Over the past few decades, a significant and noteworthy body of scientific research has emerged that fosters the notion that human foresight can be truly real, and that we can all have this potential - along with other other advanced human capabilities. Through the research of various scientists presented in this article, enhanced human capacities are beginning to move beyond superstitious thinking, delusion, and irrationality into a world of confirmed phenomena. Allegations of foresight or “interpretations of the future” have occurred “throughout the history of mankind in virtually every culture and period.”
It is not hard to see why we are so passionate about these concepts, today they are embedded in popular culture in various forms, such as films, which can sometimes be counterproductive given the fact that they are fused with fictional stories and events. Like an extraterrestrial phenomenon, the validity of these concepts seems to be diminished by the fact that they are "just films." While the stories that accompany these types of phenomena in films are probably largely superficial, the concepts do have some value. Let's look at the truth behind foresight and the requirements of “looking at the future”.
The science
“There seems to be a deep concern that the entire area will be tainted by the study of a phenomenon that is tainted by links to superstition, spiritism and magic. Defending against this opportunity sometimes seems more important than encouraging research or defending academic freedom. But that could change. - Cassandra Vieten, PhD, President / CEO of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
So what is foresight? It is basically the ability to have a premonition of a future event that would otherwise not be determined by any known process. This is the influence of a future event that has yet to occur on the responses of individuals. These responses can arise in the form of their biology, they can be conscious responses that the person is aware of, or they can be unconscious responses that the individual is not aware of (which is mostly the case when it comes to scientific expertise of foresight), and much more.
"Foresight refers to the unpredictable prediction of future events."
A recently published study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Predicting the Unpredictable: A Critique and Practical Implications of Predictive Predictive Activity, looked at a number of experiments on this phenomenon that were conducted by several different laboratories.
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These experiments show that the human body can actually detect randomly occurring stimuli that occur in 1-10 seconds. In other words, the human body seems to be aware of an upcoming event and reacts to an event that has not yet happened. What happens in the human body prior to these events are physiological changes that are measured in relation to cardiac activity, circulation, skin and nervous system.
It is important to note that these types of responses to future events, as measured in the body, are an unconscious response, which means that the subject (person) is not aware that they are actually happening. Thus, it is a form of foresight, but not full-blown conscious foreboding.
It is noteworthy that changes in our physiological activity in the autonomic nervous system occur and prepare for future events, and the fact that this "unconscious foresight" should not distract from the fact that it helps us to better understand the phenomenon of conscious foresight in the scientific sense. We are still waiting for science to catch up and provide an explanation for conscious foresight, regardless of whether this phenomenon has been observed or not.
Over the past 36 years, more than 40 experiments have been published to study this phenomenon in humans.
The analysis showed that:
“Predictive physiological foreboding of a truly random and therefore unpredictable future event has been studied for over three decades, and recent conservative meta-analysis shows that this phenomenon exists.”
Another recently published work through the journal Personality and Social Psychology of Cornell University professor Daryl J. Bem suggests that foresight may be real. Dr. Bem is a leading and respected social psychologist and is respected throughout his long career. Therefore, his work, believing that foresight can be real, is a pretty big leap for such a phenomenon.
Dr. Bem's research describes nine experiments involving more than 1000 participants in which "retroactive influences are tested over time by altering well-established psychological responses to get the person's responses before presumably causal events occur."
After going through and examining the results of these experiments, Dr. Bem concluded that all but one produced statistically significant results. The article and experimental results are presented in the listed sources.
Again, foresight is well documented and has been observed in laboratories around the world. Simply due to the lack of the ability to study Psi to simply provide an explanation for the observed phenomena, all this should not discredit the phenomenon itself.
"Historically, the discovery and scientific investigation of most phenomena preceded explanatory theories, often for decades or even centuries." - Dr. Bern.
Another study by Dr. Dean Radin, one of several authors noted in the early studies and used in this article, conducted four double-blind experiments that also show that intuitive responses, as measured by fluctuations in the autonomic nervous system, include unconscious perception of future events. that haven't happened yet, and experiments have proven this idea.
Another significant study (meta-analysis), published in the Journal of Parapsychology, by Dr Charles Honorton and Diane C. Ferrari in 1989, examines a number of studies that were published between 1935 and 1987. Studies have attempted in humans to predict "the identity of targeted stimuli chosen at random at intervals ranging from a few seconds to one year after individual responses." These scientists examined over 300 studies by more than 60 authors using approximately 2 million individual trials with over 50,000 people.
“It is concluded that their analysis of foresight experiments” confirms the existence of a small but very significant foresight effect. The effect appears to be repeatable; 40 researchers report significant results using different methodological paradigms and groups of subjects. The foresight effect is not just an inexplicable departure from a theoretical baseline, but rather an effect that encompasses factors that are known to influence more familiar aspects of human activity”
Why is foreknowledge unconscious? And does it have the potential to become conscious?
Again, as mentioned earlier in the article, the science behind foresight refers to unconscious foresight. This means that the reaction to future events before they happen is measured by physiological changes, and this seems to be pretty clear.
But why should this be so? If our body (parts of our nervous system) can receive information about events that are to occur in the future, why are we not able to make this information conscious? Perhaps we have such potential.
The researchers in the first study used in this article suggest that this may be the case because information is considered useless, like most information that is usually processed unconsciously. They also suggest that the conscious mind cannot make such quick decisions. They state that "it may be evolutionarily beneficial for unconscious processing to assess upcoming events, filter them, mobilize resources, and only then inform conscious consciousness."
Parapsychological Phenomenon, Consciousness and how they relate to the Nature of Our Reality
Foresight is one of the smaller aspects of a much larger phenomenon of what is called a parapsychological phenomenon. For more information from CE on some areas of this more information, you can read this article.