of the future via extrasensory means.
In 2004, Dr. Dean Radin from the Institute of Noetic Sciences published a paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration explicating how over a 10-year span he utilized galvanic skin response sensors (sensors capable of measuring emotional arousal by detecting electrical activity on the skin) to investigate precognition.
Using this technology, Dr. Radin subjected 109 participants to multiple trials involving exposure to randomly selected calm images, like a ball, or more erotic or violent emotional images. Research in cognitive neuroscience had demonstrated that individuals exposed to emotional images have increased galvanic skin responses than those who are exposed to calm images. Based on these findings, Dr. Radin hypothesized that if precognition is a valid phenomenon, one might see an increase in galvanic skin responses for emotional images before they appeared to the participant; he alternatively hypothesized that no increase would be seen for calm images.
Results from the experiment confirmed Dr. Radin’s hypothesis. These results suggest that people know what is going to happen before it actually does—a precognitive claim that cannot be explained by contemporary understandings of time.
As a result of the controversy produced by Dr. Radin’s paper, researchers wanted to ensure the effect could be reproduced. Dr. Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam attempted the task, and successfully replicated the findings on multiple occasions throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Other scientists pursued research projects aiming to corroborate Dr. Radin’s findings by studying additional physiological measures, in effect creating converging lines of evidence. In 2004, Dr. Rollin McCarty and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine that investigated Dr. Radin’s experimental paradigm to see whether heart rates reacted similarly to galvanic skin response sensors when presented with emotional or calm images. Based on past physiology research, Dr. McCarty and his team expected heart rate activity to be lower in the emotional image condition than the calm image condition, even before the images were presented to the 26 participants. Results of the experiment supported this hypothesis and corroborate Dr. Radin’s research, suggesting that the heart reacts similarly to galvanic skin activity insofar as it appears to be capable of detecting “spooky” information that can orient the body to future events.
While these experiments highlight the possible validity of precognition, the research program is still very new, with many questions still unanswered. Though some studies suggest the body can unconsciously “see” into the future, few studies provide persuasive evidence for the validity of higher-order precognition (knowing specific events beforehand). Before this research will be taken seriously, mechanistic theories must be developed to explain how information from the future travels to the present, and how the body interprets this information.
In the meantime, enjoy your neighborhood psychic, but take their predictions with a grain of salt.
