Background and Motivation

Mossbridge and Moddel have worked in the mainstream worlds of engineering, computer science, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience for decades while also keeping a curious eye open for interesting phenomena that need explaining. One such set of phenomena are those that cause us to question the human intuition, arrived at through our conscious waking experiences, that future events are unknowable (see essay on Time and the Unconscious Mind). This intuition causes most of us to assume that bits of perceived information about future events can only be thought of as statistically unreliable guesses. However, thirty years of research in the phenomena of presentiment and precognition suggest that physiological systems and our unconscious minds (or our "non-conscious processes") are somehow making statistically reliable guesses about future events that are designed to be unpredictable.

For example, Mossbridge and co-authors Patrizio Tressoldi at the University of Padova and Jessica Utts at UC Irvine conducted a thorough and conservative meta-analysis in which they statistically analyzed physiology data obtained between 1978-2010 in the context of experiments that test the intuition that information about future events seems to be influencing physiological processes 2-10 seconds before those events occur (see meta-analysis and subsequent review). It turned out that even with their statistically conservative methods, it appears that some kind of information is statistically reliably "leaking" into the past from the future, and being picked up by our physiological systems. Although this "leakage" of information is not what most of us consciously experience, it does not need to be construed as a violation of the laws of physics (see discussion in response to an opinion letter). Further, we ought to remain mindful that there is no clear agreement about how time should be handled in physics, and take note that both the block universe described in Einstein's special relativity as well as transactional interpretations of quantum mechanics assume that the past and future co-exist.

Mossbridge and others have done this work in response to thirty years of research suggesting that non-conscious processes, accessed either with physiological measures or with conscious "tricks" like drawing pictures seem to be receiving information about future events. Moddel and his co-workers used some of these tricks to make more than $30,000 on the stock market, but that's another lab note!

 

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