PRECOGNITION

Fiona Steinkamp

Lots of people would like to be able to foresee future events.

Just think of what you could do. You could win the lottery, or
you could warn of future disasters and prevent them from
happening.
Although this sounds as if it belongs to the realm of science fiction, many ordinary people report having had such
experiences. For most people, these experiences come just
once in a lifetime and, often, they are not particularly informative. For example, take the following account:
When I was newly married I got homesick one day.
I just had to go home. Billy fussed a little, but gave in
to me and ordered the one and only taxi to take me
to the morning train. I remember how joyful I was and
how I danced about the house waiting for the taxi.
Billy and the driver teased me, but I was too happy to
care. Just as he bought the ticket, cold fear gripped
me. I started to cry. Give him back the tickets, I
said. Please, Billy, we cant go on this train. Billy
went into one of his rages, but the ticket man reached
out and took the tickets. Do as she says. Always do
as she says. We got into the taxi and all the way to
the hotel they asked me why. I did not know. I just
cried. At dinner that night there was a commotion.
The taxi man was coming toward me, pushing people to one side and upsetting chairs. He cried, How
did you know not to go on that train? It wrecked at
the next town. The car you always ride in turned over
and everyone was killed.

Think spring 2003 15

Do some people have a paranormal power to see

into the future? There are innumerable anecdotes of
events foretold, of course. But is there any scientific
evidence of the ability? Fiona Steinkamp, a leading
investigator of the paranormal, believes there is.

Steinkamp Precognition 16

However, some experiences can be surprisingly full of detail,

as illustrated by the one below:
I was working as a street car operator. I dreamed I
was operating a car on the W line going south on F
Street. I pulled up at Avenue 26, loaded passengers
and waited for the signal to change. I proceeded and
crossed the intersection with F street crossing Avenue 26. A short block south of Avenue 26 there is
an exit for automobile traffic only. The exit goes onto
F Street and it is a one-way exit, but it is possible,
and too often done, to make an illegal left-hand turn
and go south on F Street.
Now back to the dream: As I crossed the intersection, I saw a northbound 5 car approaching. I waved
to the motorman and went on. Suddenly, without
warning, a big truck, painted solid bright red, cut in
front of me obstructing my view of the exit, and the
truck, making the illegal turn, could not see my car
because of the other street car. There was a terrific
crash [] the truck was overturned. There had been
three people in the truck two men and a woman.
The two men were sprawled on the street, dead, and
the woman was screaming in pain. The woman looked
at me with the largest bluest eyes I had ever seen.
She repeatedly shouted at me, You could have
avoided this.
I was quite shaken by the dream.
I reported for work and for one reason or another I
was given a run on the W line. I had put the dream
out of my mind. On my second trip, I pulled up to
Avenue 26 just as in the dream and loaded passengers. I was waiting for the signal to change, still not
thinking of the dream, when I suddenly became sick
at my stomach. As I left the interchange, I saw, just
as in my dream, a 5 car. Now I was definitely sick.
As I waved to the motorman, the dream came to me.

On the face of it, these accounts are impressive. In the

parapsychological literature, experiences in which someone has apparently foreseen a future event without the use
of the normal five senses or clever guesswork are called
precognitive experiences. But can peoples experiential accounts be used as evidence for the paranormal?
There are a number of problems with appealing to peoples experiences as evidence for precognition, for example. Firstly, nothing extraordinary may be happening at all.
For instance, if someone often dreams of plane crashes,
sooner or later it is likely that an actual plane crash will
occur within one or two days of that person having one of
those dreams. The dreamer may subsequently believe they
have foreseen a future event, when really the correspondence was just coincidence. Indeed, any apparently precognitive experience may potentially be due solely to coincidence, because we dont know how likely a given dream is
for a given person. Nor can we calculate the probability of a
given event occurring in the world at a particular time. Coincidence is always a possible explanation.
Secondly, once someone sees a connection between their
premonition and the later event, in their excitement they
may mistakenly believe that there had been more corresponding details in their dream than there actually were.

Think spring 2003 17

I immediately shut off the power and applied the

brakes. A truck, not a big truck completely red as in
my dream, but a panel delivery truck with space for
advertising on the side painted over with bright red,
shot directly into my path. Had I been moving at all, I
would have hit it.
There were three people in the truck, two men and
a woman. As the truck passed in front of me, the
woman leaned out of the window and looked up at
me with the same startled, large blue eyes I had seen
in my dream, and she waved her arm hand, thumb
and forefinger circled in the familiar okay gesture.

Steinkamp Precognition 18

The dreamer may even unwittingly forget all the small details in the dream that did not later match up with the future
event. When you hear the report second-hand, you hear
only what that person remembers of the premonition and
the future event. This is not necessarily an objective or reliable account.
Thirdly, you cannot know whether there were subtle cues
in the environment which may have led the person quite
normally to have had that apparent precognition. For instance,
in a survey I conducted, one participant wrote:
In the autumn of 1957 I had a very vivid dream of
flying over a wide green valley with here and there
columns of smoke arriving from what appeared to be
bush fires. About two months later I was flying out to
Kenya and somewhere over Uganda looked out on to
a valley which appeared to be identical to that which
I had seen in my dream. Even the location of the
bush fires appeared in reality to be the same as in
the dream.
This might appear to be a good instance of a precognitive
experience. Surely it is unusual for anyone to go to Kenya
and the bush fires, with the location of a particular fire, are a
specific detail. However, the participant concluded the description of the experience with the following paragraph:
However, maybe the dream did not come out of the
blue. Ten years earlier I had flown down to Nairobi
and perhaps I had a residual memory of seeing the
same or similar valley.
With this further information, the experience sounds a lot
less impressive. In this instance the participant had thought
critically about their apparent premonition. However, many
people may simply be unaware that their ostensibly precognitive experience has arisen from forgotten background in-

Think spring 2003 19

formation or subtle cues in the environment. It is impossible

to know which other, unreported factors may have played a
role in bringing about any given ostensibly precognitive experience.
There is therefore always reason to doubt whether a persons experience really did directly tap into a future event.
However, this does not mean that these experiences should
be ridiculed or ignored. Surveys of such experiences have
revealed some interesting and replicable findings. For instance, precognitive experiences are reported mostly by
women, frequently occur in dreams and are about events
that cannot realistically be prevented by an individual person. However, these findings do not let us know whether the
experiences really are precognitive; they simply inform us
that these types of experiences have very specific characteristics and, perhaps, that the people who report them are
particular types of people. Thus, although some people
clearly interpret their experiences as paranormal, it is less
clear whether their interpretation is correct. It appears that
one can neither prove nor disprove whether these experiences have a genuinely paranormal origin.
Experimental work into the paranormal started because it
was recognized early on that experiences could not provide
proof of the paranormal. Experiments have many advantages
over experiences in determining whether it might be possible to foresee future events without use of the normal five
senses or clever guesswork.
A typical forced-choice precognition experiment might involve someone seeing the backs of three cards on a computer screen (see diagram 1, first screen, on next page). The
participant has to guess which card will later have a circle
on it. The participant makes the guess and the guess is
stored on the computer. The computer then randomly selects one of the three cards, saves its choice onto disk and
gives that card a green circle. The computer compares its
choice with that of the participant to see if the two match. It
then displays its choice to the participant and informs them

FIRST SCREEN

Steinkamp Precognition 20

123456
123456
123456
123456
123456
123456
123456
123456
123456123456123456
123456
123456
123456123456
123456123456
123456
select which square will
later have a circle in it

SECOND SCREEN

12345
12345
12345
12345
12345
12345

12345
12345
12345
12345
12345
12345

12345
12345
12345
12345
12345
12345

SORRY!
Wrong guess!

Diagram 1. Example of a simple forced-choice experiment.

how they did (diagram 1, second screen). The participant
can then see if they guessed correctly or if they got it wrong.
Here, we know, firstly, that the participant will get a correct guess by chance one in three times. It is therefore possible to determine statistically whether participants are
guessing the correct card more often than would be expected
by chance. Secondly, the participant is not able to change
their mind after they have selected a card. It is not the participant who decides whether they guessed correctly. Thirdly,
there is no possibility of any normal, sensory cueing. Thus
the experiments do not have the problematic aspects that
experiences have. If you would like to have a go at this type
of experiment yourself, you can visit http://moebius.
psy.ed.ac.uk/~fiona/fifiintro.html
Do experiments like these show any evidence of precognition? Freeman conducted a series of successful experiments in the 1960s with school children. It did indeed appear that precognition was possible under controlled conditions. The children tended to guess correctly more often
than you would expect by chance alone.
However, should you believe me when I inform you of this?
People can have selective memories about experimental
evidence, just as they can with their personal experiences.
If I want to believe in the paranormal, I might simply forget
about the experiments that didnt quite work out and be particularly impressed by those that had striking results. Hence
I will remember those experiments by Freeman and forget
the unsuccessful ones by Blackmore.

Fiona Steinkamp is research fellow at the department of

psychology, University of Edinburgh.

Think spring 2003 21

Similarly, if I were a strong disbeliever in the paranormal, I

might tell you only about the experiments that failed and
brush aside any evidence of good results.
One way of getting an overview of all experimental evidence in a given area both that in favour of and that against
the hypothesis is a technique called meta-analysis. This
enables researchers to gather all available experimental data
and to arrive at a statistic that tells us whether the experiments as a whole are successful. So far, all meta-analyses
of precognition experiments have revealed overall positive
results, indicating that precognitive ability may be possible.
The analyses have generally shown that the results are not
due to poorly-conducted experiments or to forgotten unsuccessful studies.
The experimental evidence therefore indicates that some
real-life experiences could theoretically be due, at least in
part, to information being gained psychically.
However, some people might bring purely philosophical
arguments into play. For instance, some might argue that
precognition is logically impossible. If a person could foresee a future event, then that future event has had an effect
backwards in time. The future event is seen now, in the
present. Yet causation usually works not from the future to
the present but from the present to the future. Usually, I first
turn on the tap and this causes water to come out. It is not
the case that water first comes out and this subsequently
causes me to turn on the tap. The problem is, if such phenomena are possible, how is it that they occur? At this point
in time, there is no universally agreed answer.
Parapsychology will doubtlessly remain a controversial field
for years to come. It is the controversy that makes it so
interesting. Potentially, it is a field in which individuals can
make real contributions. And it is also not so easy to dismiss as some would have you believe.