4

The Psi Reflex — Presentiment and the Future-Influencing-Present Effect

Nor will it be possible in the future to dismiss as negligible the phenomenon of precognition, whether in dreams or in a state of wakefulness. Thus, exceeding the bounds of “official psychology,” the American Atomic Energy Commission proposed in 1958 that “clairvoyants” should be employed in an attempt to foresee where Russian bombs would fall in the event of war. (31^st August, 1958, Report of the Rand Commission.)

— Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (1960)

A lthough countless science-fiction stories and movies have explored precognition, without doubt the most interesting “serious” literary exploration of the topic is Thomas Pynchon’s unfinished 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow . That sprawling menagerie of wild conspiracies and crazy characters, set during and after WWII in Europe, centers on the fate of an American army lieutenant, Tyrone Slothrop, whose amorous conquests around London during the Blitz infallibly predict V2 rocket strikes in an otherwise random distribution throughout the city. Slothrop’s weird ability puts him under the scrutiny of “Psi Section,” a division of military intelligence, who link his strange gift to Pavlovian conditioning he experienced as an infant. The hope of the various shadowy figures observing and pursuing Slothrop through much of the 760-page novel is somehow to exploit his ability … but first, they have to simply understand it. ¹

It is hinted in the story that two decades earlier, a mad genius experimenter named Dr. Lazslo Jamf had used the infant Slothrop’s erections as the “target reflex” tied to an unspecified conditioned stimulus “X.” Classical Pavlovian conditioning, the basis of many human learning mechanisms and most familiar to nonscientists in the form of animal training, involves pairing an arbitrary event, called the “conditioned stimulus,” with an animal’s or person’s instinctive response to a natural reward. Pavlov’s model for this was his famous dogs: By repeatedly pairing the sound of a bell with a dog’s natural response of salivating at the smell of food, he conditioned the animals to salivate at the sound of the bell even when there was no food present. The implication, in the novel, is that Dr. Jamf had paired the infant Slothrop’s erections to some entropic stimulus, which somehow resulted, much later, in his adult habit of having sex right where one of Hitler’s rocket-bombs would fall the next day.

The secret of Slothrop’s condition(ing)—the mysterious X to which his infantile sexual response was paired—remains unanswered all the way through to an increasingly uncertain outcome, in which Slothrop descends into madness and even the circumstances of his childhood (including the very existence of Dr. Jamf) are called into question. I call Gravity’s Rainbow “unfinished” because most readers do not get this far, detecting at some point about midway through that answers, and resolution, may not be forthcoming. But this has not prevented Gravity’s Rainbow from being regarded as one of the masterpieces of 20^th century literature, along with other unfinished works like A Remembrance of Things Past (readers of which usually don’t get very far “past” the eating of the madeleine) or Finnegan’s Wake . ²

The difficulty of completion notwithstanding, Slothrop’s “gift” is one of 20^th century literature’s most memorable MacGuffins. And as crazy and comical as it seems, his unique take on psychic phenomena proved to be uncannily prescient of parapsychological research of the decades that followed the novel’s publication. These included not only the weaponizing of psi abilities, the purpose of the government-funded ESP research mentioned in the last chapter, but also subsequent research tying some kind of precognitive ability to people’s involuntary reflexes. The most interesting body of parapsychological research in the past two decades centers on detecting and responding to future stimuli outside of conscious awareness, the ability sometimes called presentiment , or “feeling the future.”

From early on, parapsychologists had realized that ESP, whatever it is and however it works, largely seems to operate unconsciously and is often accessed best in the context of physical tasks that do not require deliberation or analysis. ³ In the 1990s, an electrical engineer then at the University of Nevada named Dean Radin designed experiments that used subjects’ autonomic responses as a possible index of their ability to sense future events. In one 1997 study, he measured the skin conductance, heart rate, and blood flow to the fingertips of students and other adult volunteers while they viewed a series of randomly selected photographs—either calm landscapes and nature scenes or erotic photos or autopsies expected to elicit an emotional response. In addition to the expected high degree of arousal after seeing the emotional pictures, there was a smaller but distinct increase in arousal—what he called an “orienting pre-sponse”—peaking a second before the arousing (erotic or violent) images but not neutral pictures. ⁴ He conducted other similar experiments measuring eye movements and brainwave activity and found similar presponses to imminent stimuli.

Inspired by Radin’s work, several other researchers have pursued presentiment studies, with similar success. Neuropsychologist James Spottiswoode and physicist Edwin May reported skin-conductance changes in advance of noise bursts. ⁵ At the University of Amsterdam, psychologist Dick Bierman and neuroscientist H. Steven Scholte reported increased activity in the visual cortex and amygdala (measured using fMRI) prior to randomly presented emotional pictures but not neutral pictures; men showed an anticipatory response to erotic pictures only, whereas women showed an anticipatory response to both erotic and violent pictures. ⁶ Neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge and colleagues at Northwestern University measured skin conductance in a picture-guessing task, finding that male participants’ arousal increased significantly up to 10 seconds prior to a correct “hit,” but not women’s—possibly pointing to the greater reward males feel at being right. ⁷ A meta-analysis of 26 presentiment studies found high significance for this body of research; 87 negative unpublished studies would be needed to nullify their statistical significance. ⁸ A critical analysis of research in presentiment—also known as “predictive anticipatory activity”—by a team that included Jessica Utts (the statistician mentioned earlier) found it highly unlikely that statistical manipulations (sometimes called “p -hacking”) could account for the positive results seen in these experiments. ⁹

The most widely reported and controversial research on the unconscious influence of future stimuli on behavior—indeed possibly the most scandalous ESP research ever—was the series of studies mentioned in the Introduction by Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem. Over the course of several years, Bem conducted a series of nine large experiments, involving over 1,000 student participants, in which he reversed the causal direction in four basic psychological paradigms: reinforcement , priming , habituation , and facilitation of recall . ¹⁰ In all four types of experiment, he found astonishing, seemingly time-defying effects. (Since Bem’s experiments measured task performance rather than physiological responses, they are sometimes distinguished as tests of “implicit precognition,” ¹¹ but for simplicity I will consider them under the “presentiment” rubric.)

Reinforcement is the tendency to respond positively to reward and negatively to punishment—the basis of operant conditioning, somewhat different from classical Pavlovian conditioning but involving similar brain mechanisms. In Bem’s inversions of the usual temporal sequence, student participants tried to pick which “curtain” on a computer screen concealed a picture, clicking on the selected curtain to reveal if they were right. Some of the pictures were erotic (positive reinforcement), while others were neutral. Participants’ accuracy at picking the right curtain did not deviate from chance when the picture was neutral, but they were significantly more accurate when the picture was erotic. Unknown to the participants, the correct answers were randomly selected after they made their choices, so it was distinctly a test of precognition, not clairvoyance—there were no pictures “already there” behind the curtains.

Priming, the ability of brief, subtle, or subliminal stimuli to affect our behavior, is commonly used in psychology to measure the influence of unconscious processing. In a standard priming study, participants’ reaction time is measured when they press buttons on a keyboard to indicate a choice in response to some stimulus, but a few seconds beforehand they are very briefly exposed to a picture or word that they do not consciously register but that may make one or the other choice response faster or more likely. In Bem’s priming studies, he reversed the usual order, placing the prime after the choice, not before. Participants indicated whether they found a picture on the screen pleasant or unpleasant, after which a word like “ugly” or “beautiful” would be flashed over one of the pictures quickly enough that it would not be detected consciously but might subliminally be registered. The data suggested that primes received after the button press influenced the rapidity of participants’ responses—another seemingly impossible finding from the standpoint of ordinary linear causality.

Habituation is the tendency of both positive and negative reactions to stimuli to diminish with repeated exposure. For example, if subjects are subliminally primed with an appealing picture, when they are later asked to choose whether they prefer it or another picture, they will tend to choose the other one because the appeal of the one they’ve already glimpsed has diminished. Vice versa for negative or unappealing pictures. In Bem’s studies, the “habituation” took place after the students were presented with the options and made their choices. Again, significant deviations from chance in the results showed evidence that participants were biased by their subsequent exposure to certain stimuli.

And lastly, inspired by the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass , who explains to Alice that memory can go in both directions, Bem also conducted experiments in which participants were tested on words they had previously seen in a learning session, with the twist that some of the words were shown again after their test in a subsequent “practice phase.” In keeping with his other results, participants tended to recall better the words that they were shown after the test. The take-home point of this and the rest of Bem’s studies is that our behavior seems to be conditioned not only by what we have learned or been exposed to in the past but also, to some small but significant extent, by what we will learn or be exposed to in the future.

Besides ridicule, Bem’s article prompted a great deal of soul-searching by psychologists concerned that his impossible findings were a symptom of a rot in the heart of their science. It led to an avalanche of efforts to replicate other findings whose significance was now in doubt because the researchers had used the same standard statistical procedures Bem had relied on. A large-scale effort to replicate 100 findings in three top-tier psychological science journals was only successful in 36 percent of the studies, revealing that possibly the majority of what was getting published in the field was subpar science. ¹² Meanwhile though, smugly dismissive claims that Bem’s “feeling the future” findings could not be replicated, which appeared quickly on the paper’s heels, proved premature: A 2016 meta-analysis of 90 replications of his studies, 79 by researchers in other laboratories, supported his conclusion that future stimuli can affect people’s behavior. ¹³ Statistical analysis of the results placed the significance level in the highest category for Bayesian statistical analysis, “decisive evidence,” even when Bem’s own replications were excluded. Over 500 experiments with negative results would have had to be left in file drawers to nullify this level of significance.

The psychical researchers of Frederic Myers’ generation had viewed psychical ability as reflecting our higher consciousness, a dim adumbration of the next phase in our evolution, ¹⁴ and there is a long tradition, dating back two millennia to the Hindu yogi Patanjali, of viewing psychic abilities as “superpowers” (siddhis ) attained through rigorous mental exercise. ¹⁵ In contrast, the presentiment research of Radin, Bem, and others is a natural outgrowth of the modern evolutionary assumption that whatever the nature of our future-feeling or future-sensing faculty, its expression must have a basic survival function for the organism and thus may actually reflect our “lower” functions and our evolutionary past, not our future. ESP has not been as extensively studied in animals as in humans, but suggestive research has supported something like ESP in animals. One series of experiments by maverick biologist Rupert Sheldrake, for example, supported the idea that animal companions have a sixth sense about imminent rewards such as the return of their owners. ¹⁶ At least one recent study also suggests that planarian worms—the simplest animals with a nervous system—may be able to orient away from future aversive stimuli as much as a minute in advance. ¹⁷

For humans, an ability to orient toward social rewards would be highly adaptive, and this may be what we see in familiar experiences like the famous “sense of being stared at.” Psychologists dismiss such a sense as a mistaken product of selection bias: Instances where you turned your head and didn’t find another person looking back at you get left in your mental file drawer. On the other hand, experiments by Sheldrake have substantiated the existence of the phenomenon. ¹⁸ If presentiment serves a social orienting function, orienting us to another’s looks is precisely the kind of experience it might be expected to give rise to.

That something like presentiment may be a basic adaptive trait is an argument made forcefully by James Carpenter, a clinician and parapsychological researcher at the Rhine Center in North Carolina. Synthesizing a vast array of findings across parapsychology into a single theoretical framework, he argues that ESP manifests constantly in our lives as part of an always-unconscious faculty he calls “first sight.” ¹⁹ It is, he argues, the “leading edge” in our perception, preparing us for action, and even the ground of our efficacy in the world—“not an occasional ability but … an unconscious feature of each person’s ongoing engagement with reality.” ²⁰ Carpenter does not limit first sight to our ability to sense the future—he includes other abilities classically distinguished from precognition, like telepathy and clairvoyance, as well as psychokinesis (PK) or mind-over-matter abilities. Whatever its scope, his basic argument, that first sight is “always at work, but always out of sight,” ²¹ is an important corrective to the common assumption that, if something like ESP exists, it must be a rare occurrence. We should not confuse how difficult we find imagining a thing with how difficult nature finds accomplishing it. If it exists at all, then first sight would not be some rare exception to nature’s rules. It must be part of nature, and it would probably be ubiquitous—indeed fundamental—even if we don’t yet understand how it works.

The Spy Downstairs

If first sight is a basic, adaptive trait, an aspect of our “lower” animal nature, we might expect it to manifest most strongly when our higher executive functions are off-line or taking a back seat. Precognition has often been linked to altered states of consciousness—not only dreams but also trance, meditation, ²² hypnagogic/hypnopompic states, ²³ out-of-body experiences, ²⁴ and the effects of hallucinogens. ²⁵ Perhaps most importantly, it is also linked to “flow states” in which we engage in highly practiced creative as well as physically enjoyable or thrilling activities with high stakes. Michael Murphy, a pioneer in the human potential movement and co-founder of the Esalen retreat in Big Sur, California, wrote of transcendental and psychic experience manifesting in sports and martial arts, for example. ²⁶ Some form of sixth sense guiding and protecting particularly intuitive soldiers has long been reported in war, and the Office of Naval Research reported in 2014 that it is actively pursuing research into how “Spidey sense” may work. ²⁷ Mountain climbers and others in stressful or extreme situations report a dissociative, possibly precognitive state to which they often attribute their survival. ²⁸

One skilled, high-stakes physical activity with notorious links to precognition (as well as other paranormal phenomena) is aviation. As in combat or mountain climbing, piloting an aircraft requires senses attuned and alert, and puts the pilot in a thrilling, highly connected state of flow. Victor Goddard’s precognitive “time slip” experience while flying over an abandoned air base in Drem, Scotland, was just one of several psychic phenomena he claimed to experience in his life; ²⁹ notably, this one occurred as he was trying to navigate safely through a storm, necessitating heightened attention and adrenaline. Arctic explorer and aviator Sir George Hubert Wilkins reported a kind of psychic intuition he called “provenance” protecting him in his adventures. ³⁰ Pioneer female aviator Jacqueline Cochran, a close friend of Amelia Earhart, reported in her memoir a facility with ESP, including several instances in which she psychically located missing aircraft. ³¹ WWII bomber pilot-turned-writer Martin Caidin reported a facility with psychic abilities and may have prophesied the real-life Apollo 13 space disaster in one of his novels. ³² (He also chronicled psychic and paranormal experiences in other pilots. ³³ ) One of the more naturally gifted psychics studied as part of the ESP research program at SRI was Richard Bach, pilot and author of the 1970 bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull . ³⁴

Acting, singing, playing a musical instrument, and other kinds of performance, when engaged in with skill and complete immersion, may also be conducive to precognition. ³⁵ In the ancient world, prophecy manifested in song. I have argued elsewhere that mediumship may also be a form of disguised precognition, and it too is a performance, demanding physical engagement and a suppression of the critical intellect (to such a degree, in fact, that many mediums have no conscious memory of their trances afterward). ³⁶ The performative dimension could also account for the oft-observed (and confusing) link between apparently genuine ESP phenomena and stage magic, another skilled and semi-high-stakes activity that takes the performer’s critical faculties off-line temporarily. Russell Targ, one of the physicists in charge of the remote viewing research program at SRI, reported to Jeffrey Kripal that he received what he thought was real telepathic information while performing stage magic as a young man. ³⁷ “Mixed mediumship” is the term for the oft-noted admixture of possibly real psi phenomena with stage trickery among magicians and mediums. ³⁸

And then there are fiction writers. Historians of psychic phenomena are fortunate to have a particularly rich record of precognitive experiences in the lives of writers. This is partly a natural file-drawer effect: Reports of anomalous experiences in the lives of athletes and soldiers, for example, would be relatively rare simply because sports and combat do not leave as rich a paper trail as writing. But additionally, because writing is (for some writers at least) precisely an enjoyable flow activity that engages an individual’s intuitive and creative juices, the very act of recording ideas and inspirations may induce an “altered state” conducive to channeling information from a writer’s future. ³⁹ It is like attaching a printer directly to the phenomenon of interest. In memoirs and interviews, writers often describe their creative frenzies as a kind of trance in which ideas come unbidden; some report feeling that the thoughts of some other entity or higher self are being transcribed or channeled. In the last part of this book, we will examine two writer-precogs, Morgan Robertson and Philip K. Dick, who both described feeling possessed by a feminine muse when they wrote. Is “inspiration”—which originally meant possession by a divine spirit—simply a psychologically neutral term for drawing precognitively or presentimentally on a writer’s own future?

One striking example of possible literary presentiment is that of Norman Mailer. Mailer had become famous at age 25 for his debut novel The Naked and the Dead (1947), but he struggled mightily with his second, Barbary Shore (1951), about a writer who rents a room in a Brooklyn Heights rooming house in order to write a novel. The writer character finds that his artist neighbors are an interesting mix, including a middle-aged Communist who is hounded by an FBI agent and turns out to have been a spy for the KGB. Mailer told an interviewer years later that he was plagued by a sense of disbelief in what he was writing—it seemed unrealistic to him: “The greatest single difficulty with the book was that my common sense thought it was impossible to have all these agents and impossible heroes congregating in a rooming house in Brooklyn Heights.” ⁴⁰ But like many artists, Mailer felt he had to honor and follow his inspiration wherever it led. He had to force himself to complete the book, and when it was panned by critics, he said, he resigned himself to forever being a second-rate writer.

Six years, a third novel, and a stint in Hollywood after Barbary Shore ’s publication and savage reviews, Mailer found himself actually working in a studio in Brooklyn Heights, and one summer day (August 8, 1957) he was shocked to read a stunning New York Times cover story: “RUSSIAN COLONEL IS INDICTED HERE AS TOP SPY IN U.S.” The “Colonel” shown in the picture below the headline was the 55-year-old Russian painter and guitarist who worked in the room directly below his, just one floor down. He was known by his fellow artists in the building as Emil Goldfus, but his real name, the story said, was Colonel Rudolf Abel, of the KGB. The first paragraph of the story explained that Abel was “the most important spy ever caught in the United States.” ⁴¹ (Like in a spy novel, Abel had been caught after the FBI decoded a piece of microfilm a newsboy had found hidden in a hollow nickel.)

“I have always been overcome with that,” Mailer told the interviewer. “It made me decide there’s no clear boundary between experience and imagination. Who knows what glimpses of reality we pick up unconsciously, telepathically.” ⁴² There’s that T word again. But telepathy does not fit the facts of Mailer’s case at all. He did not live or work in that building when he was writing Barbary Shore ; at that point in his life he had never seen or interacted with “Emil Goldfus.” When gripped by the Communist spy character “McLeod,” who took over the novel-in-progress he was wrestling with at the end of the 1940s, Mailer is more likely to have been influenced by his own unsettled and shocked reaction to a New York Times cover story he would encounter seven or more years later—at least, as long as we do not chalk it up to chance.

Banging furiously at a typewriter and the other skilled activities I mentioned are all forms of rewarding physical engagement, for which Tyrone Slothrop’s compulsive amorous activity (i.e., sex and seduction) is a perfect metaphor. The fact that Slothrop’s “gift” is rooted in conditioning is thus highly realistic (even, as I suggested, prescient ⁴³ ). In fact, given precognition’s connection to arousal, excitement, and athletic or creative flow states and the fact that it seems to operate almost entirely outside of conscious awareness or control, it may be fruitful to take a reductive, even behaviorist approach to defining it—or perhaps, “prehaviorist” might be a better term: Fundamentally, precognition seems to be not seeing or knowing or even feeling the future; rather, it seems to be a matter of producing a behavior that is tied to a forthcoming reward . The behavior could be a physiological response such as a movement or an emotion; it could be a dream, or an utterance, or a drawing, or a novel. The reward might be physical, as in sex or the gratification of other biological and social needs; or it could be the gratification of successfully accomplishing a task. In an ESP task, it could simply be the satisfaction of being right. ⁴⁴ The reward could be intellectual, as in learning something new and exciting—such as reading a news story about a volcano eruption or the unmasking of a Russian spy. As we will see later in this book, the reward may often be existential: finding out we (will) have survived some chaotic or entropic threat to our survival.

Whatever the mechanism, this influence by future emotional rewards would be the basis of the intuitive guidance system that takes over whenever we follow our gut or whenever we act skillfully and instinctively in any domain. A premonition or hunch or creative inspiration that pays off in a confirmatory action is part of a reward loop, entraining the attentional faculty on those meaningful experiences coming down the pike. Engaged flow states may not only open the door to precognition by focusing the senses and busying the critical, conscious mind with other matters, they may also condition the precognitive apparatus, providing constant payoffs that propel us forward to the next reward in an ongoing chain—like feeding sardines to the dolphin of intuition. ⁴⁵

In this model, a presponsive behavior needs to be seen as one half of a two-part system, the other half being our everyday actions and experiences unfolding in linear time that serve to confirm it and thus give it meaning—for instance, Norman Mailer’s encounter with the New York Times headline about the spy downstairs. The crucial role played by confirmation is part of what makes the whole topic suspect for skeptics and even for many parapsychologists open to other forms of ESP. Since hindsight is biased by a kind of selection, it is difficult or impossible in many cases to prove that ostensible precognition is not either memory error or “just coincidence.” The difficulties go even deeper, in fact. As we will see later, a retrospective tunnel vision on events, especially after surviving some trauma—ranging from the most extreme, death and disaster, to minor chaotic upheavals like reading about a plane crash or a close brush with international espionage in the newspaper—seems to be precisely what people precognize or pre-sense in their future. We precognize our highly biased hindsight , taking us deep into a kind of recursive or fractal, M. C. Escher territory.

This fractal quality, coupled with our ignorance of precognitive or presentimental processes working in our lives, creates the causal circularity or time loops I have mentioned. Such loops may be a universal feature of a world that includes precognitive creatures who are unaware of their precognition. For instance, just imagine how weird it would have been for Mailer to read the headline about the spy in his building, as well as its vaguely unsettling subhead: “A NINE-YEAR PLOT—Suspect Said to Have Used Brooklyn Studio to Direct Network.” Mailer noted that he probably shared the elevator with this KGB Colonel many times, without ever suspecting who he was. But the source of the headline’s shock, and thus the whole reason Mailer would have been “inspired” by it years earlier, was not merely that the agent happened to be in his building, but the fact that he had already written about that exact situation: a KGB spy working in a Brooklyn Heights building full of artists and a novelist like himself. (We’ll see another, oddly similar example of this kind of fractal literary time loop, also involving a bizarre encounter with a new neighbor a writer seemingly had “written about” years earlier, when we come to the story of Philip K. Dick later in this book.)

Remember my earlier warning about quagmires. There are way more wrinkles and nuances in this notion of hindsight and “selection after the fact” than has hitherto been supposed in simplistic “yes” versus “no” debates over the existence of precognition.

Orienting Toward Meaning

My likening of precognition or presentiment to a biological reflex might not have raised eyebrows in the Rhines’ day, but it is a somewhat contrarian position now. Many parapsychologists today link psi abilities to the “extended mind”—that is, to some larger or higher consciousness that transcends the body, being metaphorically if not literally “entangled” with everything and everyone else. ⁴⁶ Psychic ability is widely seen today as the ultimate disproof of the materialistic reductions of mainstream psychology and neuroscience. Consciousness, as something potentially irreducible to brain processes, assumes center stage in a what is seen by some as a new paradigm that will unseat and replace materialism. ⁴⁷

Disaffection with materialism, and the claim that it disenchanted the world with its insistence on physical mechanistic causes for all phenomena including mental phenomena, dates back to the Romantic period, and again, it was a driving motive for the earliest psychical researchers in the Victorian era. Frederic Myers saw telepathy as part of an enlarged, transcendent “subliminal self.” The philosopher Henri Bergson argued for a kind of panpsychism , in which matter is itself a manifestation of mind and vice versa. Later, J. W. Dunne, as we saw, viewed precognition as reflecting our higher mind, “filling all space,” equivalent to the higher consciousness of mystics. And in the middle of the 20th century, Carl Jung saw psychic phenomena as manifestations of the collective unconscious, which he suggested had a transpersonal (or even what today might be called “nonlocal”) dimension. James Carpenter similarly sees first sight as a phenomenon resulting from our embeddedness in a universe of meanings that are found and not simply made by us, that extend beyond the body, and that are responsive to our intentions. ⁴⁸ He sees first sight as much more than a mere reflex in the mechanistic sense most experimental psychologists might understand the term. ⁴⁹

As a cultural anthropologist by training, I agree that meaning is central. I do not agree, though, that perennial questions about consciousness in relation to materiality need to be resolved to explain ESP. (We will come back to the reasons why later, in Part Two.) Nor do I believe we need appeal to anything like a universe pre-saturated with meanings to explain these phenomena. Information encoded in material forms of language, art, artifacts, folklore, mythology, science, and the various “lived texts” that make up culture (as anthropologists understand the term) do precede and surround us—but information is different from meaning. Meaning is really what is made when intentional actors engage with that information, assign value to and internalize it, and use it to achieve their aims. Meaning is the value of information, in other words, and it is what we as humans constantly create and recreate as part of our social and cultural experience. ⁵⁰ Rather than hovering over and above us, animating us, or exerting its own transpersonal causal (or, in Jung’s paradoxical formulation, “acausal”) force, meaning is constantly fashioned and refashioned by real embodied people in real physical interaction or physically mediated interaction. I suggest it is precisely such interactions that our first sight (as precognition) often orients us toward and that belatedly supply the meaning of our precognitive experiences. ⁵¹

I am thus arguing for a hermeneutic (interpretive) approach to studying precognition, but I mean something specific and counterintuitive by this: Meaning may be precisely what is lacking in a dream or reflex action or other behavior that is inflected by our future, until the future inciting stimulus that will enable us to make sense of it. In other words, it seems to be that it is the future, physical arrival at meaning that causes the prior behavior, and the prior behavior may often or even necessarily be part of the causal backstory of that future arrival—time loops, in other words. This time-loop framework not only offers a new way of looking at precognition in creativity and dreams but even has interesting implications for rethinking psychoanalytic models of symptoms and neuroses. Instead of being rooted solely in past traumas and unresolved conflicts, it may partly be our baffling relationship to our future that makes us “sick” (at least in the psychoanalytic sense). And it offers, I think, a more compelling way of looking at “archetypal” phenomena like Jung’s synchronicity too. If materially encoded cultural symbols exert some of their causative force or power backwards , through social actors’ unconscious precognitive engagement with them, it would help explain why the universe often seems pre-saturated with meanings that, upon scrutiny, boil down to meanings actual concrete human beings have made themselves. These are possibilities we will explore in the second half of this book.

A hermeneutic orientation to precognition has specific implications for how we approach studying the phenomenon. If precognition orients us toward meaning, the purely scientific perspective—including even the rigorously acquired experimental data supporting its existence with astronomical p -values—cannot tell us the whole story, and thus cannot be taken in isolation from the anecdotal data: individual human beings’ accounts of their anomalous experiences and what those experiences mean to them. ⁵² It has long been argued that ESP abilities of whatever sort would be unlikely to manifest strongly in sterile laboratory conditions where there is little personally at stake for the individual. What’s more, the precognitive unconscious of the experimenter and of the test subjects may create effects that cannot be accounted for and that may be misinterpreted (a very interesting and potentially far-reaching argument made by Edwin May in the context of PK research ⁵³ ). Thus the “feeling the future” studies by Bem or the psychophysical studies by Radin and other researchers, with their impressive statistical significance but small effects discernible over milliseconds or seconds, may provide only an incomplete picture of precognition’s scope. Individuals’ personal accounts and recollections of anomalies lack the reliability and replicability that are essential to the scientific method, and they cannot be supported by significance tests, but they can reveal the character of precognition as it shapes our lives in a way laboratory experiments cannot.

The Future-Influencing-Present Effect

As mentioned earlier, in 1963 the playwright J. B. Priestley solicited viewers of a BBC program to send him examples of their precognitive experiences. He was inundated with roughly 1,500 letters. More interesting to Priestley than the hundreds of precognitive-dream reports in that pile were a smaller number of stories suggesting a more general and hard-to-define influence of future events on people’s actions, thoughts, and emotions in waking life: “Somebody is in a queer state of mind, perhaps behaves oddly, and no reason for this can be discovered at the time. Later—a month, a year, 10 years—the cause of this effect reveals itself. Because of where or what or how I am now, I behaved in such a fashion then.” ⁵⁴ Priestley called this the “future-influencing-present effect”—not unlike what later researchers would call presentiment but unfolding in many cases across a much longer timeframe of an individual’s life.

In his 1964 book Man & Time , Priestley described several examples. One letter-writer was a WWII veteran with what we would now call PTSD, who experienced a “breakdown” during the war and relapses of his condition thereafter. He credited his recovery to a somewhat older woman with children whom he met and married after the war and, by the time of his writing, had a teenage daughter with. But “for a year before he met his wife or knew anything about her, he used to pass the gate of her country cottage on the local bus. And he never did this without feeling that he and that cottage were somehow related.” ⁵⁵ Another, older letter writer recalled being a girl during the First World War and when out walking one night in London, “found herself looking up at a hospital, quite strange to her, with tears streaming down her cheeks.” Years later, she moved in with a woman friend, and they remained partners for 25 years. “This friend was then taken ill and she died in that same hospital at which the girl so many years before had stared through her inexplicable tears.” ⁵⁶

Priestley also gives an example from two acquaintances of his own:

Dr A began to receive official reports from Mrs B, who was in charge of one branch of a large department. These were not personal letters signed by Mrs B, but the usual duplicated official documents. Dr A did not know Mrs B, had never seen her, knew nothing about her except that she had this particular job. Nevertheless, he felt a growing excitement as he received more and more of these communications from Mrs B. This was so obvious that his secretary made some comment on it.

A year later he had met Mrs B and fallen in love with her. They are now most happily married. He believes … that he felt this strange excitement because the future relationship communicated it to him; we might say that one part of his mind, not accessible to consciousness except as a queer feeling, already knew that Mrs B was to be tremendously important to him. ⁵⁷

Skeptics will immediately dismiss such stories as memory distorted by hindsight. Almost certainly, the woman who lost her partner did not write down that moment of tearfulness on her walk all those years earlier; it was recollected long afterward—so how can we be sure it really happened? Even if it did happen, how can we be sure she didn’t break down crying before many buildings, all the time, and just remembered this one instance after her partner died at that particular hospital? Same with the shell-shocked man who said he felt an inexplicable connection to the cottage of his future wife. Similarly, Dr. A and Mrs. B (one wonders if she was a “Mrs.” at the time of the official communications)—as well as Dr. A’s secretary, abetting his memory—could have reframed their story in hindsight, shaping it into something much more fated-seeming. But while retroactive revision of memory must always be taken into account as a possible factor in such stories, it begins to appear simply stubborn and uncharitable to reject such accounts solely on the basis of that possibility, especially in light of the masses of similar and better-documented individual cases, not to mention the masses of experimental data also suggesting the possibility of something like Priestley’s future-influencing-present effect.

And once again, hindsight arguably works against us noticing these phenomena more than it encourages us to notice (let alone report) them. We rarely become aware of the future-influencing-present effect, Priestley notes, for the same reason J. W. Dunne argued precognitive dreams so often escape notice—because we do not habitually record our “queer feelings” and thus can only reflect on them with the benefit of hindsight. It will seldom occur to people to make a connection between their thoughts or feelings at some time point A and an event occurring at a later, perhaps much later, time point B:

[T]hough I describe this effect in terms of the future influencing the present, it can never be understood in the present that is being influenced by the future; it can be understood only when the effect is well into the past and the future that influenced it is now in the present or the immediate past. It has now to be discovered in retrospect, and this makes it less dramatic and memorable, much harder to trace, than the precognitive dream. ⁵⁸

There is also an additional inhibiting force: the fact that such an effect seems so often to manifest in the highly meaningful but private context of love and romance. Sex and love, of course, are the most rewarding human experiences, toward which we might expect an adaptive presentimental ability to particularly orient us. But they are also the most intimate. Thus, among the many barriers to noticing presentiment’s operation in our lives is the fact that it may so often be connected to the most private and unshareable dimensions of our experience. ⁵⁹ This is one reason why the psychoanalyst’s couch, a context where individuals are enjoined to discuss these intimate relationships along with their dreams and private thoughts, is the perfect place to study the future-influencing-present effect, as we will see later.

The anomalies produced when we engage precognitively with the world, including synchronicities, mystical or paranormal experiences, and so on may be the most profound and meaningful experiences in a person’s life. Fortuities and coincidences are the basis of every love story, for example. It is when we fail to “wait for the sugar to melt,” in Bergson’s phrase—that is, when we try to force some sense out of our “queer feelings” without waiting for their meaning to arrive in the natural unfolding of events—that that “connection” (for that is what meaning really boils down to) will seem like something pre-existing, enveloping and surrounding us in the universe like some Platonic-Jungian amnion, or even like “the Force” in Star Wars . Instead, I suggest that our most meaningful connections to others and to ideas traverse the Not Yet, made possible by the 4-D nature of our meaning-making brain.

It is to the “how”—the possible nuts and bolts of precognition—that we now turn.