by Eric Wargo
Another principle about memory is that it is facilitated by strong emotion. Boring routine experiences don’t get strongly encoded and may be—usually are—forgotten, but surprising and unsettling experiences are better remembered, and highly pleasurable behaviors are strongly reinforced. The same connection to strong emotion has been found with psychic phenomena, again as Dunne observed with his dreams and as Frederic Myers observed with the experiences he interpreted as telepathy. 43 There are good evolutionary reasons why strong emotion might play an important role in precognition (or James Carpenter’s “first sight”): It needs to orient us to new information relevant to our survival so that we can update our knowledge about the world in a fruitful way. Survival and success demand we remember the things that reward and frighten us; it only makes sense that a precognitive orienting function would likewise focus on surprising rewards and threats.
Memory is also closely tied to our experience of place and geography, likely because the hippocampus, the brain’s librarian/archivist, also contains our maps of space. Ancient orators used familiar architectural spaces as “memory palaces” to facilitate remembering arguments and speeches, a principle still utilized by modern memory champions. 44 Dreams—including precognitive dreams—use the same principles, activating absurd, punny associations to waking episodes and “placing” them as composite images in familiar spatial settings. 45 Elsewhere I have suggested that the link between premory and space is what facilitates hauntings and “time slips,” phenomena that bridge a particular landscape to a subsequent reading or learning experience about that landscape. 46 Counterintuitively, this same principle may also explain temporal coincidences or resonances that are often observed in ESP phenomena—such as the mother’s vision in Kripal’s example occurring exactly a day before the event she seemingly precognized. Humans have a very hard time not thinking of time in spatial terms. 47 The visual/spatial calendars reported by people with synesthesia suggest what is possibly a more general principle: that our internal maps of space help structure our autobiographical map of time, our chronology. 48 If so, specific dates in the year or specific times of day may “premind” a person of experiences they will have in the future on that same day, or at that same time, the same way anniversaries remind us of events in the past.
Memory is also extremely malleable and subject to distortion over time. This reflects ongoing processes of brain plasticity involved in associating new experiences to older memories. Details of events gradually morph and change, and even memories that feel vividly accurate are often generic, schematic composites, less and less resembling actual events as they might be recorded by some God’s-eye video camera. It is possible to make people believe events occurred in the past that didn’t, such as the “lost in the mall” experiments made famous by University of California-Davis psychologist Elizabeth Loftus in the 1990s. 49 It is especially easy to modify or reshape people’s memories of real events, modifying salient details. The same unreliability seems to characterize precognition. It is, at best, “good enough for government work”—an approximation of some future experience, but typically distorted. 50 As we will see later, distortion may arise not only as a function of elapsed time but for other, psychodynamic reasons as well. In fact, a certain degree of uncertainty, obliquity, or “noise” is precisely what may allow information from our future to influence us in the present without giving rise to paradox.
One feature of memory that distinctly does not apply to precognition is sort of the exception that proves the rule and may help account for why precognition often either goes unnoticed or is interpreted as something else like telepathy. This relates to what psychologists call source monitoring . Autobiographical or episodic memories are recognized as such (and accepted as accurate—too readily, in fact 51 ) when they cohere with other events in our internal chronology. If a recollection seems plausible, given what else I know or think I know about myself, and especially if it is vivid, then why would I doubt it or puzzle over it? The same is true with our knowledge of facts. I don’t at all remember where or how I first learned tyrannosaurs only have two digits on each forelimb while allosaurs have three, but my strangely extensive knowledge of dinosaur anatomy does not surprise me in the slightest: I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was a little kid, and my room was full of dinosaur books and toys. Even if our knowledge of our lives and the world is distorted and often inaccurate, our sense of self gives it coherence, and things we “know” may come along with some plausible sense of how we know those things.
In stark contrast, given the necessary absence of any autobiographical scaffold or structure in which to place information refluxing from our future, such information would have no “provenance” and thus would be subject to various other explanations—or just ignored. I would be puzzled by a vivid, spontaneous mental image of, say, riding a bicycle through the streets of Beijing, China. I have never been to China, so such a thing would seem anomalous. I’d assume it was a memory of a dream, or “just my imagination.” If I believed in past lives or astral travel, I might shoehorn the experience into those conceptual boxes. If the image was really vivid and persistent, I might think I was going crazy. It would never occur to me that, in five years, I will be giving a lecture on time loops in Beijing, China, and will get around on a rented bike during my stay. Without knowing this, without having been to the future, there would be no way to situate this vision among the other items in my memory. And since most of our thoughts are as evanescent and hard to remember as dreams, I will be unlikely to remember this vision or notice how it corresponded to an actual event in my life some time afterward. It has often been suggested that déjà vu experiences may reflect this kind of “memory of a premonition,” although neural signals of familiarity may misfire for more mundane reasons, so it would be hard to substantiate such a claim in many, or most, cases.
It is the same difficulty that J. B. Priestley identified in the context of his future-influencing-present effect: How often will it occur to people to (a) record their passing thoughts and moods in detail and (b) compare those recorded thoughts and moods to later events? Almost never. Yet as we will see later, when people’s lives, thoughts, and feelings are recorded for some other purpose, such as in psychotherapy, it sometimes does—quite by accident—reveal suggestive evidence for something like the existence of a perturbing influence of future events on prior behavior.
“The brain is an illusion factory,” as neurobiologist Dean Buonomano puts it. 52 Humans’ ability to vividly and realistically imagine things that haven’t happened (or haven’t happened yet ) poses a huge challenge to studying anomalous experiences and ESP phenomena. One of the million functions of the Swiss Army Knife in our skulls is to serve as a powerful all-purpose imaging device, a special effects studio that would put Industrial Light and Magic to shame. It is able to create from scratch, instantly, vivid images to dramatize any piece of information or idea, real or fictitious, as well as translate complex thoughts instantly into pictures. It does this not only in dreams but also in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states on the edge of sleep, and even in waking reality when we “mentally time travel” or daydream or imagine possible scenarios. 53 Again, abundant research shows how readily this amazing capacity can be manipulated, and thus how memory can be distorted—especially in clinical situations. This body of research is often deployed to debunk psychic phenomena.
But the fact that memory may be unreliable and subject to manipulation cannot by itself explain away anomalous coincidences, such as between a dream and a later occurrence. It merely offers the skeptic a convenient alternative explanation. Life being messy and un-laboratory-like, one is forced to choose whom to believe, the experiencer or the debunker. I suggest that, rather than simplistically explain away precognition as memory distortion and wash our hands of the whole temporally obscene business—the skeptics’ easy path—we need to include the putty-like malleability of memory, and the ability of the imagination to put vivid visual-sensory flesh on
the bare bones of passing thoughts or things we read, within our account of precognition and how it might operate. In fact, it would help make sense of the characteristic obliquity of precognition.
Even just when daydreaming or mentally rehearsing scenarios, it is plain that our inner special effects studio “pre-presents” future events for which our memory lacks context by using stock images and “b-roll” we have already archived. Mentally preparing to give a presentation at a university I have never visited, I will picture it in my mind as some version of a room I am already familiar with. Precognitive visions and dreams seem to work this way too. The notion of bigshot American film producers purchasing the film rights to a not-yet-existing novel and restoring Vladimir Nabokov’s affluence in his middle age would have had no context—would have made no sense—in the mind of the teenage Nabokov at the sunset of Czarist Russia. But “circus performers” embodying the return of Nabokov’s recently deceased wealthy benefactor Uncle Vasily would be an apt approximation of that future milestone in his life, befitting of dreams’ well-known representational cunning.
Another thing our deceptive and brilliant imagination can easily do is cloak any precognitive sensibility by disguising it as something else. The vividness and immediacy of many “psychic” experiences naturally lead people to think that they have seen actual events elsewhere or communicated long-distance with their loved ones in real time. Upon learning of the Titanic ’s sinking, Clara Cook Potter may have interpreted her dream of terrified people hanging on a steeply angled railing as a clairvoyant vision of the real event, even though it could well have been (I suggest, probably was) precognitive of precisely the pictures she saw in the media. After learning of her brother’s death in that disaster, Mrs. Henderson may have interpreted her waking vision of her grieving sister-in-law and niece as some telepathic contact, but it could just as easily have been a premory of a mental scene she would have formed about his family on receiving the bad news. In his dream of Lieutenant B.’s crash, Dunne felt like he was “in” the scene and being addressed by his friend, even though it later became clear that his dreaming brain was just putting imaginary flesh on the bones of his later interpretation of a news bulletin—and the same with his vivid dream about a volcano about to blow. In both cases, a discrepancy between the actual event and the way he learned of it enabled him to trace these images to his reading.
I argue—and we will see many examples of this in Part Three when we delve into Freud and the unconscious—that dreams and precognitive visions represent not just future experiences but also our thoughts and emotions associated with those experiences. This goes a long way toward explaining why they often do not depict events completely accurately or literally. For instance, on seeing a chandelier in her child’s crib, the mother would certainly have been shaken by the terrible possibility that the baby could have been killed had she not brought her into bed with her. It is precisely this awful “what if” (i.e., what if she’d ignored her dream) that may have been pre-presented in her dream.
Precognition very often focuses on our future survival of some perilous (or at least chaotic and unsettling) outcome—in many notable cases, a tragic outcome that befalls someone else. Premonitions may not be “warnings” so much as previews of the equivocal reward of surviving some close call. In Kripal’s colleague’s case, as in Rhine’s story, there was a big reward that will be missed if we focus simply on the car accident (and the fact that it occurred not only in spite of but because of her efforts to prevent it): the fact that her son was okay , and that what had seemed in her vision like the smoke of a burning car was just the dust of deployed airbags that had saved both their lives. The dominant emotion in her case and that of the mother who dreamed of the crashed chandelier would really have been relief, and intensified gratitude for the safety of a child. It is precisely in the context of surviving some close call that those existentially powerful feelings of being alive and safe (or of loved ones being safe) are intensified. The precognitive brain seems to have a voracious appetite for thoughts and emotions about survival and close calls of one sort or another.
Survival really is the key to precognition, and on multiple levels. In the 1980s, a Russian physicist named Igor Novikov postulated that any form of time travel, informational or otherwise, could only have a non-paradoxical outcome. Reality, he argued, will always be self-consistent , even in a universe that includes cosmological exotica like wormholes that can carry information and objects back in time. 54 Subsequently, wormhole expert Kip Thorne and two of his Caltech students, Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer, confirmed that Novikov’s self-consistency conjecture is guaranteed by the laws of probability. Any attempt to shoot a billiard ball through a wormhole at an earlier version of itself in order to deflect it away from the wormhole’s mouth (and thus cause a paradox) could only have the opposite effect: nudging the ball into the wormhole instead. 55 Time-traveling billiard balls always survive their suicide attempts. We will see in the next chapter that there is a kind of causal Darwinism called post-selection that governs the flow of information backwards and forwards through the glass block of Minkowski spacetime. Information refluxing into the past only “survives” as meaningful insofar as it cannot be used to foreclose the future that “sent” that information.
It is because of this causal Darwinism that the grandfather paradox that scares so many people away from thinking about retrocausation really is an empty scarecrow, flapping harmlessly in the breeze. There is no rule dictating that time travelers are trying to kill (or even bilk) their grandfathers, and such a mission would never be successful in any case. In the block universe, the only time travelers who reach their destination in the past are ones who help bring Grandma and Grandpa together in the first place. This kind of matchmaking, although a little weird perhaps, is not paradoxical. It is also consistent with the essentially positive spirit of the messages the brain at time point B sends its younger self at time point A, even when they seem to involve dark outcomes.
“When retrocausation is allowed,” writes Princeton physicist York H. Dobyns, “one may find that an event causes itself.” 56 As long as a precognitive organism orients unconsciously toward a future that includes it, then the outcome will be a nice, safe, cozy causal loop. The term used in physics for such a formation is closed timelike curve . In myth and metaphor, we call it a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Time loop” is snappier though (and makes for a better book title). If we routinely orient to rewards in our future, and do so unconsciously, then causal tautologies and self-fulfilling prophecies ought to be constant features in our lives, dime-a-dozen formations in the Minkowski block universe. And like a volley of arrows converging on sad-eyed St. Sebastian, separate lines of research in a number of different scientific fields are rapidly converging on an explanation for how this might be possible.
6
Destination: Pong (or, How to Build a QuantumTM Future Detector)
The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.
— Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life” (2002)
I n the evangelist Luke’s account of Jesus’s divine origins, the angel Gabriel visited the young virgin, Mary, to tell her the good news that she was going to give birth to God’s son. The girl, no dummy, posed the obvious question to her visitor, “How can this be, as I know not a man?”
Gabriel cleared his throat and with a great flourish said, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.” In other words, not answering Mary’s question—at all—but sounding very authoritative, and with a lot of what scientists nowadays call “vague hand waving.”
Seeing the girl was still perplexed, Gabriel added that her relative Elizabeth had
just gotten pregnant even though everyone thought she was barren, thus “With God nothing will be impossible.” In other words, just accept it .
Countless Renaissance paintings depict Mary looking humbly quizzical before the flamboyant angel explaining all this. But it just wasn’t a 13-year-old Galilee girl’s place to question what a silken-robed messenger from heaven was telling her about God’s plans for her body. So (we are told) Mary just bowed her head and said, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.”
Mary’s “how can this be?” is one way to look at the outrage of precognition. How can it be that we could see or feel or dream of events that haven’t happened yet in the flow of time when we “know not the future”? We are all “virgins” when it comes to future time, aren’t we? Anything that violates the time barrier would have to be a miracle—or at least, something supernatural—and that has no place in science.
For Luke’s first-century audience, “The Lord” explained everything that couldn’t be explained by common sense. In our accursed, godless age, that role is taken up by quantum physics, but the explanations are sometimes no less hand-wavy. People who write about the possibilities of ESP are particularly guilty of quantum hand-waving. There’s even a specific version of Gabriel’s evocative “overshadowing” in the ESP literature: the mysterious quantum concept of entanglement . When particles are created together or interact in some way, their characteristics become correlated such that they cannot be described independently; they become part of a single “entangled state.” A measurement on one of the pair, “Alice,” would have a corresponding effect on its entangled partner “Bob” instantaneously. Even if you send Bob to a lab orbiting Alpha Centauri, he and Alice will behave identically, almost as if they somehow communicated (you know, telepathically) to get their stories straight.