Precognition

by Marinus Jan Marijs 

Morgan Robertson an American writer published in 1898 a novel called Futility. In this novel Robertson described the construction of a large presumed unsinkable steamship called the Titan, “..which was the largest craft afloat and the greatest of the works of men’. No expense was spared on making the ship luxurious and the steward’s cabin is described as being ‘equal to that of a first class hotel.”

‘The latest technology was used in the building of the Titan including the addition of ‘..nineteen water-tight compartments. With nine compartments flooded the ship would still float, and as no known incident of the sea could possibly fill this many, the steamship Titan was considered practically unsinkable.’

Because Titan was considered unsinkable she only carried the minimum number of lifeboats required by law – 24 – able to carry 500 people. This was not enough for the 2000 passengers on board.

He described that on a voyage in the month of April, this fictional steamship collided with an iceberg, and ”she rose out of the sea, higher and higher, until the propellers in the stern were exposed, then… she heeled, overbalanced, and crashed down to her side, to starboard.” There were not enough lifeboats and the causalities were staggering.

Morgan Robertson’s Titan hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean and sank. 2987 people died in the disaster.

The similarities between the fictional Titan of the 1898 novel and the real Titanic 1912 are striking:

Further:
The Titanic struck an iceberg on the starboard side on the night of April 14, 1912, in the North Atlantic, 400 nautical miles (740 km; 460 mi) away from Newfoundland.

The Titan also struck an iceberg on the starboard side on an April night in the North Atlantic, 400 nautical miles (740 km; 460 mi) from Newfoundland (Terranova).

Another novel of Morgan Roberson of 1912 describes a sneak attack by the Japanese on the United States Navy, which has similarities with Pearl Harbour.

Another writer Elias Canetti; 25 July 1905 – 14 August 1994) was a Bulgarian-born Swiss and British modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer. He wrote in German. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, “for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power”.

Elias Canetti wrote Auto da Fé (original title Die Blendung, the title of the English translation by C. V. Wedgwood, 1946 is “The Blinding”) a 1935 novel

The book manuscript was finished in 1931, and the book was published in 1935, by Herbert Reichner in Vienna (Canetti’s hometown at that time). It is Canetti’s first publication. In this book is one of the characters a chess player “he passes half his life at the chessboard”, to him chess is life. in his mind he is already world chess champion. Canetti writes further how this chess player goes to America, and says :”……..But nothing for nothing. ”What is your bid, gentlemen? ’ he cries boldly,………”A hundred thousand, Mr. Fischer”

This novel was published in1935 eight years before American Bobby Fischer was born , who became world chess champion in 1972.
The price money for the winner was a hundred thousand dollar.

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{Definition: In parapsychology, precognition (from the Latin præ-, “before” and cognitio, “acquiring knowledge”), also called future sight, and second sight, is a type of extrasensory perception that would involve the acquisition or effect of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information.} (Wikipedia)

Precognition has been shown to be instrumentally demonstrable:

…..To investigate these possibilities, Dean Radin and Dick Bierman have performed a number of experiments of emotional response in human subjects. The subjects view a computer screen on which appear (at randomly varying intervals) a series of images, some of which are emotionally neutral, and some of which are highly emotional (violent, sexual….). In Radin and Bierman’s early studies, skin conductance of a finger was used to measure physiological response They found that subjects responded strongly to emotional images compared to neutral images, and that the emotional response occurred between a fraction of a second to several seconds BEFORE the image appeared! Recently Professor Bierman (University of Amsterdam) repeated these experiments with subjects in an fMRI brain imager and found emotional responses in brain activity up to 4 seconds before the stimuli. Moreover he looked at raw data from other laboratories and found similar emotional responses before stimuli appeared. Professor Bierman presented these findings to the recent Tucson conference.

Professor Bierman’s Tucson Conference Presentation
Power Point File: tucson-2002.ppt (8.81 mb)
Anomalous Anticipatory Brain Activation Preceding Exposure Of Emotional And Neutral Pictures (PDF)
Dick J. Bierman and H. Stephen Scholte   University of Amsterdam

Dr. Charles T. Tart on precognition, in “The end of materialism”:      

“One of the most impressive overviews on precognitive studies I’ve ever seen was an article by parapsychologist Charles (Chuck) Honorton and psychologist Diana Ferrari, published in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1989. They carried out what now become a sophisticated way of assessing bodies of research literature on any phenomenon, a meta-analysis. Such an analysis recognizes  that various studies looked at the tagged phenomenon in various ways, under different experimental conditions, and with various degree of experimental rigor and control. When you look at all the published positive and negative  results obtained in this way, what’s the best conclusion about the reality or lack of it of the target phenomena? Honorton and Ferrari looked at the all the multiple-choice-type precognition studies published from 1935, when the methods for testing precognition were just evolving, through 1987. (The studies of precognition in the twenty years since there analysis strengthen and extend their conclusions.) In the English-language scientific literature they were able to find 309 studies, reported on in 113 articles. Sixty-two different investigators were involved, and the composite database was almost two million trails, generated by more than fifty thousand subjects. Most of the percipients were of course college students. Many studies involved thoroughly shuffled decks of Zener cards, often with additional randomising factors added after shuffling, such as cutting the deck according the newspaper accounts of the next day’s low temperature in some distant city, while others involved computer-generated target numbers. The combined results of the studies  produced odds against chance of 24 septillion to 1. What is a septillion? It’s 10 with 24 zeros after it, 10²⁴ . To put it more simply, it’s preposterous to believe that these cumulated precognitive results were due to chance. Lots of plain guessing was going on, certainly, but every once in a while a genuine precognitive perception of a future state of a targets occurred. One of the common arguments for rejecting evidence for psi phenomena is what’s called the fill-drawer problem. We humans like success, so a study with positive results is likely to be accepted for publication, and we’ll then know about it, while one with no results probably won’t be accepted. “Why waste expensive journal space on a study in which nothing happened?” Is the way in which an editor might think. Since scientists understand this attitude, they might not even summit the study for publication. They just leave the results in the file drawer. A simple way to think about this, is that if you accept the usual 1-to-20 odds against chance as a criterion for “significance,” then if you do experiments in which nothing truth happens, about 1 in 20 of them will show statistical significance by chance alone. If you get that 1 published and the other 19 languish in your files, a very misleading impression of reality is created. But suppose you and your colleagues have cumulatively published 10 studies on something, each with a 1-to-20 chance. If indeed nothing’s really happening that means that there are about 190 unsuccessful studies languishing in various file drawers. That’s a lot of hidden work! So maybe it’s more likely that something really is happening? Honorton and Ferrari tested how many unsuccessful, unpublished precognition studies there would need to be to bring the cumulative results of published precognition studies back down to chance results. They estimated that it would take 14,268 studies to do so. Given that there have never been more than a few people at a time working in experimental psychology, there is no way there could’ve been so many unsuccessful studies been carried out. How about flawed studies? If there is really no precognition than we would expect any apparently successful results to be due to methodological problems like opportunities for sensory cues, improper randomization of targets or recording and analysis errors.  rated the studies on quality of methodology, and found that not only was it not the case that poorer quality studies were more likely to produce more evidence for precognition, but also they found was that methodologically higher quality studies were associated with better precognition results. Since Honorton and Ferrari’s meta-analyses, many more studies have shown precognition effects, including unconscious ones. Dean Radin authoritative books (1997, 2006) are excellent places to see these reviewed.”

Dr. Charles T. Tart has been involved with research and theory in the fields of Hypnosis, Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, Parapsychology, Consciousness and Mindfulness since 1963. He has authored over a dozen books, two of which became widely-used textbooks; he has had more than 250 articles published in professional journals and books, including lead articles in such prestigious scientific journals as Science and Nature

Eminent thinkers who took the possibility of precognition seriously

Nobel Prize-winner

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1908-2008), 1970 Nobel prizewinner in literature, mentions precognition as a fact in his work.
…….the Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his book The Gulag Archipelago of psi abilities possessed by one of his former cellmates: ‘There is no doubt that he had the gift of precognition,’ Solzhenitsyn wrote. ‘More than once he went around in the cell in the morning and pointed: Today they are going to come for you and you. I saw it in my dream. And they came and got them.’
Solzhenitsyn, A. (1973). The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956. An experiment in literary investigation. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Other Eminent Figures: Exact Sciences, Engineering, Invention

JW Dunne (1875 -1949), aeronautical engineer, wrote An Experiment with Time, a book about precognition.
JW Dunne’s An Experiment with Time in which the author discussed in detail a number of his ostensibly precognitive dreams.
Dunne, J. W. (1934/1981). An Experiment With Time. London, UK: Papermac.

Gerald Feinberg (1933-1992), physicist, worked at Columbia and Princeton Universities, considered precognition to be at the base of most, or perhaps all, psi phenomena.
Feinberg, G. (1975). Precognition – a memory of things future. In L. Oteri (Ed.), Quantum physics and parapsychology (pp. 54-73). New York, NY: Parapsychology Foundation.

Psychologists and Social Scientists, Neuroscientists, Biologists, Physicians

David Bakan (1921-2004), professor of psychology at the Universities of Chicago and York, discussed Biblical prophecy
Bakan, D., Merkur, D., & Weiss, D. S. (2009). Maimonides’ cure of souls: Medieval precursor of psychoanalysis. Albany, NY: SUNY press.

Writers, Artists

The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca who seemed to anticipate precisely the date of his execution five years before the event in one of his plays,
Cardeña, E., Iribas, A., & Reijman, S. (2012). Art and psi. Journal of Parapsychology, 76, 3-25.

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910), writer, member of the American Society for Psychical Research, described various autobiographical psi events.
Mark Twain, who dreamed in detail about the future death of his brother,
Ebon, M. (1971). They Knew the Unknown. New York, NY: Signet.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), writer, published an appreciative foreword to a Spanish version of JW Dunne’s An Experiment with Time.

Alec Guiness (1914-2000), actor, wrote that he precognized the fatal accident of James Dean.
Guinness, A. (1985), Blessings in Disguise. New York, NY: Random House.

JB Priestley (1894-1984), writer, supported the notion of precognition in his essays and plays.
Priestley, J. B. (1989). Man and Time. London, UK: Crescent. (Originally published 1964).