We've all probably had more than a few moments in our life where we spontaneously had strange premonitions about the future that came true. Certainly there's some "confirmation bias" happening here but Radin's work seems to be teasing out a very small, but significant effect here.
Do you think people can predict events that will occur in the future?
Predict is a little bit too strong. I think that sometimes people have experiences that turn out to be true, and they know it in advance, but prediction implies that I'm going to sit down and figure out what is going to happen. I don't think that the phenomenon is exactly like that. But the fact that people can gain information about future events, of that I'm nearly convinced.
What is the most compelling evidence, in your view, that people can sense what might happen?
I would say that the experiments that I've done which I call "presentiment experiments" are among the most compelling, primarily because the results are more robust than what you typically see in these kinds of experiments.
Can you describe what those are?
They're a class of experiments where you don't ask the participant to consciously try to do anything. You just measure their body's response as a way of detecting that something is happening. So we measure skin response, pupil dilation and things like that.
We ask a person to sit in front of a computer and look at a blank screen, then push a button. A few seconds go by, and then the screen makes a random decision to select a stimulus that is either calm or emotional, and then it goes away after maybe 10 or 15 seconds. And then this process is repeated again and again. The analysis looks at what's happening while you are waiting for the computer to make that random decision about which picture to show. We are wondering whether people would get an unconscious sense of what their future is about to bring them.
When you do this experiment with lots of people on lots of trials, what you end up with is evidence that people significantly show different physiological conditions or states just before emotional pictures are shown as compared to calm pictures, and in the direction that you can predict, as if in fact they were somehow aware of what their future was about to bring.
Do you think that we all have some extrasensory abilities?
I think we do in the same way that we can all play golf, but we are not all going to win the Masters.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/02/25/findrelig.DTL
