Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition & Affect

[bec_87rb]

I guess you all heard the hoopla about Professor Darryl Bem at Cornell getting his ESP experiments into a peer-reviewed journal. Not even close to crackpot in his other work, he has demonstrated that some psychological tests work backwards, as if the subjects had fore-knowledge of the next events in the experiment

Comments

[chhinnamasta]

I skimmed the article and Watts' writeup quickly to get the gist, and I don't have time to examine all this in the necessary detail. Bem's hypothesis is interesting, though.

It's not exactly a whopping result, but it is curious that Bem found one at all. I'd definitely want to see these results replicated, independently, with some reliability. I, too, questioned whether these results could be attributed, in some way, to the use of pseudorandom number generation, but I understand (from Watts' comments) that Bem, apparently, tried to account for its use

[bec_87rb]

I hadn't thought of that, with respect to the digital curtain. And, definitely replicated. How many times did table-top fusion get announced?

It made me think of a tv show years ago where siamese fighting fish were seperated from an opponent by a glass insert that would be raised on a schedule dictated by a true random number generator using radioactive decay. When tested, the apparatus raised the insert more often when there was a male fish on either side of the glass. The strange question this begs is: how did the siamese fighting fish get the RNG to raise the insert more often?

Does this make any more sense of this?

[bec_87rb]

Oh! Sorry about that

There has to be a rational explanation for the weirdness

[anonymous]

Oh, sure! I occasionally respond to something my husband is thinking, only he didn't say it out loud, and he doesn't think that is funny *in the least

Re: There has to be a rational explanation for the weirdness

[bec_87rb]

I went back and watched the 27 Jan 2011 Colbert report to catch Prof Bem. My husband laughed afterward and said Bem was professor emeritus and at this stage in his career probably figured, eh, what have I got to lose? Might as well do something fun.

[uplinktruck]

There is something there. But whether or not this guy found a way to measure it is still up in the air.

[bec_87rb]

Would not surprise me a bit. The universe is a weird place, imho.