by Eric Wargo
The difficulty of completion notwithstanding, Slothrop’s “gift” is one of 20th century literature’s most memorable MacGuffins. And as crazy and comical as it seems, his unique take on psychic phenomena proved to be uncannily prescient of parapsychological research of the decades that followed the novel’s publication. These included not only the weaponizing of psi abilities, the purpose of the government-funded ESP research mentioned in the last chapter, but also subsequent research tying some kind of precognitive ability to people’s involuntary reflexes. The most interesting body of parapsychological research in the past two decades centers on detecting and responding to future stimuli outside of conscious awareness, the ability sometimes called presentiment , or “feeling the future.”
From early on, parapsychologists had realized that ESP, whatever it is and however it works, largely seems to operate unconsciously and is often accessed best in the context of physical tasks that do not require deliberation or analysis. 3 In the 1990s, an electrical engineer then at the University of Nevada named Dean Radin designed experiments that used subjects’ autonomic responses as a possible index of their ability to sense future events. In one 1997 study, he measured the skin conductance, heart rate, and blood flow to the fingertips of students and other adult volunteers while they viewed a series of randomly selected photographs—either calm landscapes and nature scenes or erotic photos or autopsies expected to elicit an emotional response. In addition to the expected high degree of arousal after seeing the emotional pictures, there was a smaller but distinct increase in arousal—what he called an “orienting pre-sponse”—peaking a second before the arousing (erotic or violent) images but not neutral pictures. 4 He conducted other similar experiments measuring eye movements and brainwave activity and found similar presponses to imminent stimuli.
Inspired by Radin’s work, several other researchers have pursued presentiment studies, with similar success. Neuropsychologist James Spottiswoode and physicist Edwin May reported skin-conductance changes in advance of noise bursts. 5 At the University of Amsterdam, psychologist Dick Bierman and neuroscientist H. Steven Scholte reported increased activity in the visual cortex and amygdala (measured using fMRI) prior to randomly presented emotional pictures but not neutral pictures; men showed an anticipatory response to erotic pictures only, whereas women showed an anticipatory response to both erotic and violent pictures. 6 Neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge and colleagues at Northwestern University measured skin conductance in a picture-guessing task, finding that male participants’ arousal increased significantly up to 10 seconds prior to a correct “hit,” but not women’s—possibly pointing to the greater reward males feel at being right. 7 A meta-analysis of 26 presentiment studies found high significance for this body of research; 87 negative unpublished studies would be needed to nullify their statistical significance. 8 A critical analysis of research in presentiment—also known as “predictive anticipatory activity”—by a team that included Jessica Utts (the statistician mentioned earlier) found it highly unlikely that statistical manipulations (sometimes called “p -hacking”) could account for the positive results seen in these experiments. 9
The most widely reported and controversial research on the unconscious influence of future stimuli on behavior—indeed possibly the most scandalous ESP research ever—was the series of studies mentioned in the Introduction by Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem. Over the course of several years, Bem conducted a series of nine large experiments, involving over 1,000 student participants, in which he reversed the causal direction in four basic psychological paradigms: reinforcement , priming , habituation , and facilitation of recall . 10 In all four types of experiment, he found astonishing, seemingly time-defying effects. (Since Bem’s experiments measured task performance rather than physiological responses, they are sometimes distinguished as tests of “implicit precognition,” 11 but for simplicity I will consider them under the “presentiment” rubric.)
Reinforcement is the tendency to respond positively to reward and negatively to punishment—the basis of operant conditioning, somewhat different from classical Pavlovian conditioning but involving similar brain mechanisms. In Bem’s inversions of the usual temporal sequence, student participants tried to pick which “curtain” on a computer screen concealed a picture, clicking on the selected curtain to reveal if they were right. Some of the pictures were erotic (positive reinforcement), while others were neutral. Participants’ accuracy at picking the right curtain did not deviate from chance when the picture was neutral, but they were significantly more accurate when the picture was erotic. Unknown to the participants, the correct answers were randomly selected after they made their choices, so it was distinctly a test of precognition, not clairvoyance—there were no pictures “already there” behind the curtains.
Priming, the ability of brief, subtle, or subliminal stimuli to affect our behavior, is commonly used in psychology to measure the influence of unconscious processing. In a standard priming study, participants’ reaction time is measured when they press buttons on a keyboard to indicate a choice in response to some stimulus, but a few seconds beforehand they are very briefly exposed to a picture or word that they do not consciously register but that may make one or the other choice response faster or more likely. In Bem’s priming studies, he reversed the usual order, placing the prime after the choice, not before. Participants indicated whether they found a picture on the screen pleasant or unpleasant, after which a word like “ugly” or “beautiful” would be flashed over one of the pictures quickly enough that it would not be detected consciously but might subliminally be registered. The data suggested that primes received after the button press influenced the rapidity of participants’ responses—another seemingly impossible finding from the standpoint of ordinary linear causality.
Habituation is the tendency of both positive and negative reactions to stimuli to diminish with repeated exposure. For example, if subjects are subliminally primed with an appealing picture, when they are later asked to choose whether they prefer it or another picture, they will tend to choose the other one because the appeal of the one they’ve already glimpsed has diminished. Vice versa for negative or unappealing pictures. In Bem’s studies, the “habituation” took place after the students were presented with the options and made their choices. Again, significant deviations from chance in the results showed evidence that participants were biased by their subsequent exposure to certain stimuli.
And lastly, inspired by the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass , who explains to Alice that memory can go in both directions, Bem also conducted experiments in which participants were tested on words they had previously seen in a learning session, with the twist that some of the words were shown again after their test in a subsequent “practice phase.” In keeping with his other results, participants tended to recall better the words that they were shown after the test. The take-home point of this and the rest of Bem’s studies is that our behavior seems to be conditioned not only by what we have learned or been exposed to in the past but also, to some small but significant extent, by what we will learn or be exposed to in the future.
Besides ridicule, Bem’s article prompted a great deal of soul-searching by psychologists concerned that his impossible findings were a symptom of a rot in the heart of their science. It led to an avalanche of efforts to replicate other findings whose significance was now in doubt because the researchers had used the same standard statistical procedures Bem had relied on. A large-scale effort to replicate 100 findings in three top-tier psychological science journals was only successful in 36 percent of the studies, revealing that possibly the majority of what was getting published in the field was subpar science. 12 Meanwhile though, smugly dismissive claims that Bem’s “feeling the future” findings could not be replicated, which appeared quickly on the paper’s heels, proved premature: A 2016 meta-analysis of 90 replications of his studies, 79 by researchers in other laboratories, supported his conclusion th
at future stimuli can affect people’s behavior. 13 Statistical analysis of the results placed the significance level in the highest category for Bayesian statistical analysis, “decisive evidence,” even when Bem’s own replications were excluded. Over 500 experiments with negative results would have had to be left in file drawers to nullify this level of significance.
The psychical researchers of Frederic Myers’ generation had viewed psychical ability as reflecting our higher consciousness, a dim adumbration of the next phase in our evolution, 14 and there is a long tradition, dating back two millennia to the Hindu yogi Patanjali, of viewing psychic abilities as “superpowers” (siddhis ) attained through rigorous mental exercise. 15 In contrast, the presentiment research of Radin, Bem, and others is a natural outgrowth of the modern evolutionary assumption that whatever the nature of our future-feeling or future-sensing faculty, its expression must have a basic survival function for the organism and thus may actually reflect our “lower” functions and our evolutionary past, not our future. ESP has not been as extensively studied in animals as in humans, but suggestive research has supported something like ESP in animals. One series of experiments by maverick biologist Rupert Sheldrake, for example, supported the idea that animal companions have a sixth sense about imminent rewards such as the return of their owners. 16 At least one recent study also suggests that planarian worms—the simplest animals with a nervous system—may be able to orient away from future aversive stimuli as much as a minute in advance. 17
For humans, an ability to orient toward social rewards would be highly adaptive, and this may be what we see in familiar experiences like the famous “sense of being stared at.” Psychologists dismiss such a sense as a mistaken product of selection bias: Instances where you turned your head and didn’t find another person looking back at you get left in your mental file drawer. On the other hand, experiments by Sheldrake have substantiated the existence of the phenomenon. 18 If presentiment serves a social orienting function, orienting us to another’s looks is precisely the kind of experience it might be expected to give rise to.
That something like presentiment may be a basic adaptive trait is an argument made forcefully by James Carpenter, a clinician and parapsychological researcher at the Rhine Center in North Carolina. Synthesizing a vast array of findings across parapsychology into a single theoretical framework, he argues that ESP manifests constantly in our lives as part of an always-unconscious faculty he calls “first sight.” 19 It is, he argues, the “leading edge” in our perception, preparing us for action, and even the ground of our efficacy in the world—“not an occasional ability but … an unconscious feature of each person’s ongoing engagement with reality.” 20 Carpenter does not limit first sight to our ability to sense the future—he includes other abilities classically distinguished from precognition, like telepathy and clairvoyance, as well as psychokinesis (PK) or mind-over-matter abilities. Whatever its scope, his basic argument, that first sight is “always at work, but always out of sight,” 21 is an important corrective to the common assumption that, if something like ESP exists, it must be a rare occurrence. We should not confuse how difficult we find imagining a thing with how difficult nature finds accomplishing it. If it exists at all, then first sight would not be some rare exception to nature’s rules. It must be part of nature, and it would probably be ubiquitous—indeed fundamental—even if we don’t yet understand how it works.
The Spy Downstairs
If first sight is a basic, adaptive trait, an aspect of our “lower” animal nature, we might expect it to manifest most strongly when our higher executive functions are off-line or taking a back seat. Precognition has often been linked to altered states of consciousness—not only dreams but also trance, meditation, 22 hypnagogic/hypnopompic states, 23 out-of-body experiences, 24 and the effects of hallucinogens. 25 Perhaps most importantly, it is also linked to “flow states” in which we engage in highly practiced creative as well as physically enjoyable or thrilling activities with high stakes. Michael Murphy, a pioneer in the human potential movement and co-founder of the Esalen retreat in Big Sur, California, wrote of transcendental and psychic experience manifesting in sports and martial arts, for example. 26 Some form of sixth sense guiding and protecting particularly intuitive soldiers has long been reported in war, and the Office of Naval Research reported in 2014 that it is actively pursuing research into how “Spidey sense” may work. 27 Mountain climbers and others in stressful or extreme situations report a dissociative, possibly precognitive state to which they often attribute their survival. 28
One skilled, high-stakes physical activity with notorious links to precognition (as well as other paranormal phenomena) is aviation. As in combat or mountain climbing, piloting an aircraft requires senses attuned and alert, and puts the pilot in a thrilling, highly connected state of flow. Victor Goddard’s precognitive “time slip” experience while flying over an abandoned air base in Drem, Scotland, was just one of several psychic phenomena he claimed to experience in his life; 29 notably, this one occurred as he was trying to navigate safely through a storm, necessitating heightened attention and adrenaline. Arctic explorer and aviator Sir George Hubert Wilkins reported a kind of psychic intuition he called “provenance” protecting him in his adventures. 30 Pioneer female aviator Jacqueline Cochran, a close friend of Amelia Earhart, reported in her memoir a facility with ESP, including several instances in which she psychically located missing aircraft. 31 WWII bomber pilot-turned-writer Martin Caidin reported a facility with psychic abilities and may have prophesied the real-life Apollo 13 space disaster in one of his novels. 32 (He also chronicled psychic and paranormal experiences in other pilots. 33 ) One of the more naturally gifted psychics studied as part of the ESP research program at SRI was Richard Bach, pilot and author of the 1970 bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull . 34
Acting, singing, playing a musical instrument, and other kinds of performance, when engaged in with skill and complete immersion, may also be conducive to precognition. 35 In the ancient world, prophecy manifested in song. I have argued elsewhere that mediumship may also be a form of disguised precognition, and it too is a performance, demanding physical engagement and a suppression of the critical intellect (to such a degree, in fact, that many mediums have no conscious memory of their trances afterward). 36 The performative dimension could also account for the oft-observed (and confusing) link between apparently genuine ESP phenomena and stage magic, another skilled and semi-high-stakes activity that takes the performer’s critical faculties off-line temporarily. Russell Targ, one of the physicists in charge of the remote viewing research program at SRI, reported to Jeffrey Kripal that he received what he thought was real telepathic information while performing stage magic as a young man. 37 “Mixed mediumship” is the term for the oft-noted admixture of possibly real psi phenomena with stage trickery among magicians and mediums. 38
And then there are fiction writers. Historians of psychic phenomena are fortunate to have a particularly rich record of precognitive experiences in the lives of writers. This is partly a natural file-drawer effect: Reports of anomalous experiences in the lives of athletes and soldiers, for example, would be relatively rare simply because sports and combat do not leave as rich a paper trail as writing. But additionally, because writing is (for some writers at least) precisely an enjoyable flow activity that engages an individual’s intuitive and creative juices, the very act of recording ideas and inspirations may induce an “altered state” conducive to channeling information from a writer’s future. 39 It is like attaching a printer directly to the phenomenon of interest. In memoirs and interviews, writers often describe their creative frenzies as a kind of trance in which ideas come unbidden; some report feeling that the thoughts of some other entity or higher self are being transcribed or channeled. In the last part of this book, we will examine two writer-precogs, Morgan Robertson and Philip K. Dick, who both described feeling possessed by a feminine muse when they wrote. Is “inspiration”—which originally
meant possession by a divine spirit—simply a psychologically neutral term for drawing precognitively or presentimentally on a writer’s own future?
One striking example of possible literary presentiment is that of Norman Mailer. Mailer had become famous at age 25 for his debut novel The Naked and the Dead (1947), but he struggled mightily with his second, Barbary Shore (1951), about a writer who rents a room in a Brooklyn Heights rooming house in order to write a novel. The writer character finds that his artist neighbors are an interesting mix, including a middle-aged Communist who is hounded by an FBI agent and turns out to have been a spy for the KGB. Mailer told an interviewer years later that he was plagued by a sense of disbelief in what he was writing—it seemed unrealistic to him: “The greatest single difficulty with the book was that my common sense thought it was impossible to have all these agents and impossible heroes congregating in a rooming house in Brooklyn Heights.” 40 But like many artists, Mailer felt he had to honor and follow his inspiration wherever it led. He had to force himself to complete the book, and when it was panned by critics, he said, he resigned himself to forever being a second-rate writer.
Six years, a third novel, and a stint in Hollywood after Barbary Shore ’s publication and savage reviews, Mailer found himself actually working in a studio in Brooklyn Heights, and one summer day (August 8, 1957) he was shocked to read a stunning New York Times cover story: “RUSSIAN COLONEL IS INDICTED HERE AS TOP SPY IN U.S.” The “Colonel” shown in the picture below the headline was the 55-year-old Russian painter and guitarist who worked in the room directly below his, just one floor down. He was known by his fellow artists in the building as Emil Goldfus, but his real name, the story said, was Colonel Rudolf Abel, of the KGB. The first paragraph of the story explained that Abel was “the most important spy ever caught in the United States.” 41 (Like in a spy novel, Abel had been caught after the FBI decoded a piece of microfilm a newsboy had found hidden in a hollow nickel.)