Time is not how we experience it on an everyday level,” says Radin. “In quantum mechanics, time may not even be part of our physical reality. It’s not that time doesn’t exist. It just behaves in a much stranger way than how it is seen through the lens of the human experience. It suggests there’s something probably associated with our consciousness that is different from our everyday experience of time. It’s able to jump outside ordinary experience and receive information from the past or future.”
Far from the carnival fortune-tellers whose clairvoyance comes from glancing at their customers’ social media accounts in a haze of incense, psychologists and neuroscientists have been trying to figure out what exactly is behind precognition, which is considered a type of extrasensory perception, or ESP. This unshakable feeling that something will transpire in the future is ancient among shamans and mystics, yet it remains unexplained.
Precognition suggests that our consciousness might actually reach beyond the linear perception of time, according to parapsychologist Dean Radin, Ph.D., the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and associated distinguished professor of integral and transpersonal psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has been probing consciousness for decades, and is the author of several books on the topic, including
Entangled Minds, the award-winning
Supernormal, and
Real Magic.
While working at the University of Nevada in the mid-1990s, Radin created an experiment to prove it. His hypothesis was that if awareness transcended time, responses to an upcoming stimulus would appear before the stimulus itself. Subjects were wired to an EEG machine and then told to press a button on a computer screen to be shown a random image. This image would either be positive, such as a sunrise, or negative, like a car crash.
The EEG would gauge brain activity within the five seconds between the prompt and the image. Predictions of seeing a positive image elicited little to no emotion, while a spike in brain activity meant the subject had a feeling they were going to be shown a negative image. This experiment has since been replicated ad nauseam and echoed the original results, which were statistically significant.
Since then, this type of pre-sentiment study has been successfully replicated about three dozen times. In 1995, the CIA even
declassified its own precognition research after statisticians were hired to review the work and declare it statistically reliable.
When statistics keep speaking to the existence of a phenomenon, that should be enough proof, Mossbridge says, but she recalls a physicist doubting her experiment results because he believed in linear time. Mossbridge’s research has shown that most people are capable of some level of precognition. She thinks that more would actually be aware of this ability—which is often looked at by society as delusional—if it was considered more mainstream.
Still, other cultures view precognition differently. Radin has studied Tibetan oracles who anticipated the future, for instance. He realized that clairvoyance, more scientifically known as “remote viewing,” is the ability to see not only through time, but also space. Thousands of years ago, eons before there would be news updates and weather forecasts, shamans who were able to perceive the future through time and space would be able to predict whether it would rain or where their enemies were advancing from. Some cultures use psychoactive substances such as morning glories or ayahuasca to awaken the second sight or “third eye.”
