by Eric Wargo
51 Price, 2014.
52 Priestley, 1989(1964), 193.
53 Ibid., 193.
54 Shermer, 1997.
55 Although Shermer and Wiseman assume a reasoned tone in their writings, reading books by some earlier leaders of the skeptical community like Gardner or magician-debunker James Randi can often be a sad and distressing experience, given the virulent hostility and undisguised condescension they routinely displayed. Gardner, in his book on the Titanic , casually calls psi-believers “idiotic,” books on ESP “lurid” and “atrocious,” and the topic of ESP “hogwash.” Hannah’s books he derides for being “privately printed.” Randi condescendingly lists ESP alongside “unicorns” in the subtitle of his 1982 book Flim-Flam (Randi, 1982), as though the topics are on par with each other, and calls two serious physicists who led a major, government-funded ESP laboratory at Stanford Research Institute “the Laurel and Hardy of Psi.” In a cultural climate where scientific rationalism is policed by such partisans, it is thus all too clear why ordinary people who experience something anomalous in their lives have been hesitant to share their experiences.
56 Strieber & Kripal, 2016.
57 Krohn & Kripal, 2018.
58 Ibid., 75.
59 Ibid., 77.
2. “If I Were You, I’d Stay on the Ground for a Couple of Days”—Victor Goddard, J. W. Dunne, and the Block Universe
1 Goddard, 1982, 251.
2 Goddard, 1975.
3 The most well-known “time slip” was the strange encounter with Marie Antoinette and her courtiers reported by two English ladies, Miss Annie Moberly and Miss Eleanor Jourdain, in 1901 in the Petit Trianon garden at Versailles. See MacKenzie, 1997.
4 In his retirement, Goddard also became a thoughtful defender of and writer on the UFO phenomenon; see Goddard, 1975.
5 Goddard, 1951.
6 Goddard’s 1951 account in The Saturday Evening Post uses the pseudonym “Commander Dewing” of the “HMS Crecy.”
7 Goddard, 1951, 25.
8 Ibid., 24.
9 One of the dramatic embellishments of the 1956 film The Night My Number Came Up , based on Goddard’s story, was that the Naval officer also told his dream to the pilot of the plane, and the pilot thus felt gripped by an awful fate as he was attempting to keep the craft in the air.
10 Childhood illness is a common feature in people who later experience psychic or paranormal phenomena.
11 Dunne, 1952(1927).
12 Dunne relates this part of the story in his posthumously published, autobiographical work Intrusions? (Dunne, 1955).
13 “The improbability of my having dreamed of half-past four at half-past four must be multiplied by the improbability of my having been bothered by a stopped watch on the previous afternoon without retaining the faintest recollection of such a fact” (Dunne, 1952[1927], 38).
14 Ibid., 39.
15 Ibid., 40-41
16 Ibid., 42.
17 Ibid., 43.
18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pelée
19 Dunne, 1952(1927), 44.
20 Ibid., 44. Dunne doesn’t add that he could have been primed to misread the number of zeros in the news article because of his dream, but because of the similarity of the digit 4 (and a string of zeros) in both numbers, his main point would still hold in either case.
21 Ibid., 45.
22 Inchbald, 2017. On his blog, Dunne scholar Guy Inchbald writes: “Without [Dunne’s] intervention there would probably have been no Sopwith Camel in the coming war, no Bristol Fighter, no Handley Page bomber, just whatever the state-owned Farnborough and the French could turn out.”
23 Dunne 1952(1927), 46-7.
24 Ibid., 49.
25 Ibid., 50.
26 Dunne, 1955, 87
27 Ibid., 88.
28 Ibid., 88-9.
29 Ibid., 89.
30 Ibid.
31 What happened to Hyde? Dunne writes: “That fellow was ‘sublimated’ quite easily. I discovered that beneath his savagery lay a nasty streak of cowardice—probably the cause of his existence. So I turned him into a bantamweight boxer fighting dogged and gory battles with any middle-weight he could find. That cured him, and he grew up to be a soldier and a pioneer of aviation” (Ibid., 91).
32 Moore, 2016.
33 Dunne, 1955, 71.
34 Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017.
35 Radin, 2006.
36 Dossey, 2013.
37 The history of trauma as a psychological construct, and of telepathy as an outgrowth of the Victorian sciences of trauma, is a vast topic wonderfully charted by Roger Luckhurst in his writings The Invention of Telepathy (Luckhurst, 2002) and The Trauma Question (Luckhurst, 2008). For the role trauma may play in precognition, see Chapter 10.
38 Kripal, 2014.
39 Dunne 1952(1927), 52.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 67.
42 Goddard, 1951, 118.
43 Dobyns, 2006.
44 See for instance Dick, 2011.
3. Postcards from Your Future Self—Scientific Evidence for Precognition
1 Vaughan, 1973, 18. See also Shields, 2011.
2 Vaughan, 1973, 18.
3 Quoted in Shields, 2011, 161.
4 Vonnegut, 1973, 64.
5 Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment (Josephson-Storm, 2017) critically examines the “disenchantment” idea in European thought.
6 See Kripal, 2010; Luckhurst, 2002.
7 Rhine, 1967.
8 Carington, 1940.
9 Rhine, 1967, 128.
10 Krippner et al., 2002(1971).
11 Schnabel, 1997.
12 Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977).
13 See Graff, 2000; May et al., 2014; McMoneagle, 2002; Schnabel, 1997; Smith, 2005.
14 See Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977).
15 Smith, 2005.
16 See Warcollier, 2001(1948).
17 May et al., 2014.
18 Utts, 1995.
19 Utts, 2016, 1379. She continues: “I have asked the debunkers if there is any amount of data that could convince them, and they generally have responded by saying, ‘probably not.’ I ask them what original research they have read, and they mostly admit they haven’t read any! Now there is a definition of pseudo-science—basing conclusions on belief, rather than data!”
20 Dunne & Jahn, 2003.
21 Honorton & Ferrari, 1989.
22 See Radin, 2013, for a good description of Honorton and Ferrari’s study and background on meta-analysis in general.
23 See Radin, 2009.
24 See Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977).
25 See Marwaha & May, 2016 for a discussion; see also Targ, 2004.
26 Feinberg, 1975.
27 Ibid., 63-64.
28 Kaiser, 2011.
29 May & Marwaha, 2015; Marwaha & May, 2016.
30 May and Marwaha’s “multiphasic theory” of psi (May & Marwaha, 2015) distinguishes a “physics domain” from a “neuroscience domain.”
31 Marwaha & May, 2016, 78.
32 May & Marwaha, 2015.
33 One of Carington’s five experiments (Experiment II) was conducted somewhat differently from the other four. All ten drawings in this experiment were made in the course of a single hour by members of a Cambridge psychology class, and the participants received feedback at the end of the class by matching each other’s drawings to the group of targets. Results here were similar to the first experiment—a pattern of matches to the ten-target group, rather than to the individual intended target (i.e., displaced hits). But it is not surprising, as the effect of the final matching exercise would have functioned similarly as if feedback were acquired by reading the published results: Participants would have been influenced by the set of target drawings as a whole (and each other’s drawings of them), rather than receiving feedback on a trial-by-trial basis.
34 Carington, 1946, 36.
35 See for example Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977); Sinclair, 2001(1930).
36 Targ & Puthoff,
2005(1977).
37 I am not aware that the possibility of participants in ESP experiments precognitively accessing the “answer book” in the form of the published results has ever been studied. Such studies could be conducted readily, for instance by comparing the results of two remote viewing experiments in which participants’ only possible feedback is in the published articles later. In one experiment, the “answers” published would actually be different from what the experimenter had assigned them to view.
38 See for instance the consideration of feedback as a necessary component of skill learning in ESP research in Targ & Puthoff, 2018(1972).
39 May et al., 1996
40 Marwaha & May, 2016.
41 Honorton & Ferrari, 1989.
42 McMoneagle, 2002.
43 McMoneagle, 1993, 226.
4. The Psi Reflex—Presentiment and the Future-Influencing-Present Effect
1 Pynchon, 1973.
2 Slothrop’s premonitory sexual response was a daring premise for an ambitious, literary novelist like Pynchon. One of the unwritten rules of literary fiction has always been: Thou shalt not use ESP seriously as a plot device . Writers openly breaking this rule quickly get relegated to the ghetto of SF, which until relatively recently remained what Pynchon’s contemporary Philip K. Dick called a “trash stratum.” The genre gods exist to serve the prevailing materialistic beliefs about causality. Pynchon, like his similarly ESP-curious contemporary Kurt Vonnegut, cunningly avoided Dick’s fate by always keeping his commitment to the reality of such phenomena (which crop up in most of his works) ambiguous, and surrounding characters who display or experience them with materialists who devote considerable cognitive effort to explaining these phenomena away in rational, linear terms (like Gravity’s Rainbow ’s “Dr. Pointsman”—as in, points on a graph). Pynchon thus didn’t need to commit himself to “believing in” ESP.
3 Carpenter, 2012; Mossbridge & Radin, 2018.
4 Radin, 1997.
5 Spottiswoode & May, 2003.
6 Bierman & Scholte, 2002.
7 Mossbridge et al., 2012; Tsakiris, 2017.
8 Mossbridge et al., 2012.
9 Mossbridge et al., 2014.
10 Bem, 2011.
11 Mossbridge & Radin, 2018.
12 Open Science Collaboration, 2015.
13 Bem et al., 2016.
14 Kripal, 2010.
15 See Radin, 2013.
16 Sheldrake, 2011.
17 Alvarez, 2016.
18 Sheldrake, 2003. Sheldrake sees the sense of being stared at as an aspect of the “extended mind.” But is the mind extended in space, or in time? Here we confront the power of the language we use to describe phenomena in biasing or constraining how we think about their possible causes (known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). What is called a “sense of being stared at” could instead be a presentiment of meeting another’s gaze . A woman has a funny feeling, looks up, and finds that a man happens to be looking at her; she may naturally assume that the man had already been looking at her—“staring”—but that is just an assumption (i.e., the man could have turned to look at her at the same moment).
19 Carpenter, 2012.
20 Ibid., 85.
21 Carpenter, 2015a, 255.
22 Radin, 2013.
23 Mavromatis, 1987.
24 Wargo, 2016b.
25 Rick Strassman (Strassman, 2014) for instance links “prophecy” to dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful hallucinogenic compound and, he argues, a neurotransmitter naturally produced in the body in small quantities.
26 Murphy, 1992.
27 Beidel, 2014.
28 Geiger, 2009.
29 Goddard, 1975.
30 Nasht, 2005.
31 Cochran, 1954.
32 Atkinson, 2010.
33 Caidin, 2007.
34 Targ & Puthoff, 2005(1977). Bach came to the attention of the SRI parapsychologists because his bestselling inspirational book seemed to be about an out-of-body experience, something commonly reported in the lives of the most gifted psychics they had studied (Targ, 2004).
35 Given its link to spontaneous and even frenetic, uncritical engagement, it would be interesting to systematically record improv performances and compare them to news headlines over the following day or two. Improv is a very Zen activity that rewards not thinking, just doing, and may also capitalize on the group effects known to facilitate psi.
36 See Wargo, 2016c.
37 Kripal, 2010.
38 For instance, the Israeli performer Uri Geller, who impressed many of the scientists who actually worked with him that some of his abilities were genuine (Margolis, 1999, 2013), nevertheless also used trickery in stage performances, which made it easy for pseudoskeptics like James Randi to call him a fraud (Randi, 1982). One personality trait typical of psychics as well as performers is extroversion (Carpenter, 2012).
39 Wargo, 2015a.
40 Marcus, 1988, 90.
41 Murphy, 1957.
42 Marcus, 1988, 90.
43 It is tempting to think Pynchon may have been precognizing these developments, but his novel probably was inspired to a great extent by the insight and/or wild imagination of the French spy and sci-fi fan Jacques Bergier. Many ideas in Gravity’s Rainbow , such as the Nazi interest in the occult and the existence of secret societies pulling the strings during the war and its aftermath, seem to have come straight from Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s early-60s blockbuster The Morning of the Magicians (Pauwels & Bergier, 1963), as did the idea of a psychic being able to predict bomb strikes during wartime.
44 Taylor, 2007.
45 A future neurobiology of prophecy may pay special attention to the neurotransmitter dopamine and structures known as the basal ganglia that are involved in reinforcing rewarding behaviors. The brain’s reward circuits govern the conditioning process, our learning from experience, by signaling the anticipation of reward or punishment from cues. It is small constant dopamine bursts in these circuits that keep attention focused on “the next thing”—on new and possibly important information. Adaptations of the reward circuit associated with addiction are the neurobiological correlate of the psychoanalytic construct of jouissance (Bazan & Detandt, 2013), which I argue is central to precognition (see Chapter 10).
46 See Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017; Dossey, 2013; Radin, 2006; Sheldrake, 2003; Targ, 2004. A notable exception is Edwin May, who argues the phenomenon will have a fully materialist explanation, probably rooted in classical, not quantum, physics (see Marwaha & May, 2015).
47 See for example Barušs & Mossbridge, 2017; Kelly et al., 2010; Sheldrake, 2012; Targ, 2004.
48 Carpenter (2015b, 5) writes:
As Plato thought, meanings exist beyond the person and are not simply constructed by the person or by groups of people. In psi, we engage meanings that supersede any physical connection to the self. Yet we engage them, we are affected by them, we express implicit references to them. It seems that we find them much more than make them, and we find them far beyond the normal bounds of the body and the current moment.
49 Carpenter, 2012.
50 My thinking on culture and meaning is strongly influenced by Geertz, 1973; and Shore, 1996.
51 On the distinction between meaning and information, and why the emergence of a scientific information theory in the 20th century required eliminating questions of meaning, see Gleick, 2012. This topic is addressed also in Chapter 6.
52 That paranormal phenomena of all kinds are meaningful phenomena that cannot be understood without considering the personal, anecdotal dimension is an argument made strongly by Jeffrey Kripal throughout his work. See Kripal, 2017; Strieber & Kripal, 2016.
53 Edwin May argues that misrecognized precognition, or what is also called “psi-mediated instrumental response,” unconsciously guides and thus “augments” decisions made by experimenters, and that this may give rise to illusory mind-over-matter or psychokinetic (PK) effects in parapsychology experiments using random number generators (May, 2015). This w
ould have implications well beyond psi research: If something like precognition or presentiment is really operative, unrecognized, in laboratories, it could account for experimenter expectation effects in everything from psychology to biomedicine. Whether some form of precognitively mediated “decision augmentation” could even account for some part of the current replication crisis remains for some future team of bold researchers to investigate.
54 Priestley, 1989(1964), 201.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 The future-influencing-present effect, Priestley writes, “is apt to work for intimate relationships that most people prefer not to discuss” (ibid., 200).
5. Catching Precognitive Butterflies—Chaos, Memory, and Premory in the Thermodynamic Universe
1 Flieger, 1997; White, 2018.
2 Nabokov, 2018.
3 Boyd, 1991, 366.
4 Nabokov, 2018.
5 See, e.g., Price, 1996; Sheehan, 2015.
6 Gleick, 2016.
7 See White, 2018.
8 Kaku, 2009.
9 Buonomano, 2017.
10 Price, 1996.
11 Radin, 2013, 131-132.
12 Bradbury, 1952.
13 Gleick, 1987.
14 Ibid., 8.
15 Hilborn, 2004. When later asked about the origins of the butterfly metaphor, the scientist who came up with the “butterfly” title for Lorenz’s session did not recall being influenced by Bradbury’s story, but that would not preclude him having read the story and forgotten about it. However, even assuming a straightforward causal reason for the coincidence, it would not preclude Bradbury from having precognized developments in 1970s systems science—or more likely, Gleick’s 1987 book. In fact, there are passages in Bradbury’s story that are stunningly similar to later writings on the butterfly effect. For instance, Bradbury writes: “Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion” (quoted in Ibid., 425).
As an added note, it is likely that Michael Crichton was thinking of Bradbury’s story and its (possibly illusory) connection to Lorenz’s butterfly effect when he included a “chaotician” (the character Ian Malcolm) in his bestselling 1990 novel Jurassic Park , about a theme park of cloned dinosaurs.
