Mystic Info - Mediums/Psychics - Precognition

Precognition

Precognition is a form of extra-sensory perception which allows a "percipient" to perceive information about future places or events before they happen (as opposed to merely predicting them based on deductive reasoning and current knowledge).

A related term, presentiment is used to refer to information about future events which may not present itself in conscious form but rather in the form of emotions or feelings at the autonomic level. These terms are considered by some to be special cases of the more general term clairvoyance.

Throughout history there have been many people who have claimed to have precognitive abilities, and the gift of prophecy is a common feature of many religions. Just as prevalent are anecdotal accounts from the general populace of precognitions, such as someone "knowing" who is on the other end of a ringing telephone before they answer it, or having a dream of unusual clarity with elements of content that later turn out to be events that actually occur. While anecdotal accounts do not provide scientific proof of precognition, such common experiences continue to motivate research into such phenomena.

Experimental research of precognition began at least as early as the work of J. B. Rhine, and eventually came to be his preferred mode of conducting his tests. This was a variation of his famous card-guessing experiments in which the participant was asked to record his guess of the entire order of a card deck before the deck was shuffled. Precognitive experiments have since been studied in a variety of formats by various parapsychologists, for example by the remote viewing researchers, and at the Princeton Engineering Anomalous Research centre (PEAR).

In 1997 parapsychologist Dean Radin designed a new series of automated experiments to test for presentiment. In these experiments, participants are monitored for biophysical parameters such as galvanic skin response, blood volume at the extremities, etc, and then presented randomly with photographs which have either a "calm" content (e.g. landscapes, still life, etc), or an "emotional" content (erotic or violent). Within predicted parameters, the experiment showed positive results that for some participants there was a correlation between the content of the picture (calm vs. emotional) and a participant's measurements in the several-second interval preceding the presentation of the photo. The experiment's design is fairly secure in that the system is automated and double-blind, and the participant's measured reactions do not involve conscious responses.