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Precognition (from the Latin præ-, “prior to,” + cognitio, “acquiring knowledge”), also called Future Sight,^[1] refers to perception that involves the acquisition of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information.^[2][3] The related terms, premonition (from the Latin praemonēre) and presentiment refer to information about future events that is perceived as emotions. The terms are usually used to denote a seemingly parapsychological or extrasensory process of perception, including clairvoyance. Various psychological processes, making no reference to psi, have also been offered to explain the phenomena.

As with other forms of extrasensory perception, the existence of precognition is not generally accepted by the scientific community, because no replicable demonstration has been achieved.^[4] Scientific investigation of extrasensory perception (ESP) is complicated by the definition which implies that the phenomena go against established principles of science.^[5] Specifically, precognition would violate the principle that an effect cannot occur before its cause.^[5] However, there are established biases, affecting human memory and judgment of probability, that can create a convincing but false impression of precognition.^[6]

Contents 1 Belief 2 Evidence 2.1 Case collections 2.2 Experimental approaches 2.2.1 Free-response studies 2.2.2 Forced-choice studies 2.2.3 Unconscious perception studies 3 Explanations 3.1 Philosophical 3.2 Psychological 3.2.1 Cognitive failure/distortion models 3.2.2 Sampling theories 3.3 Parapsychological 3.3.1 Subliminal awareness 3.3.2 Psi-mediated instrumental response (PMIR) 3.4 Observational theories 3.5 Methodological 4 In dreams 5 Miscellany/trivia 5.1 In fiction 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

[edit] Belief

Surveys show that precognition, particularly in dreams, is considered real by at least one third of the general population. One such survey sought to validate the Australian Sheep-Goat Scale of paranormal belief. Three items on this 18-item scale specifically refer to precognition, and in a validation study involving 234 Australian psychology students, experience of precognition was reported by 35% of participants, as occurring in the form of dreams, and 38%, as occurring in the form of (wakeful) premonition. Additionally, 27% of these participants affirmed belief in precognition as a possibility.^[7]

Many of the "psychic experiences" that are volunteered to parapsychologists by the general population involve apparent precognition. In one review of a U.S. case collection, submitted to Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory, 75% of 1777 dream-based experiences were of an ostensibly precognitive type, as were 60% of 1513 wakeful experiences.^[8] A similar pattern was identified for a separate collection of 157 cases experienced by children; here, the largest category of experiences was again of precognitive dreams (52%), followed by precognitive intuitions (52%).^[9] A German case collection produced a similar figure: 52% of 1,000 cases were of the apparently precognitive type.^[10] A British study of 300 volunteered cases showed 34% to be apparently precognitive.^[11]

[edit] Evidence

[edit] Case collections

History records many instances of apparent precognition, and belief in its occurrence as a form of seeing into the future (this can be through visions, déjà vu or through dreams which is usually the cause of recognition) .^[12] The first thorough collection and critical review of such spontaneous cases was created by the British Society for Psychical Research (SPR). This involved checking the veracity of people's reports by interviewing witnesses, and obtaining objective evidence of the occurrence of the precognition prior to the event's occurrence. Substantial reports of these cases were authored by Eleanor Sidgwick in 1888^[13], and H. F. Saltmarsh in 1938.^[14] Sidgwick believed the evidence warranted further investigation as to the validity of the concept of precognition, and Saltmarsh offered that the evidence, if it did not scientifically establish the phenomenon, at least excluded alternative hypotheses. Nicol, however, in a later review, came to the conclusion that their evidence was not so suggestive, given, in particular, the long length of time between the occurrence of some of the most suggestive cases, and their first report to the SPR.^[15]

J. W. Dunne, a British aeronautics engineer, undertook to study precognitive dreaming more objectively, by recording each of his dreams as they occurred to him, and identifying any correspondences between his future experiences and his recorded dreams. In 1927, he reported his findings, together with an explanatory theory, in An Experiment with Time. In this work, at least 10% of his dreams appeared to represent some future event, pertaining to some relatively trivial incident in Dunne's own life, or some major news events appearing in the press a day or so after the dream. Dunne concluded that precognitive dreams are common occurrences: many people have them without realizing it, largely because they do not recall the details of the dream.^[16] Also reported in the book was an experiment Dunne conducted with several participants other than himself, each studiously recording their dreams and seeking to associate them with subsequent experiences. While these confirmed Dunne's personal observations, a later independently conducted experiment failed to replicate his findings.^[17]

[edit] Experimental approaches

[edit] Free-response studies

These studies of spontaneous cases suggested, at least, that the reliability of recollection, and subjective interpretations of correspondences between the precognition and the future event, naturally limited the evidence for precognition. Accordingly, more controlled laboratory approaches became desirable in the interest of establishing and understanding precognition. Some experimental approaches have been developed in which the natural psychological forms of precognition – in dreams or waking visions – have remained the object of study. In these experiments, participants are, at least initially, free to respond in any manner that spontaneously occurs to them – e.g., by a dream, a vision, or an hallucination. Only later must they, and/or independent judges, decide how well their reported experience agrees with a subsequently and randomly chosen target stimulus, from among a set of alternative "decoy" targets.

With such free-response methods, experiments have been conducted in precognitive dreaming at the sleep laboratory of the Maimonides Medical Center^[18][19], in precognitive Ganzfeld hallucinations and visions.^[20] While such experiments have produced some suggestive evidence for precognition, they have been somewhat limited to studies of selected participants, and have involved procedures that can be too expensive for other researchers to replicate, or too complex to theoretically interpret.^[21]

[edit] Forced-choice studies

Most experiments on precognition have involved a forced-choice procedure.^{[citation needed]} The first such ongoing and organized research program on precognition was instituted by J. B. Rhine in the 1930s at Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory.^[22] Rhine used a method of forced-choice matching in which participants recorded their guesses as to the order of a deck of 25 cards, each five of which bore one of five geometrical symbols. The test of precognition was based on the fact that these "guesses" were made before the deck was shuffled by the experimenter.^[23] In an effort to distinguish between different parapsychological accounts of precognition, and to better understand its conditions, experiments were conducted in which the order of the target deck of cards were sorted by hand versus machine, or by reference to macroscopic events, such as randomly selected meteorological readings, or by complex algorithms. Early experiments also sought to determine the temporal scope of precognition by organizing the target deck only 1-2 versus 10 days, or even a year, after responses had been recorded and secured.^[24][25][26]

Experiments by Samuel G. Soal, a mathematician, and colleagues seemed to provide impressive evidence of precognition. They ran forced-choice ESP experiments in which someone attempted to identify which of five animal pictures a subject in another room was looking at.^[27] Their performance on this task was at chance, but when the scores were matched with the card that came after the target card, three of the thirteen subjects showed a very high hit rate. These experiments were hailed as "the most impressive data ever reported" for ESP, with controls that "seem to be absolutely watertight".^[27] Rhine described Soal's work as "a milestone in the field".^[27] A dissenting view came from research chemist George Price who reviewed Soal and Bateman's book Modern Experiments in Telepathy for the journal Science in 1955.^[28] Price argued that since ESP was so unlikely, the positive results not attributable to error were more likely the result of deliberate fraud.^[28] This prompted several replies that Price's criticism was unfair, resting on the mere possibility of fraud rather than actual proof.^[27] In 1978, the experiments were in fact exposed as fraudulent. The statistician Betty Markwick, while seeking to vindicate Soal, discovered that he had altered his data to create extra hits.^[28] The untainted experimental results showed no evidence of precognition.^[27]

A meta-analysis of all reports in the parapsychological literature of card-calling experiments on precognition was conducted in the late 1980s.^[29] This encompassed 309 experiments reported by 62 different investigators and published between 1935 and 1987. 23 of the 62 investigators reported positive results. The overall result offered precognition as a reliable but small effect over these studies, and an effect that could not be accounted for by levels of methodological reliability (as assessed by rating the studies on eight attributes of method), nor any publication bias against reporting null results.

Other researchers, including Smithsonian Executive Secretary Charles Greeley Abbot and British psychologist R. H. Thouless, introduced the study of precognition in the displacement of guesses to targets. This involved a set of target symbols, and "guesses" as to their identity, but, rather than precognizing the order of a whole deck of symbols, scored for precognition by checking the correspondence between each response and the target assigned to one or more trials ahead of that to which the response was originally assigned. Several studies using this method have continually offered displacement as reliable evidence for precognition.^[30][31]

Following these experiments, a more automated technique of experimentation was introduced that did not rely on hand-scoring of equivalence between targets and guesses, and in which the targets could be more reliably and readily tested as random. This involved testing for precognition with the use of high-speed random event generators (REG), as introduced by Helmut Schmidt in 1969^[32] and further conducted, in particular, at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (1979-2007).^[33] In this procedure, participants indicate when they believe (by whatever means available to them) that the REG has produced an event that either conforms or differs from one of two target events. In comparison to the card-guessing type of experiments, this procedure permits much more data to be collected in an experimental session, while reducing the number of alternatives that need to guessed.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Unconscious perception studies

Another class of experiments have tested for precognition by unconscious signs. These have involved physiological responses, such as of skin conductance and electroencephalographic activity, or indirect psychological measures, such as ratings of preference for one or another target alternative. In these experiments, participants are not asked about their experiences, and do not need to be informed that they are participating in an experiment on ESP. Dick Bierman and Dean Radin have reported positive evidence of precognition in experiments of these kinds.^[34][35]

[edit] Explanations

[edit] Philosophical

A number of philosophical issues have been raised as problematic for various explanations of precognition.

• Intervention paradox: In relation to the issue of causality, it can be asked how precognition accounts for actions of those who know of a future event by precognition. If the action causes the event not to occur, this could prevent the viewer from seeing the event in the first place.

• Circular cause and consequence: A subtler form of paradox concerns the problem of events that are actually caused by the foreseeing of the event. Though in and of itself this chain is logically consistent, it is a chicken or egg problem – if the event did not happen the viewer would not have seen it, which would have prevented it from happening.

[edit] Psychological

Various psychological processes have been offered to explain experiences of apparent precognition.

[edit] Cognitive failure/distortion models

Suited to explaining at least naturalistic occurrences of apparent precognition are several more or less hypothetical unconscious cognitive processes. These were first raised, in summary, by the philosopher C. D. Broad ^[36], and include:

• Selection bias where people remember the "hits" and forget the "misses," remember coincidences more often than other non-coincidences, or when they were correct about a future event rather than instances when they were wrong. Examples include thinking of a specific person before that person calls on the phone. Human memory, it is argued, has a tendency to record instances when the guess was correct, and to dismiss instances when the guess was incorrect.

• Cryptomnesia in which people retain knowledge of a certain fact that will occur in the future, but lose conscious knowledge of how they learned it. When the event comes to pass, it appears to them that they knew of the event without the aid of recognized channels of information.

• Unconscious perception by which people unconsciously infer, from data they have unconsciously learned, that a certain event will probably happen in a certain context. As with cryptomnesia, when the event occurs, the former knowledge appears to have been acquired without the aid of recognized channels of information.

• Self-fulfilling prophecy and Unconscious enactment in which people bring events that they have precognized to pass, but without their conscious knowledge.

Some psychologists have explained the apparent prevalence of precognitive dreams in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto subsequent events.^[6] In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future.^[37] Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.^[38]

[edit] Sampling theories

A further psychological theory, first proposed by the geneticist Lila Gatlin, proposes an extraordinary capacity of prediction based on past information – without any reference to parapsychological or paraphysical concepts.^[39][40][41] According to Gatlin, by way of example, in an experimental situation of the card-guessing type for extrasensory perception, any knowledge that the participant acquires of the sequence and proportions of alternative targets in earlier runs can be used to predict a future sequence of the targets. This is because any finite sequence of data contains some element of non-randomness, and if this non-randomness is characteristic of the process that generates the target data throughout the experiment, then it can be used as information to predict any future series of target data. The theory accepts that this information can be very subtle, perhaps only involving a bias, say, in equal representation of all possible groups of seven cards. Yet it proposes that people are sensitive to any past deviation from randomness – great or small – in the process of producing future behavior, and that people unconsciously utilize this information in order to unconsciously perform a statistical prediction of the next event. This process, Gatlin offered, would be especially well informed in experiments that offer continual feedback about the correctness of guesses, but it can also occur if participants are only privileged with a quick display, at the end of the run, of the target cards.

When Gatlin first proposed this theory in the parapsychological literature, it was strongly refuted as less plausible than the construct of extra-sensory perception.^[42][43] However, much of its propositions have recently re-appeared in the form of the Decision Augmentation Theory (DAT).^[44][45] This theory was principally proposed as an explanation of data from studies of psychokinesis of random event generators. Here, rather than any "force" working on the devices, or any future observation affecting their outcome (see Observational theories, below), the correspondence of output with intention is dependent on an optimal sampling of the data-generation process – one that permits the future data to conform with intention. In naturalistic situations, this amounts to positioning oneself, "at the right place, at the right time", in order to maximize the fulfillment of one's expectations. Precognition, indeed, is offered by DAT as an explanation of all forms of psi, including telepathy and clairvoyance. In this way, for instance, the fact that spatial distance between the target cards and percipients was observed, in many ESP experiments,^[46] to make no difference to ESP scores, could be explained by posing sampling of the target-generation process as the site for psi – no notion of transmission of a signal from an agent to a percipient being required. DAT permits, however, unlike Gatlin's theory, that some anomalous source of knowledge, not dependent on prior information, can inform the decision as to when to appropriately sample the data. This respects the fact that the experiments it seeks to explain involve sources of "quantum randomness", which are generally considered to be unpredictable. DAT thus presents a theory that hypothetically encompasses both psychological and parapsychological concepts.

[edit] Parapsychological

There are several ways by which precognition can be conceived as occurring without fundamental dependence on normally recognized processes of perception and cognition, i.e., by psi.

Firstly, there are several ways to explain precognition as a form of extrasensory perception. Precognition can be conceived as an extraordinary process of clairvoyance, involving no direct perception of the future.^[47] If, as is offered by the philosophy of determinism, all future events are determined by present conditions, then it can be suggested that it is clairvoyance of all the relevant present conditions that permits one to know their future outcomes. Alternatively, if somebody in the present is aware of what will happen in the future, then it can be suggested that it is telepathy of that information that grants oneself a like knowledge of the future. "Seeing into the future" can also be conceived as not a direct perception of a future event, but only a perception of one's own future experience of that event; what J. B. Rhine called precognitive sensory perception.^[48] This, Rhine offered, could be extended to precognition of one's future inferences, dreams, or any other kind of psychological experience – and not of any objective event itself.

The construct of psychokinesis permits another set of ways to think about precognition. It can be suggested that precognition involves the influence of present conditions so that they conform with what is precognized.^[49] Alternatively, a retrocausal process can be proferred as an explanation, raising the idea that, at a future time, the ostensibly present conditions are influenced backward in time.^[50]

As for theories of precognition itself, parapsychologists have offered several phenomenological theories that – like most psychological theories themselves – do not presume to provide a physical explanation of how precognition occurs, but only seek to describe the processes that must, it seems, be occurring at a psychological level of explanation. There are two classes of such theories, which are not exclusive to each other.

[edit] Subliminal awareness

One class of theories – principally as discussed, albeit in quite disparate ways, by Dunne (1927) and Saltmarsh (1938) – supposes that awareness is fundamentally trans-temporal, acquiring information beyond the "specious present" of information that is typically available for immediate awareness.^[14][16] While we are only ever consciously aware of some limited temporal range of information, these theories assert that, unconsciously, a much wider temporal range of information is sampled and used for the benefit of the organism.

[edit] Psi-mediated instrumental response (PMIR)

This theory, offered by then psychologist Rex G. Stanford,^[51][52] proposes that humans unconsciously and automatically scan their environment for motivationally relevant information, including - as the subliminal awareness models suggest - information that will only occur in the future of each conscious observer. This information will be used, by those who are so disposed, to place the person in a goal-relevant position with respect to its environment. This creates the experience of precognition, should some of this information have been represented in conscious imagery or other representational forms.

[edit] Observational theories

One class of parapsychological theories makes reference to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, particularly as it implicates the constructive role of human observation.^[53][54][55] Precognition, in the context of these theories, is generally conceived in the manner of retroactive psychokinesis, but without recourse to any notion of the transmission of psychophysical energy. According to some observational theories, it is at the point of observation of a future event that the event is, in fact, determined, and, under certain conditions of motivation, randomness and feedback, this future observation can inform the present observer.^[56]

[edit] Methodological

The experimental research into ostensible precognition has, like much of the research into extrasensory perception, been subject to various critiques of its methodology. This concerns the fundamental logic of the methods, and particular aspects of procedure. A general issue is concerned with the possibility that the phenomena contradict generally recognized principles of science^[28], coupled with the absence of a method to demonstrate precognition on demand.^[4]

As regards particular experiments, a precognition experiment obviates concerns that there could be some subtle sensory cues from the targets that inform participants' responses, given that the targets are only generated after the data from the participant are secured. However, this creates the contrary issue that the target-generation process must not in any way be informed by the already available "responses". Particular experiments in precognition research have been critiqued for their methodological adequacy. Experiments in the displacement form of precognition were critiqued by Gatlin in presenting her sampling theory, given some evidence of non-randomness in the target series (see references). Additionally, there has long been debate about the proper statistical analysis of the displacement effect.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] In dreams

Robert Van de Castle summarizes some of the key progress points in the area of psychic dream research in his book Our Dreaming Mind. In 1819, H. M. Wesserman successfully projected messages to experimental subjects while they slept and dreamed. While the general content of the dream was successfully received, some of the characters in the dreams were changed.^[57]

An Italian psychiatrist, G. C. Ermacora, published a paper in 1895 titled “Telepathic Dreams Experimentally Induced”. This work documented successful efforts of a medium to transmit dreams to a young girl. Perhaps the best-known research in this field was conducted at Maimonides Medical Center, in Brooklyn, New York by Stanley Krippner and Montigue Ullman in 1964. These trials clearly showed positive correlations for transmitting information to dreamers who had no prior knowledge of the subject material. Dr. Van de Castle himself was a subject during these sessions and achieved considerable success in having dreams that were closely correlated to the target pictures.^{[citation needed]}

Van de Castle further documents the evidence for psychic dreaming based on a questionnaire approach. Survey questions sent to several thousand individuals listed in Who’s Who In America resulted in 430 replies claiming some kind of ESP experience and dreams were involved in 25 percent of these cases.^{[citation needed]}

Louisa Rhine at the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University compiled by far the best-known and largest body of such dream evidence.^{[citation needed]} Dr. Rhine collected over 7000 accounts of ESP experiences. The majority of these accounts were dream related and were seemingly precognitive in nature. The material for this work was collected by advertisements in various well-known popular media.^{[citation needed]}

David Ryback, a psychologist in Atlanta, used a questionnaire survey approach to investigate precognitive dreaming in college students. His survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 percent reported some form of paranormal dream. He rejected many of these claims and reached a conclusion that 8.8 percent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.^[58]

An early inquiry into this phenomenon was done by Aristotle in his On Divination in Sleep. His criticism of these claims appeals to the fact that "the sender of such dreams should be God", and "the fact that those to whom he sends them are not the best and wisest, but merely commonplace persons." Thus: "Most [so-called prophetic] dreams are, however, to be classed as mere coincidences...", here "coincidence" being defined by Aristotle as that which does not take "place according to a universal or general rule" and referring to things which are not of themselves by necessity causally connected, his example being taking a walk during an eclipse, neither the walk nor the eclipse being apparently causally connected and so only by "coincidence" do they occur simultaneously.^[59]

Other researchers in this area are more guarded in their reports on the value or use of dreams. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, first published at the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud argued that the foundation of all dream content is the fulfillment of wishes, conscious or not and devoid of psychic content.^{[citation needed]} In his discussions with Carl Jung, he referred to parapsychology and precognition as “nonsensical.”^{[citation needed]}

Dreams which appear to be precognitive may in fact be the result of the "Law of Large Numbers". Robert Todd Carroll, author of "The Skeptic's Dictionary" put it this way:

"Say the odds are a million to one that when a person has a dream of an airplane crash, there is an airplane crash the next day. With 6 billion people having an average of 250 dream themes each per night, there should be about 1.5 million people a day who have dreams that seem clairvoyant."^[60]

[edit] Miscellany/trivia

• London psychiatrist J. A. Barker established the British Premonitions Bureau in 1967, which collected precognitive data in order to provide an early warning system of impending disasters.^{[citation needed]}
• Abraham Lincoln had a very vivid premonition of his death. Ten days before he was assassinated he dreamt he was in the East Wing of the White House where people were mourning. When he asked a soldier who had died, he was told "The President".^[61]

[edit] In fiction

• In the Star Wars franchise, both the Jedi and Sith are granted precognitive abilities through mastery of the Force. This allows them to predict probable future events and to react to events that have not yet happened; this creates the illusion of them possessing super human reflexes in combat.
• In the TV series Heroes, some characters have the ability to see, dream, and/or paint pictures from the future. For Example: Angela Petrelli, Isaac Mendez, and Matt Parkman.
• In the TV series Supernatural, the character Sam Winchester has the supernatural power to have visions from the future, though he displays no control over this skill.
• Horror author Stephen King uses precognition in some of his novels, most notably The Shining and The Dead Zone, where a man can see the immediate future or past by touching an object relating to the subject of his prediction.
• Precognition, and the implications of wielding a power like it, plays a significant role in Frank Herbert's Dune series, in which precognition is essential to faster than light space travel.
• Alyssa Milano's character Phoebe Halliwell in the television series Charmed possesses the power of precognition.
• Many Marvel/DC characters possess the power of precognition, including Destiny of the X-Men comics and Lilith from Teen Titans series. Dream Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes comes from a world where the entire population can see the future. Spider-Man's "spider-sense" is also a limited precognitive sense. In the film Elektra, based on the comic book character Elektra Natchios, the protagonist displays the ability of "Kimagure", a seemingly supernatural ability that grants the practitioner the power, among others, to see the future. Another Marvel ninja, Psylocke, is a mutant who possesses limited precognitive abilities, though she has no control over them.
• Precognitives ("precogs") play a prominent role in several science fiction novels by Philip K. Dick. For example, Barney Mayerson, one of the main characters of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a precog. The movies Minority Report and Next, both derived from short stories written by Dick, contain major references to precognitives.
• In her "Bishop/Special Crimes Unit" novels, Kay Hooper writes of an FBI team of psychics, some specializing in precognition.
• In the novel series Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, one of the main characters, Alice Cullen, has the ability to see decision-based futures.
• In the Code Geass spin-off manga series Nightmare of Nunnally, Nunnally Lamperouge obtains the power to read the lines of the future, functionally identical to precognition.
• In the novel by Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, one of the characters has the ability to perceive someones' death.
• In the TV series Stargate SG-1, Jonas Quinn acquires the ability to see possible futures in the episode "Prophecy".
• In the TV series Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition encounters a man named Davos who has visions of the future in the episode "The Seer".
• In the TV series Andromeda, Trance Gemini can see multiple futures and decide the course of action taken to achieve the best possible one.
• In the anime series Yu-gi-oh!, Ishizu Ishtar has the power to see both into the past and the future using the Millennium Necklace.
• In the last two episodes of series 4 of the revived TV series, Doctor Who, Dalek Caan travelled through time and rescued the Dalek's creator, Davros, going mad and gaining precognitive abilities.
• In the e-RPG, Empire City, the teenage meta Faith possesses seer-like visions of the past, present and future.
• In the Talent, Tower and Hive series by Author Anne McCaffrey there are people called talents some possess the talent of precognition.
• In Pokémon, aura users have a limited usage of this.
• In some sections of Richard Brightfield's 1983 Choose Your Own Adventure gamebook The Phantom Submarine, the protagonist is described as gifted with the "ability to know what will happen".
• In E.E "DOC" Smiths Lensman series the "Arisians" have the ability to mathematically forecast the future by extrapolating the most likely of all possible future scenarios.

[edit] See also

• Anomalous cognition
• Fortune-telling
• Premonitions (novel)
• Premonition (film)
• Retrocognition
• Second sight

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Guiley, Rosemary Ellen: Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience, New York: HarperCollins, 1991, pages 465-466
• Robertson, Morgan and Stevenson, Ian, M.D.: The Wreck of the Titan: The Paranormal Experiences Connected with the Sinking of the Titanic. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Bks, 1991.
• Spence, Lewis: An Encyclopedia of Occultism, New York, Carol Publishing Group Edition, 1996, pages 329
• Stevenson, Ian: A Review & Analysis of Paranormal Experiences Connected with the Sinking of the Titanic. Journal of American Society for Psychical Research 54, 1961.
• Barrett, Deirdre, PhD .”The Committee Of Sleep”. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001
• Quinn, Adriene. “Dreams of History That Came True”. Tacoma: Dream Research, 1987.
• Reed, Henry, PhD. “Getting Help From Your Dreams”. Virginia Beach: Inner Vision Publishing, 1985.
• Thurston, Mark. PhD. “Tonight’s Answers To Tomorrow’s Questions”. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.

[edit] External links

• Precognition, Presentiment & Remote Viewing - Dean Radin
• "Precognition and Second Sight" in Robert Todd Carroll's The Skeptic's Dictionary
• Definition of "precognition" in James Randi's An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
• The Best Case for ESP?
• Failed Psychic Predictions for 1998
• Online Psi Experiments Links to precognition experiments (Parapsych.org affiliate of the AAAS)
• International Association for the Study of Dreams Guidance on dreams from a clinical approach with little emphasis on precognition
• Intuitive Connections
• www.edgarcayce.org
• stockdreams.org

v • d • e Parapsychology Topics Remote viewing · Clairvoyance · Cold reading · Extrasensory perception · Near-death experience · Precognition · Psychic · Psychokinesis · Psychometry · Telepathy · Ganzfeld experiment · Apparitional experience Organizations Society for Psychical Research · Parapsychological Association · Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory · National Laboratory of Psychical Research · International Association for Near-Death Studies People Dean Radin · Susan Blackmore · Alister Hardy · Ray Hyman · Raymond Moody · Andrew Nichols · Tommaso Palamidessi · James Randi · Joseph Banks Rhine · Rupert Sheldrake · Michael Shermer · Russell Targ · Charles Tart · Jessica Utts · Karl Zener · Richard Broughton Publications Journal of Parapsychology