a follow-up story …..
I’ve written about Cornell psychology professor emeritus Daryl Bem and his precognition experiments before. A former stage magician, mentalist and self-described sceptic, Bem has been researching human predictive capacity for two decades now.
His scientific paper, Feeling the Future, will be published in next month’s issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His focus has been on the human potential to anticipate future experiences. Are we able to know things that are going to happen before they do?
His research involved nine experiments and more than 1,000 university students. According to Bem, in all but one of the experiments, the hypotheses that psi exists is confirmed. He says, “the odds against the possibility that the combined results are merely chance coincidences or statistical flukes are about 74 billion to 1.”
Of course the next step is critical discussion of his work and replication. Bem acknowledges that most academic psychologists don’t believe psi exists. In fact, he claims they’re more skeptical than physicists. But he’s ready for their imput.
His intention has been to provide well-controlled demonstrations of psi, able to be replicated by independent investigators. To that end, Bem has been compiling replication packages for scientists interested in running the tests themselves. As he says, “that is the acid test of any surprising new finding: independent replication.”
Bem’s paper is available on-line now if you want to take a look. Click here to read it for yourself.