Presentiment update
I was interviewed for a TV program on premonitions by ABC News 20/20. It will be broadcast on Friday October 26, 2012, and then afterwards the entire show can be seen on the ABC website.
Update (10/28/12): The broadcast program was completely different than what I had been told it would be by one of the producers. Someone at ABC News apparently thought there was too much science on the program, and as a result the show was dumbed down to the point where the content ranged between outright stupid and ridiculously silly.
This page on the ABC site makes the show newsworthy because it reports on "Evidence of Premonitions Discovered in New Study." This title refers to a meta-analysis of presentiment experiments published in the journal Frontiers in Perception Science by Northwestern University neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, University of Padova psychologist Patrizio Tressoldi, and University of California Irvine statistician Jessica Utts.
Update (10/28/12): The broadcast program was completely different than what I had been told it would be by one of the producers. Someone at ABC News apparently thought there was too much science on the program, and as a result the show was dumbed down to the point where the content ranged between outright stupid and ridiculously silly.
This page on the ABC site makes the show newsworthy because it reports on "Evidence of Premonitions Discovered in New Study." This title refers to a meta-analysis of presentiment experiments published in the journal Frontiers in Perception Science by Northwestern University neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, University of Padova psychologist Patrizio Tressoldi, and University of California Irvine statistician Jessica Utts.
What they analyzed were experiments similar to those I've been publishing since 1997 and describing every now and then on this blog. The paper's abstract reads:
This meta-analysis of 26 reports published between 1978 and 2010 tests an unusual hypothesis: for stimuli of two or more types that are presented in an order designed to be unpredictable and that produce different post-stimulus physiological activity, the direction of pre-stimulus physiological activity reflects the direction of post-stimulus physiological activity, resulting in an unexplained anticipatory effect. The reports we examined used one of two paradigms: (1) randomly ordered presentations of arousing vs. neutral stimuli, or (2) guessing tasks with feedback (correct vs. incorrect). Dependent variables included: electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume, pupil dilation, electroencephalographic activity, and blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) activity. To avoid including data hand-picked from multiple different analyses, no post hoc experiments were considered. The results reveal a significant overall effect with a small effect size [fixed effect: overall ES = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.15–0.27, z = 6.9, p < 2.7 × 10−12; random effects: overall (weighted) ES = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.13–0.29, z = 5.3, p < 5.7 × 10−8]. Higher quality experiments produced a quantitatively larger effect size and a greater level of significance than lower quality studies. The number of contrary unpublished reports that would be necessary to reduce the level of significance to chance (p > 0.05) was conservatively calculated to be 87 reports. We explore alternative explanations and examine the potential linkage between this unexplained anticipatory activity and other results demonstrating meaningful pre-stimulus activity preceding behaviorally relevant events. We conclude that to further examine this currently unexplained anticipatory activity, multiple replications arising from different laboratories using the same methods are necessary. The cause of this anticipatory activity, which undoubtedly lies within the realm of natural physical processes (as opposed to supernatural or paranormal ones), remains to be determined.
The parenthetical portion of the last line of the abstract is rather peculiar. As I understand it, it was added by the authors due to the concerns of at least one referee, who was apparently worried that some may see this paper as supporting evidence for an anomaly that is far too similar to what people have reported through the ages as instances of precognition.
Comments
Michael.
Sorry for the OT, but are there news on the replications of consciousness and double-slit experiment?
It was very interesting!
I'm not suprised the skeptics are playing the fraud card with all the good press psi research has garnered lately.
Also, can you disclose the two groups who are starting replications of the double-slit work? would be good to follow their progress.
But the idea that psi research has an especially serious problem with investigator fraud or other forms of misconduct is neither persuasive nor justified. Reported experiments are either independently repeatable or they are not, and my reading of the meta-analyses indicate that many of the now-classic experimental paradigms do replicate just as well, if not better, than they do in more conventional fields. One would need to propose multi-investigator fraud or collusion to explain away those results, and I don't see that as plausible.
I'm not at liberty to reveal the other groups interested in replicating the double-slit studies because one group is waiting to see if they receive a grant to support the work, and the other is still in the earliest formative stages. I can say that neither group is from the United States.
Regards, Michael.
Our original analysis was not a sliding window but rather a cumulative analysis starting an hour before to an hour after the moment of ignition. We selected that period of time because it seemed reasonable. It turned out to be fortuitous as far as our hypothesis goes, but perhaps other lengths might have been even more fortuitous.
http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2012/10/30/people-may-be-just-a-bit-psychic-even-they-dont-know-it/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DVj6NgTDI
My only gripe (and I realize this was probably beyond the scope of the present paper) is that I wish the authors would have given a little more consideration to those studies that are not, by definition, of "presentiment", but that still investigated unconscious, physiological psi effects. Only a few of such studies were included in the meta-analysis (denoted as "guessing tasks"); others were not because they did not directly test the hypothesis of the present paper, although they were mentioned elsewhere in the text. These particular unconscious-psi paradigms seem to be even less susceptible to potential confounds than the "presentiment" paradigm, which was clearly the emphasis of this meta analysis.
http://www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/TrialRegistryDetails.html
But these registries will be used only if journal editorial guidelines are revised to ensure publication of any registered study regardless of outcome, and also if methods of assessment used in academia give credit for conducting registered studies that fail to show anything interesting.
Based on the inertia of history, I can predict that neither of these factors will change any time soon, and thus registries will continue to be lauded as a wonderful idea, but they won't be used much.
Will it be possible to view your upcoming talk at the Aqus cafe, or will it be downloadable in the future.
Regards,
Michael.
In any case, I'm phasing out public talks. I'm much more interested in reaching thousands via webinars. So we are looking into live and recorded webcasting services.
E.g., one time on a multi-city book tour I ended up giving a talk to a total of two people, both of whom were staff from the book store! I swore I would never do that again.
I wonder how much thought you have given to ways to increase the effect size of presentiment experiments.
Do erotic pictures give best result? There seem to be so many other possibilities - e.g. an evil looking mask combined with a moderate electric shock!
Hmm - if you want some laboratory fear, how about recruiting some people with a phobia - say of spiders, and swapping the erotic images for spider images. I imagine some would agree to the experiment, and they would feel fear despite never being in any danger.
Also, I wonder if the pictures would not have more impact if you used VR goggles, and maybe 3D.
prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v109/i25/e253902
If I'm understanding it correctly it suggests that the paths of photons in a complex medium are random but correlated due to interactions between their wavelike aspects, and this is in a 'noisy' environment where I (perhaps over simplistically) would have expected any entaglement to decohere...Not really my area of expertise but I hope I'm not off beam by thinking similar effects could be expected in matter particles such as electrons etc.
Not sure if this might have theoretical implications in due course or not but I'd be interested in any thoughts on this by those better qualified than myself.
MickyD: I haven't seen any lab-based RNG PK studies published in many years. There are a few groups doing field consciousness studies with RNGs, but that's about it. I vaguely remember that for the 2000 MA we collapsed the PEAR results into just a few data points. But I don't have the paper handy so I'm basing this on memory.
Instead of presensing that they are about to flash, but actually having the thought, and then CAUSING the light or sound to go off??
So were we. We're investigating to see what happened.
This can be checked by checking the distribution of stimulus types used in the experiment. If that distribution is as expected by chance then it is unlikely that the RNG was influenced. Also, in some presentiment studies the stimuli are neutral -- light flashes or audio tones -- with no inherent reason to prefer one over another.
I'm afraid I don't know what this sentence means. Under the null hypothesis there is no relationship between pre-stimulus and post-stimulus differential effects. If there is a relationship, then something is alerting the person about their (randomly selected) future.
I don't have the full MA database in hand so I don't know what the overall z score is. I'd guess that it was at least, if not more significant, than the (conservative) selection presented this this paper.