by Eric Wargo
Or is there? There is one thing that is very hard to “shield” against, and that is the psychic getting some form of feedback later in his or her life. Experiments testing alleged telepathy or clairvoyance/remote viewing in laboratory contexts frequently include some form of direct feedback to the participants immediately following a session, letting them know how well they did. Even when there is no feedback given as part of the experiment, it may often be possible to find out “the right answer” later. If precognition is real, then any kind of confirmation available later could theoretically be the origin of what only seemed to have been information gained via some other, easier-to-comprehend ESP modality.
This argument has been floated cautiously again and again in the literature on ESP. 25 It is essentially the conclusion reached by J. W. Dunne based on his forensic scrutiny of his own dreams, for instance. However much it seemed on the surface like clairvoyance or some other psychic modality, information that “came true” in his dreams could always be traced to his own future experiences, including reading experiences about distant events like a volcano eruption. Yet his Serialism theory, with its multiple levels of consciousness and the implication that our highest consciousness transcends the physical body, tended to distract from the more materialist conclusion his data pointed to: that precognition was, as it were, “all in his head”—his brain communicating with itself across time.
In 1974, Columbia University physicist and futurist Gerald Feinberg proposed a brain-based theory of precognition at a meeting of quantum physicists and parapsychologists in Geneva, Switzerland. If precognition exists, he argued, it is most likely a neurobiological phenomenon related to memory, but in reverse—or what he called “memory of things future.” 26 He speculated, given the small effects seen in laboratory ESP research, that this faculty may be linked only to short-term memory, and thus works mainly for near-future experiences, and that in any case it could only bring information on events occurring or learned about during an individual’s lifetime. He also suggested, tentatively, that many, perhaps all, other kinds of ESP “can be explained in terms of ordinary perception combined with precognition.” 27 Feinberg was a bit of a maverick, who had made waves in physics circles as well as the popular science press in the late 1960s with his hypothesized particles called tachyons , which travel faster than light and thus backward in time. 28 Tachyons have never been found and are today no longer believed to exist. But as I will be arguing later, his suggestion about precognition and its relation to memory may have been highly prescient.
More recently, physicist Edwin May, who directed the ESP research at SRI after 1986 and then headed the program researching “anomalous cognition” (May’s preferred term) after it was transferred to SAIC, and psychologist Sonali Bhatt Marwaha have also argued that all forms of ESP are likely precognition misinterpreted or misidentified. 29 Unlike Feinberg, they do not assume precognition is solely an “inside the head” phenomenon 30 ; but reducing anomalous cognition to precognition is a bold step that may move the field of parapsychology forward by, as they say, “collaps[ing] the problem space” 31 of these phenomena. What has always seemed like several small piles of interesting but perhaps not overwhelming data supporting various diverse forms of psi or anomalous cognition may really be a single, impressively large pile of evidence for the much more singular, astonishing, and as I hope to show, physically plausible ability of people to access information arriving from their own future.
In Part Two, where I address the possible “nuts and bolts” of this ability, I will be making a case for precognition being something close to Feinberg’s “memory of things future”—an all-in-the-head information storage and retrieval process, but one that is not limited to short-term memory. Evidence from life and laboratory suggests it may be possible, within limits, to “premember” experiences days, months, and years in our future, albeit dimly and obliquely, in a manner not all that different from how we remember experiences in our past. The main qualitative difference would be that, unlike memory for past experiences, we have no context for recognizing information from our future, let alone interpreting or evaluating it, and thus will seldom even notice its existence. We would also have little ability to directly search our memory for things future, the way we can rummage in our mental attic for information we know we acquired earlier in life. Yet things we will learn in our future may “inform” us in many non-conscious ways, and this information may be accessed in dreams and art and tasks like ESP experiments that draw on ill-defined intuitive abilities.
It is a hypothesis that remains to be explored and tested, but it could elegantly explain not only many anecdotal claims of precognition but also many experimental findings across ESP research, such as Whately Carington’s “displaced hits.”
* * *
Again, precognition was still a new and poorly-thought-out idea in 1940, and Carington did not know how to grapple with the implications of his results, so the possibility that participants might have been precognizing later feedback or information they might acquire through normal sensory channels after the experiment never occurred to him. Nor did it occur to later commentators like Louisa Rhine. But what we now need to realize, in light of the strong evidence supporting precognition, is that whether or not Carington actually hung the drawings up on his wall may have made no difference. In fact, he might not have needed to make drawings at all, but only say he did … in his published results.
If precognition is the influence on an individual’s behavior of information that will be conventionally acquired later, including interesting future reading experiences as Dunne observed with his dreams—and by extension, even false or erroneous reading experiences taken as true —then any experiment participant who read Carington’s article, “Experiments on the Paranormal Cognition of Drawings” in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1940, would have had higher-than-chance odds of making drawings that matched some of the targets during the experiment a year before, in 1939. In his article, Carington explicitly lists the 10 targets for each of the five experiments—“bracket, buffalo, hand,” and so on. The article was effectively what May and Marwaha call an “answer book.” 32 Psychics and remote viewers may be people who intuitively know how to cheat by peeking at this book when making responses to questions they couldn’t conventionally already know the answers to.
The precognitive hypothesis could account not only for the higher-than-chance correspondence between the participants’ drawings and Carington’s drawing sets for each experiment but also for the displacement factor. Even though all five experiments were written up in the same article, the lists of ten target objects for each group were listed separately, distinctly identified by their dates, as was identifying information for each group of subjects (e.g., “students in Dr. Thouless’s lecture class” or “members of Mr. O. L. Zangwill’s Workers Educational Association psychology class,” etc.). Readers curious about how well they had done in the experiment a year earlier would have been quickly able to find their own experiment and the list of drawings. Getting the exact day right would have been unlikely, however—it would mean “pre-membering” exactly on which night you drew which picture, a tall order at a year’s remove even for memory going the usual direction. 33
A further detail also supports this interpretation. The published article gives verbal labels for the targets (the nouns extracted randomly from the dictionary) rather than reproducing the target drawings that Carington and his wife made of them. As might be expected if participants were making their drawings informed by future reading of his article, Carington noted that the “hits” seemed as if the subject had responded to the verbal label for the object (e.g., the word “hand”) rather than to the picture:
There is virtually no indication that subjects in any sense ‘see’ and copy the original. On the contrary, everything seems to happen much more as if those who scored hits had been told, ‘Draw a Hand,’ for example, than ‘Copy this drawing of a Hand’. It is, so
to say, the ‘idea’ or ‘content’, or ‘meaning’ of the original that gets over, not the form. 34
Interestingly enough, this is nearly opposite the pattern reported in other early drawing experiments and in remote viewing experiments at SRI when feedback was available, which usually consisted of being taken to the site after the remote viewing session or being shown the object or picture visually. In those cases, subjects reported getting sketchy visual impressions during the task, with no sense of the identity or meaning of the object/location. 35 This has always been interpreted as a function of the distinctly nonverbal, non-analytical, “right-brained” nature of ESP. 36 Could it instead simply reflect the format (visual versus verbal) in which the feedback will be later received?
As an explanation for Carington’s results, the precognitive hypothesis can be only that, a hypothesis. There is at this distance no way of knowing the identity of the individual participants or what their subsequent reading habits consisted of, including which ones went on to read his article later in their lives or otherwise may have received feedback directly from Carington. “Participants’ Life and Learning Experiences Subsequent to the Experiment” are never included in published results of ESP experiments (or any psychology experiments), and it is obviously impossible to know, when you publish an article, who is destined to read the article later. Interestingly, Carington noted that a group of participants at Rhine’s lab across the Atlantic at Duke University participated in the fourth and fifth experiments and scored exceptionally well. One possibility is that, having prior interest and experience in the field of telepathy research, as well as ready access to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research , this group may have been more likely than the other participants to peruse Carington’s article a year later. 37
Attempts to experimentally assess the role feedback may be playing in ESP performance have produced inconsistent and unclear results. The SRI researchers considered feedback important to ESP performance, but they generally interpreted its role as psychological—the importance of feedback in learning a new skill, as well as bringing closure to a trial before moving on to the next one. 38 Later, Edwin May and two colleagues conducted studies of anomalous cognition at various intensities of feedback flashed on a tachistoscope, including a complete absence of feedback in certain trials. They reported that the two most experienced participants (of four) scored well at describing or drawing unseen, randomly selected target images both when the images were flashed after the session and in trials when they did not see this feedback, leading the researchers to conclude that feedback is not necessary. 39
On the other hand, Marwaha and May reported an interesting experiment in which participants remote viewed randomly selected photos of sites around the Bay Area; the photos had been taken months earlier, but feedback consisted of being taken to the actual site after the remote viewing session. Participants’ drawings and descriptions tended to match the sites as they existed when visited, in some cases differing significantly from the photographs (e.g., ponds had dried in the interim, or there was new construction). In other words, psychics’ responses conformed to the feedback, not the intended “target.” 40 In their meta-analysis of precognition studies, Honorton and Ferrari found a difference between studies that included feedback to the participants and those that did not. The strongest results were from experiments that included participants who had done well in previous experiments, were tested individually, and received feedback after each trial. 41 Performance in precognition tasks seems to correlate with the availability of confirming information in the participant’s (near) future, yet the reason why is still debated.
The “precognition only” argument is not widely held among parapsychologists or remote viewers, who often report a subjective conviction that some part of their consciousness has left their body and is actually present at the location they are “viewing.” But the most storied and successful living remote viewer, Joseph McMoneagle, concluded that his successes were not a function of mentally traveling across space but of receiving information from his future self. McMoneagle distinguished himself (and even earned a Legion of Merit award) for a series of stunning psychic exploits during his years on the Star Gate program. For instance, in late 1979, he was shown a photograph of a large building near a body of water and asked to describe what was going on inside it; he was told only that the building was somewhere in Russia. Over the course of a few sessions, he described and drew in detail a huge double-hulled submarine being constructed inside the building. Unknown to him, the building was adjacent to the White Sea, near the Arctic Circle, yet construction of a submarine at that location seemed impossible, given that there was no access to the ocean from the building. Authorities at the National Security Council who reviewed his notes and drawings thought what he had “seen” was absurd. But early the following year, his report was confirmed by satellite images showing a new deep trench that had been dug from building to the water, and a new enormous “Typhoon” class sub (the vessel featured in Tom Clancy’s novel The Hunt for Red October ) with numerous specific details matching his description. 42 When asked over a decade later how he thought remote viewing works, McMoneagle put it plainly:
Simply put, I think that I am sending myself information from the future. In other words, at some point in the future I will come to know the answer to whatever question has been put to me in the past. Therefore, whenever the information is passed to me in its accurate form, that is when I send it back to myself in the past. 43
According to such a logic, many if not all anecdotal accounts of spontaneous “telepathy” experiences could also be precognition in disguise. Notoriously, for example, some twins report telepathic connection, being able to feel each other’s injuries or knowing of crises happening to each other even when living far away. But you cannot know for sure your twin sister broke her arm until you call her on the phone and find out about it—some physical, real-world confirmation is the only way to verify a “psychic” intuition. That phone call (or letter, or email) may in many or even all cases be the real source of that psi-acquired knowledge. (We will see later why it would be very easy to misattribute the source of anomalous insights gained via precognition.)
Whether and to what extent precognition can account for all ostensible forms of ESP—a still-open question—it is reasonable to suppose that precognition, not telepathy (or some cosmic alignment of archetypes a la Jung’s synchronicity), was at work in the Vonneguts’ case too. The butterflies that brushed Kurt’s cheek did not fly all the way from his drowning brother-in-law James Adams in New Jersey; they flew from himself in his own future, when he was informed that Adams had been on the ill-fated train—a tragic piece of news with huge implications for his own future and that of his family. They were precognitive, not telepathic, butterflies.
4
The Psi Reflex — Presentiment and the Future-Influencing-Present Effect
Nor will it be possible in the future to dismiss as negligible the phenomenon of precognition, whether in dreams or in a state of wakefulness. Thus, exceeding the bounds of “official psychology,” the American Atomic Energy Commission proposed in 1958 that “clairvoyants” should be employed in an attempt to foresee where Russian bombs would fall in the event of war. (31st August, 1958, Report of the Rand Commission.)
— Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (1960)
A lthough countless science-fiction stories and movies have explored precognition, without doubt the most interesting “serious” literary exploration of the topic is Thomas Pynchon’s unfinished 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow . That sprawling menagerie of wild conspiracies and crazy characters, set during and after WWII in Europe, centers on the fate of an American army lieutenant, Tyrone Slothrop, whose amorous conquests around London during the Blitz infallibly predict V2 rocket strikes in an otherwise random distribution throughout the city. Slothrop’s weird ability puts him under the scrutiny of “Psi Section,” a division of militar
y intelligence, who link his strange gift to Pavlovian conditioning he experienced as an infant. The hope of the various shadowy figures observing and pursuing Slothrop through much of the 760-page novel is somehow to exploit his ability … but first, they have to simply understand it. 1
It is hinted in the story that two decades earlier, a mad genius experimenter named Dr. Lazslo Jamf had used the infant Slothrop’s erections as the “target reflex” tied to an unspecified conditioned stimulus “X.” Classical Pavlovian conditioning, the basis of many human learning mechanisms and most familiar to nonscientists in the form of animal training, involves pairing an arbitrary event, called the “conditioned stimulus,” with an animal’s or person’s instinctive response to a natural reward. Pavlov’s model for this was his famous dogs: By repeatedly pairing the sound of a bell with a dog’s natural response of salivating at the smell of food, he conditioned the animals to salivate at the sound of the bell even when there was no food present. The implication, in the novel, is that Dr. Jamf had paired the infant Slothrop’s erections to some entropic stimulus, which somehow resulted, much later, in his adult habit of having sex right where one of Hitler’s rocket-bombs would fall the next day.
The secret of Slothrop’s condition(ing)—the mysterious X to which his infantile sexual response was paired—remains unanswered all the way through to an increasingly uncertain outcome, in which Slothrop descends into madness and even the circumstances of his childhood (including the very existence of Dr. Jamf) are called into question. I call Gravity’s Rainbow “unfinished” because most readers do not get this far, detecting at some point about midway through that answers, and resolution, may not be forthcoming. But this has not prevented Gravity’s Rainbow from being regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature, along with other unfinished works like A Remembrance of Things Past (readers of which usually don’t get very far “past” the eating of the madeleine) or Finnegan’s Wake . 2