It's About Time: The Scientific Evidence for Psi Experiences

This article was truly amazing and the published paper was even better. Evidence has been around for Psi for a long time but with this paper and research from people like Dean Radin it will still not be accepted by people who have a fixed world view and anything that goes against that world view will be rejected. Nevertheless the truth still has to be told.

First here's some of the article and then I will discuss some of the published paper.

OK readers, later in this article, I'm going to use an example that will involve either a garden, a sailboat, a running man or a train. Can you accurately guess which one? In a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), Cornell psychology professor Daryl Bem has published an article that suggests you can, possibly more often than the 25 percent of the time on average you might expect just by chance.

Entitled "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect," the paper presents evidence from nine experiments involving over 1,000 subjects suggesting that events in the future may influence events in the past -- a concept known as "retrocausation." In some of the experiments, students were able to guess at future events at levels of accuracy beyond what would be expected by chance. In others, events that took place in the future appeared to influence those in the past, such as one in which rehearsing a list of words enhanced recall of those words, with the twist that the rehearsal took place after the test of recall.

So what is notable about the current publication? To begin, Bem is not just any psychologist; he is one of the most prominent psychologists in the world (he was probably mentioned in your Psych 101 textbook, and may have even co-authored it). And JPSP is not just any journal but sits atop the psychology journal heap; the article, especially given its premise, was subjected to a rigorous peer-review (where scientific colleagues critique the article and decide whether it is worthy of publication). Also, Bem intentionally adopted well-accepted research protocols in the studies, albeit with a few key twists, that are simple and replicable (they don't require lots of special equipment, and the analyses are straightforward). Even so, whether the larger scientific community will pay attention to this study remains to be seen.

www.huffingtonpost.com...

You have to read the article and the paper. There's a link to the published paper in the article.

Participants knew when and where an erotic picture would be versus a neutral picture. They also could avoid negative pictures versus neutral pictures. It could be an extension of evolution where you have animals that can sense when another animal is in heat. Humans have this on a mental or Psi level. We know when we're about to see a pleasing image or a negative image before we see it.

With another test it has been shown that when you flash a word before a picture there's a congruent response when you have a pleasant word followed by a pleasant image. There's lag time when a pleasant word is followed by an unpleasant picture.

He then reversed it. The word flashed after the picture was shown and after the participants hit the button to indicate if they saw a pleasant or unpleasant picture. Well, a lag time was still present when an unpleasant picture was followed by the word pleasant before the participants saw the word that would be flashed after the picture.

I mean think about that. A pleasant picture would come on the screen, the participants in the study would hit pleasant or unpleasant and then the words pleasant or unpleasant would flash on the screen. When they flashed the word before the picture there was a lag time if the picture didn't match the word but this lag time still occurred before the participants in the study even saw the word.

There's 9 studies and they're very interesting.

I don't need proof to know that Psi exists. Just like how I don't need proof that 9/11 was an inside job either.

Some people may want to know about this, but seriously, why can't they just try it out themselves?

Psi is a form of energy. It is rudimentary and isn't really much, however, advancing on it can bring much higher powers and perhaps black magic.

I've made countless psi balls. And the part where you state that people have a fixed world view will reject this, that is completely correct.

Even I reject it. At first, people reject it without trying, and the next step, they reject it while trying it. Of course, its an automatic, subconscious process, thanks to years of programming.

However, just about ANY drug can disturb this view, and allow someone to try creating a psi ball.

I can create a psi ball by self discipling myself without the usage of drugs, however, it is weak and dull, and takes 10 to 15 minutes to create.

Now, as weird as it sounds, but take 3 shots of Alcohol(I never drink), and the minutes are reduced to 3.

Now, stronger ego dissolving drugs have made me create a psi ball energy that made my hands burning hot, freezing cold, and feel incredibly energetic, and made me feel like there was a powerful magnet between my hands, all in 1 minute. One time, I did it in 10 seconds.

So yeah, its all about what you accept. If you accept you can do something, you will do it. Believing it is not the thing to do because beliefs are based off of fear and ignorance.

Anyway, I hope everyone tries to create a psi ball at least once. Go to psipog.com for more info.

Oh and one more thing, if you create a psi ball and keep powering it up for like 5 minutes or more, after you stop, you will feel refreshed incredibly. Its like you awoke from sleeping for days. It feels like you are very very alive, loose, powerful, fresh, clear headed, and just everything positive, but it does diminish so try to keep it alive as long as possible.

Good luck on your journeys. And I do not advocate the usage of drugs, and I detest having to use it occasionally myself.

what does PSI stand for, god i read this stuff but no answer. sure i figured it out what is was from context clues but don't assume we know it all....i don't still know what the acronym means lol

reply to post by religiousmurder


Psi (parapsychology)

Psi is a term from parapsychology derived from the Greek, ψ psi, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet; from the Greek ψυχή psyche, "mind, soul".[1][2]

They proved PSI years ago with RD Nelson's experiments at the PEAR labs. Nobody in the mainstream will give it any airtime.

Hi psi fans.

Look around the subjects linked by the first line of my signature,
and you will see what psi can do to the reality and to you ! !

What the BLEEP! do we know !? down the rabbit hole".
A FANTASTIC 3 DVD movie and interviews kit ! !

Blue skies.

reply to post by Matrix Rising
If this paper was correct it seems like casinos would be going bankrupt, as discussed in this paper which reviews the paper in the OP:

dl.dropbox.com...

After accounting for the house advantage, what is the
probability that the psi-player will win one million euros? This probability, easily calculated
from random walk theory (e.g., Feller, 1970, 1971) equals 48.6%. This means that, in this
case, the expected profit for a psychic’s night out at the casino equals $485,900. If Bem's
psychic plays the game all year round, never raises the stakes, and always quits at a profit
of a million dollars, the expected return is $177,353,500.

Bem’s psychic could bankrupt all casinos on the planet before anybody realized
what was going on. This analysis leaves us with two possibilities. The first possibility
is that, for whatever reason, the psi effects are not operative in casinos, but they are operative
in psychological experiments on erotic pictures. The second possibility is that the
psi effects are either nonexistent, or else so small that they cannot overcome the house
advantage.

So let's see some casinos bankrupted by roulette players beating the house odds and I'll be convinced. Ever heard the saying "put your money where your mouth is"?

That paper goes on to describe some of the issues with Bem's paper aside from the fact that real life experience in casinos by psychics doesn't confirm the prediction rate in Bem's paper:

The most important flaws in the Bem experiments, discussed below in detail, are the
following: (1) confusion between exploratory and confirmatory studies; (2) insufficient attention
to the fact that the probability of the data given the hypothesis does not equal the
probability of the hypothesis given the data (i.e., the fallacy of the transposed conditional);
(3) application of a test that overstates the evidence against the null hypothesis, an unfortunate
tendency that is exacerbated as the number of participants grows large. Indeed, when
we apply a Bayesian t-test (G¨onen, Johnson, Lu, & Westfall, 2005; Rouder, Speckman,
Sun, Morey, & Iverson, 2009) to quantify the evidence that Bem presents in favor of psi,
the evidence is sometimes slightly in favor of the null hypothesis, and sometimes slightly in
favor of the alternative hypothesis. In almost all cases, the evidence falls in the category
“anecdotal”, also known as “worth no more than a bare mention” (Jeffreys, 1961).

We realize that the above flaws are not unique to the experiments reported by Bem.
Indeed, many studies in experimental psychology suffer from the same mistakes. However,
this state of affairs does not exonerate the Bem experiments. Instead, these experiments
highlight the relative ease with which an inventive researcher can produce significant results
even when the null hypothesis is true.

So their claim is that nearly ALL research papers on this topic, and not just Bems, are flawed and show the null hypothesis as being true in cases where it's not true.

Each of those flaws is discussed in detail and since I have a strong background in statistics I can vouch for some of what they're saying, though I don't claim to be an expert on the topics of either the OP paper nor the paper pointing out flaws in the methodology.

But if someone had some precognitive ability to predict what color would come up next on a roulette wheel, even if they were right only 6 times out of 10, they could beat the house and make a fortune. I've heard of people doing this on occasion, but I've never heard of anyone doing it consistently.

Maybe the casinos would have to redesign the roulette wheel to replace black with non-erotic pictures, and replace red with erotic pictures for the psychic to win?

Originally posted by C-JEAN
What the BLEEP! do we know !? down the rabbit hole".
A FANTASTIC 3 DVD movie and interviews kit ! !

Is this the movie you're referring to?

What The Bleep Do We Know!? (2005)

documentary aimed at the totally gullible. Shifting from quantum theory to mystical mumbo jumbo in the blink of an eye

So is promoting this movie an admission of being totally gullible?

The OP posted a serious scientific work by a respected researcher so I would vote for not polluting this thread with something that is neither a serious scientific work nor is it by a respected researcher.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


There is a flaw in your experiment...

Casinos kick out and ban players who win too much. Even online casinos.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


The casino thing can be done (I've done it myself and have a close friend (who's a world famous author of metaphysical books) who used to fund his international trips to Vegas in this way), but it's nowhere near as simple as doing it in a lab or 'creating a psi ball' which is quite literally child's play.

Perhaps, if the practitioner were immune to the emotion surrounding money, they could get a better batting average.

Personally, I used to be able to guess red/black way more than 50% of the time, until I 'put my money where my mouth is' and then the clarity disappeared in a whoosh of emotion. I still managed to pay my rent etc at the time, but it was very draining and I later found much easier ways to make money consistently and without any ongoing investment of time and energy, so I don't do it anymore.

Of course I could be lying, but those with a bit of 'psi' will be able to 'sense' if it's true or not

ETA: The OP in a round-about way explains why the real world application of psi is challenging. They state that it takes them 20 minutes to form an energy ball when sober, but only a couple of minutes when under the influence of mind altering drugs. Psychoactive drugs help to get the mind 'out of the way', or help to concentrate the focus of awareness, or both.
The effect itself is instantaneous, but when the egoic mind is engaged, it's not possible to keep one's awareness in the present moment, which is the only place 'psi activity' is going to show up.
Being present automatically causes the cessation of thought, which is necessary as when thoughts arise the 'psi' energy is diffused and diverted into creating imagination and memories (past and future).

Sorry, that was a very clumsy and verbose sentence, but writing about this stuff in a simple and concise manner is quite a challenge - too many paradoxes and opportunities for misunderstanding terms and perceptions. Plus, I'm doing my best to describe my own experience in the terms used by the OP, which is not really my choice of language for this stuff.

Originally posted by Arbitrageur
Maybe the casinos would have to redesign the roulette wheel to replace black with non-erotic pictures, and replace red with erotic pictures for the psychic to win?

Yes, that would definitely help IMO.

Originally posted by gift0fpr0phecy
There is a flaw in your experiment...

Casinos kick out and ban players who win too much. Even online casinos.

Technically it's not really my experiment, I quoted the source, but that's true, they kicked card counters out for winning too much.

But you can't do card counting with a roulette wheel. So if they are frequently kicking psychics out for winning too much at roulette, I'd like to know about that, the evidence would be just as good.

Originally posted by RogerT
Personally, I used to be able to guess red/black way more than 50% of the time, until I 'put my money where my mouth is' and then the clarity disappeared in a whoosh of emotion.

You actually have to be right more than 51.35% of the time to beat the house odds, but Bem's study showed that's possible. However he's been accused of using the Texas sharpshooter fallacy to achieve these results:

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is using the same data to both construct and test a hypothesis. Its name comes from a parable where a Texan fires his gun at the side of a barn, then paints a target around the shots and claims to be a sharpshooter.

By Bem's own admission some of this took place:

In late 2010, "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect", a psychology paper by Daryl Bem ostensibly provided evidence of precognition. In Bem's experiments, small but statistically significant number of test subjects' responses appeared to be influenced by conditions which appeared later in the tests.[1] However, Bem has acknowledged forming some of his conclusions after the tests, rather than testing fixed hypotheses as any rigorous application of the scientific method should. He has also stated that, before concluding and publishing his research, "I purposely waited until I thought there was a critical mass that wasn't a statistical fluke".[1] While this may seem logical at first glance, deliberately waiting for such a "critical mass" actually means stopping research at a point when the results appear favourable to the hypotheses rather than continuing through a pre-set number of experiments before checking for overall findings.

Of course I could be lying, but those with a bit of 'psi' will be able to 'sense' if it's true or not

I suspect neither you nor Bem of overtly lying. However my psi tells me that inconvenient results are ignored. (such as your statement that when the emotions of real money came into play, the precognitive ability was diminished, which is along these lines. Actually that's not my psi, that's your own admission. ). Bem more or less indirectly admits to this with his "exploratory" rather than "confirmatory" approach to data collection and if you were scientifically accurate about your data collection you may find a similar pattern.

Reasons (or excuses?) like that are cited as reasons why nobody can win the Randi challenge for demonstrating paranormal or psychic abilities, like "the pressure of the test messes up the psi" or something like that. Even if that's true, it still leaves us with a lack of proof for these abilities.

Regarding proof for Bem's claims, it will be interesting to see if the results can be replicated by other researchers without using the "Texas sharpshooter fallacy" that Bem is accused of using.

Actually, the evidence for psi has not only a theoretical framework established by Time Symmetrical Quantum Mechanics; but, also, interestingly enough, an expression of that 'quantum reality' on the macro- rather than merely the micro-scale: Reverse Speech Analysis which very clearly demonstrates the reality of information coming "back from the future".

A book entitled The Power of Premonitions, as well as another book entitled Extraordinary Knowing both summarize evidence which demands a completely different understanding of consciousness itself.

Michael Cecil

reply to post by Arbitrageur


The quote from your post doesn't make any sense because there basically trying to pass off opinion to refute the results of the tests.

These test can be replicated and he set them to reduce the experimenter effect. This seems to happen when you have an experimenter that might already believe these things may be possible might get different results than a skeptic.

You quoted:

to quantify the evidence that Bem presents in favor of psi,
the evidence is sometimes slightly in favor of the null hypothesis, and sometimes slightly in
favor of the alternative hypothesis. In almost all cases, the evidence falls in the category
“anecdotal”, also known as “worth no more than a bare mention” (Jeffreys, 1961).

This is just opinion. This doesn't refute the tests or the results, this is just saying Bem can't look at the results in this way. Again, this is just opinion. Bem is not trying to show the origin of Psi just that Psi exist using studies that are well know to some in the field and just reversing them.

You quotes from Wikipedia but you should have went to the source article.

The paper, due to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology before the end of the year, is the culmination of eight years' work by Daryl Bem of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "I purposely waited until I thought there was a critical mass that wasn't a statistical fluke," he says.

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 experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type.

In another 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.

Bem did things that were simply genius like the test with the word flashing after the picture. Psychologist already know that there's a lag when the picture doesn't match the word flashed before the picture is shown. Bem showed that this occurs even if the participant doesn't know what the word is. This is from the paper.

In recent years, priming experiments have become a staple of cognitive and cognitive social
psychology (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Fazio, 2001; Klauer & Musch, 2003). In a typical
affective priming experiment, participants are asked to judge as quickly as they can whether a
picture is pleasant or unpleasant, and their response time is measured. Just before the picture
appears, a positive or negative word (e.g., beautiful, ugly) is flashed briefly on the screen; this
word is called the prime. Individuals typically respond more quickly when the valences of the
prime and the picture are congruent (both are positive or both are negative) than when they are
incongruent. In our retroactive version of the procedure, the prime appeared after rather than
before participants made their judgments of the pictures.

Because slower responding on congruent trials than on incongruent trials—called a contrast
effect—has also been observed in some priming experiments (Hermans, Spruyt, De Houwer, &
Feeling the Future 21

Eelen, 2003; Klauer, Teige-Mocigema, & Spruyt, 2009), we also ran a standard non-retroactive
priming procedure in each session to ensure that our protocol would produce the usual (non-
contrast) priming effect (see also, de Boer & Bierman, 2006). Because this turned out to be the
case, the psi hypothesis was that the retroactive procedure would also produce faster responding
on congruent trials than on incongruent trials.

So Bem set up a simple study that would show if the same thing happened in reverse and the participants don't know the word before it's flashed. Here's the results.

As shown in the table, the standard forward priming procedure produced the usual result.
For example, with a 1,500-ms cutoff criterion and the inverse transformation, participants were
23.6 ms faster on congruent trials than on incongruent trials, t(96) = 4.91, p

Here's more from the source of your Wikipedia quote.

Exploring time-reversed versions of established psychological phenomena was "a stroke of genius", says the sceptical Krueger. Previous research in parapsychology has used idiosyncratic set-ups such as Ganzfeld experiments, in which volunteers listen to white noise and are presented with a uniform visual field to create a state allegedly conducive to effects including clairvoyance and telepathy. By contrast, Bem set out to provide tests that mainstream psychologists could readily evaluate.

So far, the paper has held up to scrutiny. "This paper went through a series of reviews from some of our most trusted reviewers," says Charles Judd of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who heads the section of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology editorial board that handled the paper.

www.newscientist.com...

The problem I see is that people feel threatened by Psi because it doesn't agree with a belief system they may hold. So they assume that Psi has to be attached to the paranormal.

Psi effects could be the result of evolution or non locality and entanglement. These effects could have a natural explanation but when these things are mentioned then people immediately jump to their belief system.

This could be are sun and rain. What I mean is the ancients gave mystical meanings to things like the sun and rain until we were able to explain these things in the language of science. This could be the same with Psi. These effects occur and eventually science will try to explain them if we ever get passed people's belief systems.

Maybe things like telepathy, ESP, Clairvoyance, remote viewing occur naturally. Maybe things like life after death and psychic ability occur naturally. I think this is the next frontier of science but research will be delayed because this back and forth will go on for years because people's belief system will always come into play in these areas.

I would like to give you all the opportunity to discover for yourselves the reality of a certain form of remote viewing called "anima" in Sanskrit. It is named as one of the eight siddhis, or paranormal powers, that can be acquired through the practice of yogic pranayama and Kundalini activation of the ajna chakra, which is located between the eyes. The Theosophists Annie Besant & Charles Leadbeater claimed that they acquired this form of remote viewing of the subatomic world and described what they assumed were the atoms of the elements, including several that science had not detected at the time. The historical background to their work is discussed at:
smphillips.8m.com...
Compare for yourselves here:
smphillips.8m.com...
their descriptions of the atoms of the first 20 elements of the Periodic Table (as well as gold) with what nuclear physics knows about the composition of their nuclei and what, according to the theory of quarks, is the composition of protons and neutrons.
You will be completely amazed. Such correlation is far more impressive and convincing than analysis of the above-chance results of a set of experimental tests of precognition, for which you have to trust their soundness. The statistical significance of meta-analysis can ALWAYS be disputed and conventional explanations given by die-hard skeptics, however implausible they may seem to more balanced observers. But what they CANNOT dismiss are chance-defying levels of correlation between scientific facts about atomic nuclei and their alleged paranormal descriptions that were published many decades before physicists had learned anything significant about their composition. Here you will discover 21 amazing examples (taken from a sample of 46 elements) of this unique demonstration of the existence of the human ability (described c. 200 B.C. by Pantanjali in his Yoga Sutras), to "see" objects too small to be resolved by the human eye. No statistical analysis of significance is needed here, so obvious and frequent is the successful matching between facts of nuclear and particle physics and paranormal descriptions of the subatomic particles making up atomic nuclei.

never under estimate the power of chance / randomness

there are plenty of case studies where the out come was grater with just chance and randomness then by brute force

then again one should not under estimate the power of sight , the human eye can pick up single photons which you register

humans have still a long way to go before we know what is the so called "NOW"

Originally posted by Matrix Rising The problem I see is that people feel threatened by Psi because it doesn't agree with a belief system they may hold.

Well, it's more than merely a belief system.

It has to do with the very structure of the consciousness of the 'thinker' itself.

To challenge those fundamental assumptions is to threaten the eruption of psychosis, as described by Descartes in the opening passages of his Second Meditation.

The goal of 'classical' science is conceptual certainty and predictability and time going only in a forward direction; thereby excluding mountains of data about the uncertain and the unpredictable and any evidence indicating the bi-directionality of time. All of that comes under the rubric of "unscientific" meaning not real, meaning it doesn't exist at all, meaning it is an hallucination, meaning that it is nothing more than psychosis.

Heisenberg established the "uncertainty principle" not as signifying that the very existence of the electron is uncertain but that its position and momentum cannot both be determined simultaneously.

But, when these 'classical' scientists turn to the experiments on pre-cognition, animal telepathy, or Reverse Speech Analysis, etc., they conclude that "uncertain" and "not 100% predictable and replicable" translates into "it doesn't exist at all". It is nothing more than psychosis.

Michael Cecil

I think you might like to check this man and his serious efforts to research the NDE and Remote Viewing phenomena - Melvin Morse - his credentials:

spiritualscientific.com...

www.spiritualscientific.com...

I am a natural born sceptic, but this guy seems very real and legit... I will keep checking his work in the future and especially any possible debunking of his claims from credible people.