INTRODUCTION

Beyond Folk Causality (or, One Damn Thing Before Another)

Our element is eternal immaturity. The things that we think, feel, and say today will necessarily seem foolish to our grandchildren; so it would surely be better to forestall this now, and treat them as if they were foolish already…

— Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (1937)

T hiotimoline is an aromatic compound extracted from the bark of the shrub Rosacea Karlsbadensis rufo . First isolated and described by Russian botanists in the 1930s, its properties baffled Soviet and American scientists for well over a decade. The extract, a whitish crystalline powder, dissolved so fast when water was added to it that they had to devise a new measuring instrument to measure its solubility accurately. What they found was stunning, and at first, totally unbelievable: Thiotimoline dissolves 1.12 seconds before water touches it.

The question chemists always asked about thiotimoline effectively personified or anthropomorphized the substance: How did it “know” when, or if, water was going to be added?

Thiotimoline’s ultrafast solubility, dubbed “endochronicity” by the Russians, met with so much initial skepticism in the chemical community that very little further investigation was done on this compound until the early 1950s, when the reasons for its extraordinary behavior were finally discovered through a technique called crystallography.

Thiotimoline is an organic molecule, which means that it contains a carbon atom bonded to other atoms. Carbon forms four such valence bonds , positioned at each point of a tetrahedron. What the Soviet chemists discovered was that the carbon atom in thiotimoline is somewhat different than other carbon atoms: Two of its carbon valence bonds extend across the temporal dimension , not a spatial dimension. It means that one of its bonds is slightly in the molecule’s past, and another is in the molecule’s future . This accounts for thiotimoline’s curious property of dissolving slightly before water touches it.

Eventually the “endochronometer” devised to measure the rate of thiotimoline’s dissolution became more interesting than the plant extract by itself, due to the many possible real-world applications of performing measurements on a four-dimensional molecule. Think about it: If the adding versus not adding of water to a lump of chemical could somehow be tied to an outcome having real-world relevance—the weather, the winner of a horse race, the success of a satellite launch, or the attacks of an enemy in war—then a genuine predictor of future events was within grasp. Although 1.12 seconds is not much forewarning of an event, chaining together a lot of endochronometers (each with their little lumps of thiotimoline) would greatly enlarge that narrow window and create the world’s first precognitive circuit—what researchers called a “telechronic battery.”

Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, it did not take long to figure out that such a device could be turned into a very destructive weapon. Interceding to prevent contact with water after the thiotimoline in a telechronic battery dissolved caused an Atlantic hurricane to suddenly change course and obliterate the lab and the battery, fulfilling its chemical prophecy and ensuring that no paradox (or what one researcher called “Heisenberg Failure”) occurred.

Thiotimoline is fictional, of course—an ingenious hoax perpetrated by Isaac Asimov in a series of faux-journal articles, beginning with “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” in the March 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction . ¹ The young writer was then a graduate student in chemistry and wanted to give himself practice writing for his dissertation by doing a story in the utterly humorless style of a journal article. He followed up his tour de force with his 1953 “The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline” and then “Thiotimoline and the Space Age” in 1960.

It made for a fun thought experiment. But it was also remarkably prescient of real discoveries in physics that have been made over just the last decade. In 2009, for example, a research team at the University of Rochester used a high-precision sensor to measure how much a mirror was deflected by the photons in a laser beam, and then measured a portion of the photons a second time. The photons subjected to a second measurement were found to have deflected the mirror previously much more than the portion that didn’t get the second measurement. ² It suggested that that second measurement amplified those photons in their past .

There should really be a row of about twenty exclamation marks following that last sentence.

For over three centuries, our expectations about cause and effect have been dominated by the way objects like elementary particles “hit” other particles and deflect them, in sequence—the mechanical billiard-ball “action and reaction” that Isaac Newton codified in 1687 as his Laws of Motion. Objects move through space, carrying a certain amount of energy with them, and imparting that energy to other objects they interact with. It’s an assumption that works well for predicting most of the things we encounter in our daily lives, like bodies and billiard balls, icebergs and ocean liners, and for creating machines. And it is why the natural-science worldview that arose in the Enlightenment was called mechanism , seeing the world as a big machine.

But it has long been known that the machine view doesn’t hold in all situations, or at the smallest scales. On the scale of atoms and photons, a frustrating unpredictability was found to reign. For instance, while you can predict when half the atoms in a lump of radioactive material like uranium-235 will decay (i.e., its half-life), you cannot predict when a single uranium-235 atom will decay; it is completely random. About a century ago it became the central dogma of the new field of quantum physics that this randomness imposed strict limits to how much an experimenter can know about a physical system. Any given fact about a particle, such as its position or its velocity, had to be regarded as uncertain , taking the form of a vague smear of probabilities, until someone actually performed an experiment and got a result. The dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics for most of the past century has been glossed by the term “Copenhagen Interpretation,” a rough consensus some of the field’s big names reached in the mid-1920s that a particle has no fixed, determinate reality unless and until it is observed.

But recently, an alternative, even more mind-bending but also more elegant interpretation is winning a growing number of converts. That’s the idea that what looks to our human eyes random or uncertain (because we cannot predict it other than statistically) may actually reflect the effects of unseen influences of the future, acting “backward” on the present. For instance, the precise amount each photon deflected the mirror in the Rochester experiment seemed to be influenced by the next thing the photon interacted with after it bounced off the mirror. Experiments like this—we will learn about some others later in this book—are actually shaking the foundations of physics and vindicating Albert Einstein, who famously could not accept that God would be so unclassy as to turn His universe into a giant craps table. What seemed for all the world like randomness—blind chance—may really be the previously unseen influence of particles’ future histories on their present behavior. Retrocausation , in other words.

We may be on the verge of a massive shift in how we view time, causality, and information. Classical causality, the one-thing-after-another billiard-ball world of Isaac Newton and his Enlightenment friends, is being revealed as folk causality , a cultural construct and a belief system, not the way things really are.

Could physics’ new two-way perspective on the behavior of matter at a fundamental level have anything to teach us about human behavior?

Consider a highly publicized 2011 article by Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem, called “Feeling the Future.” ³ Unlike “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline,” this was not a hoax or a fiction, but in many respects it was similar to Asimov’s story, in that it described an apparently time-defying behavior, this time not of water-soluble organic molecules but of Cornell University undergraduates.

Turns out that if you put 100 Ivy League kids in front of a computer and ask them to guess which of two “curtains” on the screen hides a picture, they tend to be correct more often than chance would predict when the not-yet-shown picture is explicitly erotic—of “couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts” (according to the description they read prior to signing the consent form). The students’ accuracy did not deviate from chance when the pictures were of boring romantic but nonsexual scenes, like couples kissing or a wedding. Unknown to the participants, the correct answer and the type of picture—erotic or neutral—were randomly selected by the computer after the students made their choice.

Bem’s picture-guessing experiment was one of nine he had conducted during the first decade of this millennium, all of which reversed the causal direction in four basic paradigms in psychology, including reinforcement (what the above example was testing), priming (subliminal influences on behavior), habituation (the tendency of familiarity to breed disinterest), and facilitation of recall (or the reinforcing effects of repeated exposure on learning). Eight of his nine experiments produced statistically significant but “impossible” results from the standpoint of unilinear causality. ⁴ For example, students preferentially remembered words in a word-learning task that they were exposed to again after the test. (Again, picture a row of about 20 exclamation points.) But while it made headlines and even got Bem onto the Colbert Report , the paper sparked a flurry of hostility, embarrassment, and ridicule from across psychology and other scientific fields, and the ridicule continues to this day. Just Google “Daryl Bem” and you’ll get a taste of it.

Bem’s article was controversial not just because of what he purported to find—as we will see, he was only the latest in a long line of serious researchers to report time-defying psychological effects in carefully controlled laboratory studies—but because he had the poor taste of publishing his causally perverse results in one of the highest-ranking journals in psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . Although his paper passed peer review, the ritual that traditionally sorts the scientific wheat from the chaff, and although Bem was a very well-respected experimental psychologist with a long track record of solid science in other areas like self-perception and attitude formation, the journal’s editors felt compelled to publish an editorial comment addressing readers’ inevitable concerns:

We openly admit that the reported findings conflict with our own beliefs about causality and that we find them extremely puzzling. Yet, as editors we were guided by the conviction that this paper—as strange as the findings may be—should be evaluated just as any other manuscript on the basis of rigorous peer review. Our obligation as journal editors is not to endorse particular hypotheses but to advance and stimulate science through a rigorous review process. ⁵

The editors’ reference to “beliefs about causality” highlights an important point. Causality is part of our belief system, and beliefs have a cultural basis, not just an empirical one. Ours is the first and only society in history to not—at least not officially—make a place in its story of causality for sensing or knowing events in the future, and more generally for the teleological relevance of “final causes” in explaining human affairs. Yet ordinary people in all walks of life, in every culture on Earth (including our own) and throughout recorded history, have reported getting forewarnings of traumatic or threatening events, commonly called premonitions ; and many religious traditions make a place for the ability of certain individuals to speak or even write about future events, commonly called prophecy . On top of that, many researchers besides Bem have accumulated masses of robust and compelling evidence for the human capacity to unconsciously sense or feel the future, or presentiment . The term precognition , which means knowing or perceiving future events in some fashion other than through normal inference, is an umbrella term that is often used to encompass the rest.

Packing to Leave

I’ll warn you right now: Precognition, prophecy, premonition, presentiment—I will use these overlapping terms somewhat interchangeably although generally remaining consistent with their specific connotations—is a touchy subject. People can react unpredictably when things go “the wrong way.” You’ve heard the woodsman’s advice, don’t get between a bear and her cubs? Well, don’t get between a modern, science-literate person and their beliefs about causality. The result is liable to be condescension, ridicule, or worse. Again, just go on Google or Wikipedia and you will see what I mean: Like the filthy brown cloud around the Peanuts character Pigpen, a cloud of epithets like “baloney” and “hogwash” and “pseudoscience” attaches itself to ESP, precognition, and related subjects wherever they appear in polite society, along with the implication that people who believe in or experience these things are sadly self-deceived. ⁶ The subject of precognition is, as physicist Daniel P. Sheehan puts it, “beyond the pale of polite discussion.” ⁷ The Dutch psychologist Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, upon reading Bem’s article, reported that he had to keep putting it away: “Reading it made me physically unwell.” ⁸

Thus, while researching and writing this book, I did not tell very many people what I was working on.

But on several occasions, friends and acquaintances who learned of my interests were eager to tell their own experiences. I ended up, unexpectedly, with a not-unimpressive dataset of experiences from my social circle in Washington, DC, and from readers of my blog The Nightshirt , who shared stories with me in emails. My rule in this book has been to use only public, published sources and not, for instance, any of my own precognitive dreams (with one exception in the Postscript); and most of the “ethnographic” material I collected is too personal, or too sad in a couple cases, to share anyway. But it feels appropriate to tell a couple anecdotes here (with permission) to set the stage for our journey through the topic of precognition and the “loopy” ways it influences our lives.

A Washington, DC, software engineer and artist in her mid-30s, whom I will call Anne, told me in an interview about a series of experiences that had occurred in her late teens and twenties, specifically dreams in which, she said, “I knew something I couldn’t possibly know—typically, that someone I knew had passed away.”

One of these dreams occurred the first few weeks of her freshman year of college. Anne dreamed of encountering her ex-boyfriend’s father on the steps of an academic building on her campus. “There was a big glass door, and he had just walked up the steps and was about to walk through the doors. He turned around and looked at me and looked down to where I was standing and said, ‘Well, bye!’ And he had his hands in his pockets and his glasses were on and he was really peaceful, and he walked through the glass door.” As soon as she woke up, she said she knew that this had been a symbol somehow. She found out later that day that her ex’s father had died. She knew that he had been a professor at a different university, and thus encountering him in her dream on her own campus made a kind of symbolic sense. She also knew that he had recently been diagnosed with a slow-growing cancer but that he was expected to live a few more years, so this death was not expected.

A few years later, after college, Anne recalled waking early one weekend morning to go to the bathroom and passing the open door of her roommate, who was busy packing his suitcase. She asked him what he was doing, and he said that he was going home to be with his family because his uncle had just died. Anne did not know her roommate’s uncle, but did vaguely know, from something her roommate had mentioned months earlier, that his uncle was ill. She said she was terribly sorry and went back to bed.

She awoke what felt like maybe an hour later and found her roommate still packing his bag, still on his bed, just as she’d seen him before. She was surprised that he had not already left to drive to his family’s house.

She said, “I’m so sorry to hear about your uncle, again,” and her roommate looked startled—he blanched—and said, “How did you know about that?”

She said, “You told me this morning, when I woke up earlier, that your uncle died.”

“We didn’t talk this morning,” he said.

Anne realized at that moment that she had only dreamed of awakening the first time.

In her late twenties, Anne also had a series of dreams of seeing the home of a close childhood friend, from above, as though approaching it in a hot air balloon. She had lost contact with the friend about a year earlier but felt that these dreams somehow symbolized that something was wrong in that house—perhaps an illness or death in the family. She later learned that her friend had died of an opioid overdose. Anne did not know that her friend had started using drugs and had become addicted during the last two or three years of her life.

In the course of corresponding about precognition and this book-inprogress with Jeffrey Kripal, a Rice University historian of religion and a leading scholar of the paranormal, Jeff shared with me an experience of his own that was remarkably similar to Anne’s dream about her roommate, although in Jeff’s case the context was more amusing than sad.

Jeff described how he had recently been compiling an archive at his university related to paranormal phenomena. In the course of this effort, he had received an envelope from a retired Pentagon employee who had accumulated a large library on UFOs and was planning to donate it to the archive.

Jeff wrote: “I opened it and saw that it was a brief essay he had written about his one and only paranormal experience. I did not have time to read the essay, so I tucked it into my schedule book.”

Jeff was too busy to read the essay because he was about to leave on vacation. When he returned, he found the envelope. Except … it was still sealed. “It had never been opened. I looked and looked at each edge, expecting to find a scissor cut. Nothing. More puzzled, I cut it open and found what I ‘remembered’—an essay on his one and only paranormal experience (a partial levitation). I was more puzzled by the memory than the levitation.”

Examples like this, especially since they are so trivial, will readily be ignored or dismissed by skeptics as false memories, hindsight bias, or simple déjà vu, an erroneous signal of familiarity attached to a novel experience. (Those of a more paranoid disposition may instead suggest that Jeff really did open the letter, just as he remembered, but that the trickster-like forces that really run the show re-sealed the envelope afterward.) I will be arguing that skeptics’ claims—about the biases that distort our perceptions, for instance—sometimes do not hold up against masses of compelling evidence, including laboratory evidence, that something about our cognition—or our consciousness, if you prefer that term—really transcends the present moment. Premonitory dreams, weird “memories” of things that haven’t happened yet, and other odd experiences in which we seem to overtake ourselves in time may reflect that we genuinely think across the fourth dimension , not unlike Asimov’s thiotimoline molecule.

Anomalous experiences frequently are reported in the context of stress. In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated coastal areas of Texas at the end of August, 2017, a Houston woman I will call Michele contacted me after reading an article I had written on precognition. She found my article when searching the internet for information that might illuminate something baffling she had experienced that day, as she and the rest of her city were trying to return to normal existence in the aftermath of the flooding that had ruined so many homes and lives.

Michele described how she had been feeling stressed and ungrounded when she went to run some errands, including a trip to the post office. The traffic was terrible, as a friend had even warned her before she left, but at the post office she found an empty parking space right in front of the building. But at that point, a voice inside her head said, “Don’t park here. You might hit a car when you back out.” She then had the thought, “Do I have my insurance card?”

Disregarding this warning voice, Michele parked in the spot anyway. Later, when she was backing out, she collided with another car that was doing the same thing. She then discovered that, indeed, she did not have her insurance card.

It was not the first time Michele had failed to heed her own driving-related premonitions. She told me about a similar, weirdly fractal experience in which she had been driving with a friend and in fact telling that friend about another friend’s accurate premonition of a motorcycle accident, when she approached a red light. She had just finished telling the story, when her inner voice told her to run the red light. Although she safely could have done so, her “better judgment” censored the impulse to violate traffic safety rules, and she pulled to a stop … at which point her car was rear-ended. “So, there I was telling a story about the importance of heeding precognitive warnings, and then I didn’t heed my own! That is, assuming it was even possible for me to heed it.”

These puzzling experiences, among others, led Michele to question deeply our culture’s folk causality, and even the central dogma of free will: “I’ve been thinking that the future may affect the past or present and that perhaps free will is an illusion (or at least different than what we think).” Indeed, the collision in the post office parking lot led her to a conclusion very similar to what I will be arguing in this book: “What if the premonition of the accident was the direct result of the accident itself, especially the traumatic emotions I felt? In other words, if the accident never happened, then maybe I could not have been forewarned.”

A favorite story genre in books on ESP are “catastrophes averted” because of some premonitory warning such as a dream. ⁹ We will see in this book that premonitions that go unheeded or are impossible to heed are just as (if not more) common and raise troubling questions in the minds of those who experience them. “What’s the use of a premonition if it can’t be used to prevent or avert a disaster?” is an obvious one. I will be arguing that precognition, premonition, prophecy may not be what we think they are, and that even when they seem to warn us of traumas, accidents, or catastrophes on the road ahead, and may even prepare us for them, they are really about our future survival of events that throw our lives, or at least our emotions, into upheaval. They may even orient us toward subtle emotional rewards that can occur in the context of those upheavals.

After Michele backed into another car in the parking lot of the Houston post office, she got out and faced the other driver. “At first, his look was hard, maybe anger, maybe anguish,” she said. Even though she did not know who was at fault, Michele told him “I’m so sorry. There’s just so much stress with all that’s been happening.”

She said the other driver’s look softened. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “This will all be taken care of. I just lost my house and everything in the flood.”

“That’s when I started crying and couldn’t stop,” she said, and she and the other driver held each other’s arms—“a brief moment of loving acceptance. It was beautiful.”

I suggested to Michele that the voice in her head before taking that parking spot may not have been trying to warn her against a course of action but could, in some weird way, have oriented her toward that rewarding moment of human connection in the context of the stress everyone in her city was feeling. After all, a car accident easily remedied through insurance is small potatoes when set against the devastation of homes, and the net gain in this event was a needed moment of meaningful human connection—and at least for Michele, a fascinating precognitive experience.

Although precognition often surfaces to awareness in the context of stress and trauma, even death in many cases, I will argue that it really orients us ultimately to life, and to a renewed, intensified awareness of being alive.

In Part One of this book, we will see numerous examples of precognition and what I am calling time loops : baffling, causally circular situations in which a precognitive experience partly contributes to the fulfillment of the precognized event—what is sometimes called a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” In addition to anecdotal claims of precognition and a fascinating, semi-scientific investigation of the subject by a pioneer aeronautical engineer a century ago, we will also see how laboratory evidence strongly (in fact, overwhelmingly) lends support to the possible verity of the anecdotal claims: Information from our future somehow appears able to exert an influence over our behavior, albeit usually in oblique, non-obvious ways. That it so often seems to operate outside of conscious awareness suggests that precognition may be a very primitive, basic guidance system, one that could be shared widely in the animal kingdom.

In Part Two, we will examine the “how,” the physics and biology that might make such a thing possible. Not only is retrocausation being demonstrated in physics experiments like the one mentioned earlier, but various lines of evidence from fields like quantum computing and quantum biology make it increasingly plausible that biological systems may, within limits, be able to “pre-spond” to future stimuli. Exactly how it works is still speculative, but precognition is no longer absurd from a materialist scientific standpoint, the way it was even just a decade or two ago. The brain may well turn out to be an organ that extracts meaning from an otherwise noisy, but constant, informational reflux from the Not Yet .

The Not Yet is a term I use for the unknown-but-soon-to-be-known future: something that is on its way, about to arrive, and that brings with it understanding—such as the meaning of a baffling dream, or the confirmation of a hunch. Precognition, I will argue, is about our strange relationship to the Not Yet, orienting us toward increased understanding and meaning coming down the pike.

Even if such a possibility is increasingly scientifically thinkable (if not fully explainable), anything that upsets the one-way folk-causal order of things is really hard to wrap our heads around. When it comes to matters of time and causality, we are all a bit like A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh—we are “bears of little brain.” Besides being plain difficult, it is almost as if precognition has a force field around it, a dense and intimidating fog of taboo , tending to deflect even people who notice its operation in their own lives onto a course of denial or forgetfulness. When people experience dreams that relate uncannily to imminent experiences, for example, they will often grasp at other explanations—preferring even to think that they are just crazy or self-deceived—rather than actually cut through the thickets of illogic around these phenomena and try to understand them.

Because precognition is taboo, the perfect place to look for guidance in traversing the fog of unreason that surrounds it is the original science of unreason and taboos, psychoanalysis, the subject of Part Three. Since the psychoanalytic clinic is a context where real people’s lives, dreams, and thoughts are subjected to close scrutiny and have sometimes been written down in great detail, the case studies of Sigmund Freud and other pioneers in this controversial realm of human inquiry provide a rich trove of data on precognition. And interestingly, Freud himself turns out to have been, without knowing or acknowledging it, a “precog” par excellence . His most famous dream, for example, turns out to have startlingly foreshadowed the illness that would claim his life decades later. Freud’s own explicit denial of the possibility of precognition could even be seen as his tragic flaw, making his life a fascinating case study of a man haunted by time loops he could not or would not confront.

Precog was a term coined by the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote a lot about precognition because it seemed to be a constant and baffling feature in his own life. To really understand precognition, we have to place these experiences within the context of the individual’s life story. Fortunately, both psychotherapeutic case studies and the world of letters provide countless examples of odd and interesting time loops caught in amber, enabling us in many cases to take a biographical approach to studying the phenomenon. Over the course of this book we will see several striking time loops from the lives of famous writers and other artists, and in Part Four, we will look closely at how precognitive experiences shaped the biographies of three people: Phil Dick, a turn-of-the-century sea adventure writer named Morgan Robertson, and a highly precognitive patient of Carl Jung named Maggy Quarles van Ufford (the until-recently anonymous woman at the center of the famous scarab story, the centerpiece of Jung’s writings on synchronicity).

What the psychoanalytic and literary cases all strongly suggest is that precognition is not seeing or getting some glimpse of future events “out there” in objective reality. Rather, it is an engagement with personally meaningful realizations or learning experiences ahead in a person’s own life. Sometimes those future realizations pertain directly to the circumstances in which a premonition or a dream first occurred, giving a genuinely loop-like structure to our lives and thoughts. I will even suggest that what since Freud’s day has been described as the neurosis- and creativity-generating “unconscious mind” may really be our waking consciousness displaced in time.

I began with a story about a lump of dissolving crystalline powder, so I will conclude with another one. Early in the last century, the philosopher Henri Bergson wanted to awaken his readers to the unfolding of matter in time. He argued that when we imagine living things and inert objects as existing totally in the present moment, having only spatial characteristics, we cannot understand them fully. In his masterpiece Creative Evolution , he used a lump of sugar in a glass of water to illustrate an altered, intuitive perception of matter in its durée , or continuous unfolding. The way the sugar presents itself at any given moment to our senses, he argued, is just a shadow of its full glory; to fully apprehend it, Bergson wrote, “I must wait until the sugar melts.” ¹⁰

I must wait until the sugar melts . Another way of putting it is that the sugar is not just a lump of chemical. It is or has a story, and stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Your understanding of the sugar’s story can never be complete until you see how things turn out. When you do that, you apprehend the sugar’s story in a more complete way … and you may even detect that that dissolution of the sugar was already included in its prior dry, crystalline state. It might have even influenced that earlier state in some way. That is the possibility we are going to explore in this book—not for sugar, but for people. ¹¹