Doug's Darkworld

OK, maybe that’s not quite literally what has been discovered, but close enough. A set of careful experiments has shown that the human brain can be influenced by events that haven’t happened yet! Let me repeat that just so it sinks in, scientists have discovered scientific proof that the human brain is somehow influenced by future events. There were a number of experiments, for our purposes here I will describe just one. Experimental subjects were given a list of words to read, without being told anything more. Then the list was taken away and they were given a surprise quiz: to recall as many of the words as they could. With me so far, people being tested on how many words they can recall from a list of words they just read, simple enough, right? Then for each participant, a computer randomly chose a few of the words on the list, and the test subjects were asked to type each of them  several times.

Now, the question here is, will there be any relation between the words the subjects were asked to study after the recall quiz and the words they actually recalled on the test? And the surprising answer is, yes, yes there was. People were slightly more likely to recall words that they had retyped multiple times in the future. The effect was very small, but it was significant. And very small effects are common in science, if they are repeatable, they are real. And if they are real, they need to be explained. In some as yet unknown fashion it appears that people’s brains are somehow primed to more easily recognize words they will study in the future.

Now this wasn’t some whackjob study done in someone’s basement, this was a study by a respected social psychologist, Dr Daryl Bem, at Cornell University. He conducted a number of similar tests, which were basically just a set of well known tests, but changed the chronology of them. IE if one is asked to type a few words multiple times, then shown a  list of words, and then be asked to recall as many of them as they could, test subjects were more likely to recall words they had previously typed. That’s how studying and memory works, and this is one of the ways these are studied.

Now, before getting too excited, yes, we need to wait and see if other researchers will get the same results. And one can be sure that studies trying to replicate these tests results will no doubt be underway soon. The good Dr. Bem may be above reproach, but trickery by lab assistants is not unknown in the realm of science. Nor is people unconsciously massaging the data to get the result they were looking for. Basically there’s a number of possible ways these results may turn out to be, well, non-existent.

If they do turn to to be repeatable, well, that’s going to trigger a lot of new research, that’s for sure. More on point, while to the layman the idea that our brains can somehow see into the future may seem logically impossible, there is a branch of science where such effects are standard fare. This would be quantum physics, the science of the tiniest particles in existence. In the quantum realm, that of photons and electrons, the “blurring” between both time and distance is already well known. IE there are plenty of experiments that show that particles can be influenced by factors that physically or temporally are “impossible.” This is the so called “spooky action at  a distance.” It may not make sense, but it’s very real.

My point here is that while these new experiments are very intriguing, they aren’t as unexpected as one might think. Basically the idea that there is this thing we call “now” that neatly bifurcates reality into “past and “future” is an ideal, not necessarily a reality. It’s a perfectly useful and handy way to understand and view the universe, in fact it’s what makes things like clocks and train schedules so handy. The actual reality appears to be a little fuzzy around the edges, and “now” may be connected to the past and the future in subtle ways that science is just starting to appreciate.

What are the possible consequences of this discovery? It could turn out to be a meaningless quirk with no actual application, just an example of how quantum events can influence the big picture in subtle ways. On the other extreme, it could lead to machines or devices that could peer seconds or minutes into the future. I will let the gentle reader ponder the implications of that. In any case, this is yet another example that shows that reality conforms to its own rules, and is under no obligation to conform to our idea of what “makes sense.” It’s up to humans to understand reality as it really is,  because on some level it will make sense, but maybe not the one we’re used too.

And thinking about this discovery is making me appreciate the difference between fundamentalist religions and science. Science seeks to understand the world as it really is, the fundamentalists try to make their observations fit their preconceptions. I mean there appear to be large numbers of people who literally believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old, and they have even gone so far as to build a “museum” to foster this belief. To me it would be as if millions of grown ups literally believed in Santa Claus. It doesn’t make sense to me, but there must be some powerful sociological or psychological reasons why millions of humans never really grow up and literally believe in Santa Claus all their lives. I’m sure psychologists and sociologists are studying this phenomenon carefully.

More on that tomorrow as I get around to my promised post about “what’s on  the other side?”

(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is central to illustrating the post. It’s posted in hundreds of places on line with no attribution, so I have no idea where it originated. It just looked kinda cool and expressed the ideas in the post in a visual way. The source material for this post, and lots of references and links can be found at: Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!)