Motherboard

You may not have met Dr. Daryl Bem yet, but if his findings are true, you may already feel his presence. The energetic emeritus Cornell parapsychologist has attempted to experimentally demonstrate that the human mind can “feel” future events. And in his latest article, he reports that people in the present are probably influenced by, and can predict, events that happen in the future.

At the very least, his research says, we are able to predict pornography. Really. But more on that in a moment.

Before you confuse Bem’s research with past parapsychology hoaxes such as Project Alpha, or the experiments in “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” keep in mind that the article (pdf) is set to appear this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the field’s premier clearinghouses. “The article has passed review by four scientific experts,” Bem says.

His experiments test for precognition—the ability of people to perceive events in the future. In one of nine such experiments conducted on more than 1000 student subjects, a pornographic image would randomly appear on the left or right hand side of a computer screen. The results indicate that people could predict where the pornographic image would appear—even before the computer made its random decision.

Of course, this phenomenon was not observed to occur all of the time. Instead, Bem looks for the small deviations in expected outcomes. In this case, it is expected that people would, on average, guess the left or right side correctly 50% of the time. However, he reports that his participants could predict the position 53.1% of the time. And because this 3.1% difference is reported statistically significant, Bem asserts it is strong evidence for precognition. This, as well as the results of his other experiments, undoubtedly appears extraordinary.

CONTROVERSY IS ALSO PREDICTABLE

Of course, as Bem himself anticipated, the approval of his paper for publication has reopened some vigorous debate around psi, the field of psychology related to what he calls the “anomalous process of information or energy transfer.” Not long after a preprint of his paper surfaced, Bem began fielding criticism from a slew of critiques, including an in-depth review by “James Alcock”, an established parapsychology critic. Most notably, critiques are coming from statisticians who request more advanced Bayesian analysis (See this paper and this paper). However, their criticism extends further than Bem. As Eric-Jan Wagenmakers states, “[Bem’s results] indicate that experimental psychologists need to change the way they conduct their experiments and analyze their data.”

But by basing his tests and statistical analysis on known and standard methods, Bem keeps them intentionally simple and repeatable, which he believes has made his results more convincing. He says he’s received many requests for the materials he used so that more studies can be conducted. Although he supports accurate replication of his work, he notes a concern for the decline effect – the tendency of effects in scientific research to decline over time. It’s an effect for which the parapsychology field is famous.

Two social psychologists who replicated Bem’s pornography experiment, Leif Nelson of the University of California at Berkeley and Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon University, found no significant results. But this is empirical science, and their findings don’t completely rule out Bem’s:

“There are obviously a multitude of possibilities for why we failed to obtain a result similar to Bem, ranging from the mundane (e.g., our sample was more heterogeneous than Bem’s) to the exotic (e.g., the quantum mechanics that allow for the detection of future events are also contingent on the specific physical features of the original experiment rooms.)

… For the purposes of this paper we really only care about one possibility: Do we fail to detect precognition because precognition does not exist? In answer to this question we emphatically say, ‘We don’t know. On the one hand, we fail to replicate the effect, but on the other hand, our single failure to replicate is hardly sufficient to seriously undermine an entire paper.’”

For enthusiasts of precognition, the paper is already a milestone. Although the psi world may in large part be comprised of spiritual or supernatural beliefs, Dr. Bem told me he “belongs to a different camp.” His fascination with physics and mathematics led him to strive for physical explanations of precognitive phenomena. His research is not driven by religion or spirituality but rather a spirited curiosity, he says.

WHY AND HOW

While Bem can offer no explanations for the phenomena he found, he points to analogies in the field of physics to provide some hope for an explanation that we may later understand. Bem gives the example of bird migration, which was once thought to be a psi phenomena. Now it’s understood that it’s contingent on birds’ perception of the earth’s magnetic fields.

As for why certain individuals may be endowed with precognitive abilities – he doesn’t think we’re all the same – Bem underscored the evolutionary drive. In the wild, there are very obvious advantages to predicting shocking events a couple seconds before. Animals being hunted could rely on a precognitive instinct to detect danger before it strikes. That kind of competitive edge has a positive effect on the “fitness” of an individual; Bem posits that by natural selection, precognitive abilities have grown in animals.

The best underlying explanation is harder to grasp, Bem states, because it may lie in quantum mechanics. “Even if quantum-based theories eventually mature from metaphor to genuine models of psi,” he said, “they are still unlikely to provide intuitively satisfying mechanisms for psi because quantum theory fails to provide intuitively satisfying mechanisms for physical reality itself.”

At the end of his paper, Dr. Bem quotes legendary physicist Richard Feynman, and he did so again during our discussion. The quote comes from a candid discussion by Feynman on quantum mechanics: “The difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, ‘But how can it be like that?’”

The quote would seem like an ironic choice, given that Feynman was an outspoken critic of parapsychology during his own years at Cornell. “Although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement,” Feynman states, “you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work.”

But what appears to make Professor Bem a more important kind of parapsychologist is the higher level of care he took in his controversial endeavor. Whether he will convince the world of the existence of psi in the future, that can’t be predicted just yet.

Daryl Bem’s homepage

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