Define prescience.
One time at a job my co-worker was ringing out a mop and he was pushing too hard. I told him that he was going to break the ringer. The next night he broke it. Was that prescience? Was that foreknowledge? Did I see into the future and observe it?
Conscious and Anomalous Nonconscious Emotional Processes: A Reversal of the Arrow of Time?
Two previous experiments have been reported that tried to explore physiological indicators of "precognitive information" in which subjects respond prior to presented stimuli. In an elegant experiment in the early seventies, John Hartwell, then at Utrecht University, measured the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) after a warning signal and before a random selected picture of a face was to be displayed (Hartwell 1978). The CNV is a brain potential that has been associated with anticipatory processes; more precisely the CNV is interpreted as a "readiness for response" preparation. The subjects in Hartwell's studies were asked to respond with one of two buttons depending on the gender of the face on the picture. The warning stimulus was sometimes informative, that is, the subject could infer from the warning stimulus what the gender type of the face on the picture would be. In those trials a mean CNV was observed that clearly differed for the two stimuli categories. In the other case the warning stimulus was uninformative but it was hoped that the CNV still would indicate what type of picture was about to be shown. Such a finding would suggest that in some way or another the subject had nonconscious knowledge of the nearby future. 1
Nearly 20 years elapsed before the idea of precognitive information reflected in the physiology of subjects was picked up again by the second author of this article (Radin 1996). He used the physiological measures Skin Conductance, Heart Rate, and Plethysmography, which reflect behavior of our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Furthermore, in contrast to Hartwell, he used highly emotional pictures that were presented 5 seconds after the subjects had pressed the button for the next trial. In 3 independent studies Radin found significant differences in physiology, most notably in the skin conductance, preceding the exposure of calm versus extreme pictures. The precognitive response was termed "presponse." Radin discussed a number of possible classical explanations for presponse but concluded that these do not apply.
However one potential "normal" explanation, namely the effect of anticipatory strategies, was not discussed at the time. Subjects who participate in this type of experiment while being aware that once every so often an extreme picture will be displayed may build up (generally incorrect) expectations about the probability that such an extreme picture will be shown in the forthcoming exposure. Indeed, owing to the "gambler's fallacy," their expectation may increase after each calm picture and decrease after an extreme. Superficially it appears that this could result in a mean anticipatory presponse that is smaller for calm stimuli than for extreme stimuli.
This possible explanation of the differences in presponse was later modelled through elaborate computer simulations by the first author and by an independent sceptical outsider. It turned out that the effect as described above only emerges when randomization is done without replacement, and therefore it could not explain Radin's original results (see also discussion section). Thus the experimental results by Radin suggested a true, large and replicable "precognitive" psi effects with a remarkable signal to noise ratio
The first author of this chapter (DJB) was skeptical of these results and therefore decided to replicate the experiments using the same general procedure and the same picture material but completely different software and hardware and also a different randomization procedure. This would, if the effects could be replicated, make an explanation in terms of technical artefacts or inappropriate randomization less likely.
