Is it possible to see into the future?

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Many Scientists are Convinced that Man Can See the Future

By DR DANNY PENMAN

PROFESSOR Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room. The gentle whirring of machinery can be heard faintly in the background. He smiles and presses a grubby-looking red button. In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner. If it wasn’t for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker across the woman’s face, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just a normal health check.

But this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is possible to predict the future.

For the results – released exclusively to the Daily Mail – suggest that ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them ‘see’ the future.

Such amazing studies – if verified – might help explain the predictive powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such Extra Sensory Perception, dEj vu and clairvoyance. On a more mundane level, it may account for ‘gut feelings’ and instinct.

The man behind the experiments is certainly convinced. ‘We’re satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens,’ says Professor Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. ‘We’d now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it.’ And Bierman is not alone: his findings mirror the data gathered by other scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad.

Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University, says: ‘So far, the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.

‘In fact, it’s not clear in physics why you can’t see the future. In physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect.’ Virtually all the great scientific formulae which explain how the world works allow information to flow backwards and forwards through time – they can work either way, regardless.

SHORTLY after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage. It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease.

It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that ‘something’ was not right. Nobody vocalised it but shortly before the attacks, people started altering their plans out of an unspoken instinct.

One woman suffered crippling stomach pain while queuing for one of the ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center. She made her way to the lavatory only to recover spontaneously. She missed her flight but survived the day. Amid the collective outpouring of grief and horror it was easy to overlook such stories or write them off as coincidences. But in fact, these kind of stories point to an interesting and deeper truth for those willing to look.

If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability to divine the future.

Well, strange as it seems, that’s just what happens.

THE aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unusually empty.

All the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual number of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained away, but all four?

And it wasn’t just on 9/11 that people subconsciously seemed to avoid disaster. The scientist Ed Cox found that trains ‘destined’ to crash carried far fewer people than they did normally.

Dr Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, found exactly the same bizarre effect.

If it was possible to divine the future, you might expect those at the sharp end, such as pilots, to have the most finely tuned instincts of all. And again, that’s just what you see.

When the Air France Concorde crashed in 2000, it wasn’t long before the colleagues of those killed in the crash spoke about a sense of foreboding that had gripped the crew and flight engineers before the accident.

Speaking anonymously to the French newspaper Le Parisien, one spoke of a ‘morbid expectation of an accident’.

‘I had this sense that we were going to bump into the scenery,’ he said.

‘The atmosphere on the Concorde team for the last few months, if one has the guts to admit it, had been one of morbid expectation of an accident.

It was as if I was waiting for something to happen.’ All of these stories suggest that we can pick up premonitions of events that are yet to be.

Although these premonitions are not in glorious Technicolor, they are often emotionally powerful enough for us to act upon them.

In technical parlance it is known as ‘presentiment’ because emotional feelings are being received from the future, not hard facts or information.

The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many years the U.S. military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme known as Stargate, which set out to investigate premonitions and the ability of mediums to predict the future.

Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by the ability of ‘lucky’ soldiers to forecast the future.

These are the ones who survived battles against seemingly impossible odds.

Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings – and occasionally-actual glimpses of the future – could flow backwards in time to guide soldiers. It helped them make lifesaving decisions, often on the basis of a hunch.

He devised an experiment to test these ideas. He hooked up volunteers to a modified lie detector, which measured an electrical current across the surface of the skin.

This current changes when a person reacts to an event such as seeing an extremely violent picture or video. It’s the electrical equivalent of a wince. Radin showed sexually explicit, violent or soothing images to volunteers in a random sequence determined by computer.

And he soon discovered that people began reacting to the pictures before they saw them. It was unmistakable.

They began to ‘wince’ a few seconds before they actually saw the image.

And it happened time and time again, way beyond what chance alone would allow.

So impressive were Radin’s results that Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel Prizewinning chemist, took an interest.

He was hooked up to Radin’s machine and shown the emotionally charged images.

‘It’s spooky,’ he says ‘I could see about three seconds into the future.

You shouldn’t be able to do that.’ OTHER researchers from around the world, from Edinburgh University to Cornell in the U.S., rushed to duplicate Radin’s experiment and improve on it. And they got similar results.

It was soon discovered that gamblers began reacting subconsciously shortly before they won or lost. The same effect was seen in those terrified of animals, moments before they were shown the creatures. The odds against all of these trials being wrong are literally millions to one against.

Professor Dick Bierman decided to take this work even further. He is a psychologist who has become convinced that time as we understand it is an illusion. He could see no reason why people could not see into the future just as easily as we dip into memories of our past.

He’s in good company. Einstein described the distinction between the past, present and future as ‘a stubbornly persistent illusion’.

To prove Einstein’s point, Bierman looked inside the brains of volunteers using a hospital MRI scanner while he repeated Dr Radin’s experiments. These scanners show which parts of the brain are active when we do certain tasks or experience specific emotions.

Although extremely complex, and with each analysis taking weeks of computing time, he has run the experiments twice involving more than 20 volunteers.

And the results suggest quite clearly that seemingly ordinary people are capable of sensing the future on a fairly consistent basis.

Bierman emphasises that people are receiving feelings from the future rather than specific ‘visions’.

It’s clear, though, that if ordinary people can receive feelings from the future then perhaps the especially gifted may receive visions of things yet to be.

It’s also clear that many paranormal phenomena such as ESP and clairvoyance could have their roots in presentiment.

After all, if you can see a few seconds into the future, why not a few days or even years? And surely if you could look through time, why not across great distances?It’s a concept that ties the mind in knots, unless you’re a physicist.

‘I believe that we can "sense" the future,’ says the Nobel Prizewinning physicist Brian Josephson.

‘We just haven’t yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.

‘People have had so called " paranormal" or "transcendental" experiences along these lines. Bierman’s work is another piece of the jigsaw.

The fact that we don’t understand something does not mean that it doesn’t happen.’ If we are all regularly sensing the future or occasionally receiving glimpses of it, as some mediums claim to do, then doesn’t that mean we can change the future and render the ‘prediction’ obsolete?

Or perhaps we were meant to receive the premonition and act upon it? Such paradoxes could go on for ever, providing a rich seam of material for films such as Minority Report – based on a short story of the same name – in which a special police department is able to foresee and prevent crimes before they have even taken place.

COULD such science fiction have a grain of truth in it after all? The emerging view, Bierman explains, is that ‘the future has implications for the past’.

‘This phenomena allows you to make a decision on the basis of what will happen in the future.

Does that restrain our free will?

That’s up to the philosophers. I’m far too shallow a person to worry about that.’ The problem with presentiment is that it appears so nebulous that you can’t rely on it to make reliable decisions. That may be the case, but there are plenty of instances where people wished they had listened to their premonitions or feelings of presentiment.

One of the saddest involves the Aberfan disaster. This occurred in 1966 when a coal tip collapsed and swept through a Welsh school killing 144 people, including 116 children. It turned out that 24 people had received premonitions of the tragedy.

One involved a little girl who was killed. She told her mother shortly before she was taken to school: ‘I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.’ So should we listen to our instincts, hunches and dreams?

Some experts believe we may already be using them in our everyday lives to a surprising degree.

Dr Jessica Utts at the University of California, who has worked for the U.S.

military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal research, believes we are constantly sampling the future and using the knowledge to help us make better decisions.

‘I think we’re doing it all the time,’ she says. ‘We’ve looked at the data and it does seem to happen.’ So perhaps the Queen in Through The Looking Glass was right: ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.’


This should be fun.
 
I call B.S. The future hasn't happened yet, anything could theoretically happen.
So nobody can really predict the future. But with the crashes, that's just chance that there arn't as many people.
 
No, it's not.

I had a feeling before I read the article that this was from the Daily Fail.
 
I think we can but only random moments and very rarely, I say it because I've experienced that moment when you remember that you have lived that moment already, I don't remember the name of that.

EDIT: The name of that is Déjà Vu
 
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I think it's already pretty well known that we compensate for neural delays at least, giving the impression that we can see one tenth of a second into the future. It's possible it's not just limited to visual response either. I don't think driving a race car at high speed, or hitting a golf ball, or skiing down a mountain slope would be possible if the brain didn't compensate somehow, for the lag in the senses. Now, whether that compensation happens because the brain knows what will happen, or whether the brain is judging the situation based on past experience, I don't know. Perhaps it's both?

Then you have stuff like Deja Vu where it feels like you've been in a certain situation before, but is actually the first time it's happened. Or you see a stranger, but it feels like you know that person. Hmmmm.

Or, maybe the sense of having foresight into the future is really just a coincidence. Perhaps cause and effect reasoning may lead someone to believe that because they wanted something to happen (like winning the lottery), and it did happen, they believe they have predicted the event?

There's another thing too, what if the images these test subjects were shown happened in a predictable enough pattern for the brain to recognize? They would then know what image was going to come up next, because they subconsciously recognized the pattern.

The planes of 9/11 though, not sure what to think of that one.
 
I say, no - it's not possible. Its more possible to have serveral coincidences than it is to actually see the future. If you believed in future-telling, you'd believe in Fate or a destined-path. I don't believe in that, so, future-telling is bogus.

I think most of it has to do with relativity. Deja-vu tends to be more of a "remembered" thing, and sometimes its just something you do repetitively and your brain "realizes"it sometimes, instead of auto-piloting through whatever action.. causing the sense of deja-vu.

I have never met someone that I thought I knew before, so I can't speak to that experience.

As far as surveys and picture tests -- honestly, alot of people think in the same ways. The fact that people will guess the same thing isn't exactly an uncommon facet to the mind; and in that particular type of test, it seems like they're testing for a particular result. IE - a flawed test; something where someone is trying to PROVE something about how people think, can build a test that would persuade most people to think in a certain way. A lead-in question, for example, to get someone thinking in a certain way.

Again, relativity - you make small predictions every day "that dude isn't using his blinker, but he's going to jump lanes anyway", are just things that you can learn to recognise and see patterns in. That's what the human brain specializes in. Pattern building. You "predict" correctly = future telling? not really. You could've just as easily predicted wrong, and therefore not a future told. People are easy to read most of the time, you just have to recognise the pattern.
 
Deja vu is not predicting the future; which no you cannot do.

I suggest grabbing some psychology material and reading up on deja vu if you honestly believe that is in anyway related to seeing the future...
 
When I have Deja Vu it feels almost like a dreamt being in this situation before, and occasionally I realise the Deja Vu before the end of what the dream was and can predict how a situation can go. It only happens rarely and its very spooky when it does, however i can confidently say that I have predicted the future.

I see what people say on that since anything can happen because it hasn't happened yet and that makes perfect logical sense, however if physics has taught me one thing then its that everything isn't logical.
 
I'd say, yes. It might sound stupid, but I think it's possible. Maybe not, to “see”, like a 10 second “movie”, of the future, but just a really short clip, or a picture, (I've tried that myself), of whatever, may happen. I can't say, if the brain's, really “predicting the future”, or if it's just guessing the future. Could be both.
 
I predict that this threads will be filled with lame jokes, off topic answers and ..... (dotted line is for the real clairvoyants of GTP) :dopey:
 
Deja vu is not predicting the future; which no you cannot do.

I suggest grabbing some psychology material and reading up on deja vu if you honestly believe that is in anyway related to seeing the future...

From Wiki (horrible source I know, but still): Déjà vu, from French, literally "already seen", is the phenomenon of having the strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has been experienced in the past.

So, it's a sensation that you correctly predicted the future at some point in the past. I'm not saying this is what actually happens. It just reminded me of Deja Vu.


I don't think there is a present. To me, there is just past and future. Did you literally just read these words "just now" or did you read them a few milliseconds ago? ;) A second, two seconds? How about this sentence?

The past is all we have. Everything we sensed has already happened before the signals have reached the brain. We are constantly traveling into the future even as you read this sentence. So no, we can't sense the "future." We experience a past. Future events haven't happened yet. We can take a guess though. The subconscious mind sure likes to guess without us even realizing it.

Of course, this all assumes that our current understanding of time and dimensions is absolutely correct.


/deep thoughts :lol:
 
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From Wiki (horrible source I know, but still): Déjà vu, from French, literally "already seen", is the phenomenon of having the strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has been experienced in the past.

So, it's a sensation that you correctly predicted the future at some point in the past. I'm not saying this is what actually happens. It just reminded me of Deja Vu.
/deep thoughts :lol:

No. It is a sensation that you have experienced in the past (or one you think you have had).

That is not the same as "a sensation that you correctly predicted the future at some point." This is not what wiki says.

You have misinterpreted "already seen"

Wiki says this:

The psychologist Edward B. Titchener in his book 1928 A Textbook of Psychology, explained déjà vu as caused by a person having a brief glimpse of an object or situation, before the brain has completed "constructing" a full conscious perception of the experience. Such a "partial perception" then results in a false sense of familiarity.[1] The explanation that has mostly been accepted of déjà vu is not that it is an act of "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather that it is an anomaly of memory, giving the false impression that an experience is "being recalled".[2][3] This explanation is supported by the fact that the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong in most cases, but that the circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where, and how the earlier experience occurred) are uncertain or believed to be impossible.
 
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Seeing into the future is like pigs flying. Sure, it could happen, but it's due to outside influences and not a legitimate example.
 
Yogi Berra
It's like déjà vu all over again

One thing missing in the article is what seems to be a lack of controls. For instance, it cites people who had a sense of foreboding before the Concorde flight. It doesn't address how many people had forebodings on flights that turned out to be perfectly normal.
 
No. It is a sensation that you have experienced in the past (or one you think you have had).

That is not the same as "a sensation that you correctly predicted the future at some point." This is not what wiki says.

You have misinterpreted "already seen"

Wiki says this:

The psychologist Edward B. Titchener in his book 1928 A Textbook of Psychology, explained déjà vu as caused by a person having a brief glimpse of an object or situation, before the brain has completed "constructing" a full conscious perception of the experience. Such a "partial perception" then results in a false sense of familiarity.[1] The explanation that has mostly been accepted of déjà vu is not that it is an act of "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather that it is an anomaly of memory, giving the false impression that an experience is "being recalled".[2][3] This explanation is supported by the fact that the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong in most cases, but that the circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where, and how the earlier experience occurred) are uncertain or believed to be impossible.

Look, let's pretend I've experienced Deja Vu with someone I just met. I feel like I've met this person before, I figure "I'm getting a sense of Deja Vu with this guy." It feels like you've seen this event before (or "predicted," or "foreseen," possibly in a dream, only it wasn't in a dream, the dream never happened, see), and that you met him in the exact same hallway and exact same time of day as "before." (But of course, you didn't predict the event, but if you didn't know about the explanation for the phenomenon, you would think you had somehow foreseen the event. In the past. Which you never did. ;)

The only reason I mentioned Deja Vu in the first place was because that's what the topic of discussion reminded me of, along with a few other things. I now realize that it was an off-topic remark and I apologize.
 
If you could see into the future would that mean the future is inevitable and set in stone I.e. Unchangeable and therefore we don't really have freewill????

Yep it comes down to the old freewill verses predeterminism debate, unless if course someone has a magically way of reconciling the two.
 
Here's 2 people that's been there done that and got the t-shirt.... 3 times :dopey:

back-future-6.jpg


Judging by part 2 in the trilogy we should expect to see flying cars by 2015 :sly:

In seriousness though, I don't think it's possible.
 
I must be psychic. I saw this coming:

before I read it. :lol:

:lol: Exactly.

And technically, everything we see, even in the present, is from the past. Light travels at a finite speed, so whatever we're seeing, no matter how close to us, is the tiniest bit older than the age we're seeing it at.

Happily, this allows us to compliment our better half scientifically*.

Girlfriend/wife, standing five metres away: "What do you think?"
You: "You look 1/59,954,491 of a second younger than you are, darling"



*May not be interpreted as a compliment.
 
If by "the future" you mean; all processes in the known universe at any given time in the future, I think the answer is given by the question: No.
 
One thing missing in the article is what seems to be a lack of controls. For instance, it cites people who had a sense of foreboding before the Concorde flight. It doesn't address how many people had forebodings on flights that turned out to be perfectly normal.

Quite. The fact that they cited 9/11 and the low death toll, when there were perfectly mundane, non-psychic explanations (9/11 was during an election and at the start of the school year in New York, many people were away from their jobs at the time. Those that weren't shacked up with their mistresses, that is.
 
No. It is a sensation that you have experienced in the past (or one you think you have had).

That is not the same as "a sensation that you correctly predicted the future at some point." This is not what wiki says.

You have misinterpreted "already seen"

Wiki says this:

The psychologist Edward B. Titchener in his book 1928 A Textbook of Psychology, explained déjà vu as caused by a person having a brief glimpse of an object or situation, before the brain has completed "constructing" a full conscious perception of the experience. Such a "partial perception" then results in a false sense of familiarity.[1] The explanation that has mostly been accepted of déjà vu is not that it is an act of "precognition" or "prophecy", but rather that it is an anomaly of memory, giving the false impression that an experience is "being recalled".[2][3] This explanation is supported by the fact that the sense of "recollection" at the time is strong in most cases, but that the circumstances of the "previous" experience (when, where, and how the earlier experience occurred) are uncertain or believed to be impossible.

Wiki is wiki lol.

Even though that is from 1928, before neuroscience and modern psychology, it does a nice job of summing it up.

When I have Deja Vu it feels almost like a dreamt being in this situation before, and occasionally I realise the Deja Vu before the end of what the dream was and can predict how a situation can go. It only happens rarely and its very spooky when it does, however i can confidently say that I have predicted the future.

I see what people say on that since anything can happen because it hasn't happened yet and that makes perfect logical sense, however if physics has taught me one thing then its that everything isn't logical.

Deja vu is not prediction.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-05-spatial-configuration-deja-vu-psychology.html

Nice video on that one^

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-babble/201208/the-neuroscience-d-j-vu

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1651507,00.html

So, if your prediction entirely rests on Deja Vu then you have not predicted the future, confidently.

Posting links on android = a no go evidently.
 
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Look, let's pretend I've experienced Deja Vu with someone I just met. I feel like I've met this person before, I figure "I'm getting a sense of Deja Vu with this guy." It feels like you've seen this event before (or "predicted," or "foreseen," possibly in a dream, only it wasn't in a dream, the dream never happened, see), and that you met him in the exact same hallway and exact same time of day as "before." (But of course, you didn't predict the event, but if you didn't know about the explanation for the phenomenon, you would think you had somehow foreseen the event. In the past. Which you never did. ;)

The only reason I mentioned Deja Vu in the first place was because that's what the topic of discussion reminded me of, along with a few other things. I now realize that it was an off-topic remark and I apologize.

Thats isn't deja vu, you don't think you have forseen the event. You think you have remembered an event. Even if what you say was true. What you think is irrelevant. Only whether you could see in the future or not is relevant. Not whether you think you can or not.
No need to apologise, it's just a discussion :)
 
The OP seems to be an article in the popular press rounding up some new research by scientists into the way the world might work.

I'm humble enough to say I don't know 100% exactly how the world works, but I'm interested in learning.

It is very easy to quickly answer the OP question, at least provisionally, in the negative:
- It is only a popular article, not peer-reviewed science.
- The fact is, their is very little peer-reviewed science on the paranormal, though there is some.
- The mainstream view does not accept paranormal phenomena.
- So if we are dealing with science, it is fringe science at best and crackpottery or fraud at worst.
- Military and CIA efforts in this area have not seemed to be effective.

On the other hand, the article was enjoyable and brought news of possible new discoveries in this area.

I will continue to be interested in this subject, because it is interesting and we definitely don't already know fully how nature works. For example, I carefully follow heliophysics and space sciences as a hobby, and I am continually confronted by reports of how observational and theoretical physicists are "surprised" about this or unable to explain that. If they can be that humble about nature, I suppose that suggests something about how the rest of us might react, too.

Respectfully submitted,
Steve
 
Interesting article. I'm always fascinated by this sort of thing. I have no doubt that humans have hidden abilities as such which we simply have yet to properly measure. Maybe this has something to do with the "Global Consciousness Project"

 
It is very definitely possible to see into the future, it's called mathematical propagation. It's how we know where to point our antennas to talk to spacecraft. We look into the future using mathematical magic to figure out where the spacecraft will be at that time. Sometimes we go back in time to figure out where the spacecraft was, that's called reconstruction.

Sometimes, very rarely, we even go back in time and predict what would be the future for that time, but what would be called the past today, and test our prognostication ability.
 
Those 9/11 stories sound great and support the position of the article and all, but they come off as just stories. Any actual names and references to back those up?


And regarding deja vu, I've experienced it quite a lot. I'm still trying to have that one deja vu experience where I finish someone's sentence.
 
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