Quantum


HEALTH


Issue 9 February 2011


Precognition—the ability to perceive future events—has mostly been dismissed by mainstream scientists, even though careful researchers, such as Dr. Dean Radin, of the Noetic Sciences Institute in California, have amassed extensive evidence for its reality. What Bern has done has taken the debate into the mainstream, and he has his colleagues kicking and screaming in denial. Bern’s experiment showed two things, which are really two sides of the same coin: that precognition exists and that information can flow backward in time to influence past events. (It should be noted that mainstream physicists have shown this “backward in time to influence past actions” effect as well, in rigorous physics experiments, such as variations of the double- split experiment; however, the philosophic ramifications of these experiments have been largely ignored, dismissed as “just another weird aspect of the quantum realm.”)


Using more than 1,000 volunteers, Bern conducted a series of common psychology experiments over an eight-year period. The caveat is that in the experiments he reversed the order in which tasks were carried out, so that the “effect” came before the “cause.” For example, in one standard type of memory and recall test, subjects are shown a list of words; half of the list is then selected at random and subjects are asked to type those words into a computer. Later, the subjects are given a memory test to see which words they most easily recall. Usually, the words that they “practiced,” that is that they typed into the computer, are more easily remembered. What Bern did is reverse the order of the final two tasks. He gave people a list of words, then he gave them the memory test, and finally he had them type in a random selection of half the words on the list. “Practicing” those words should have had no effect on the results of the test, as the volunteers had already taken the memory test. But the results showed that they tended to remember the practice words more easily. The


16 Quantum Health


cause-effect arrow of time was reversed, and the conclusion can stated either of two ways: the volunteers somehow precognitively knew which words would be chosen at random to “practice” later and so recalled them more easily during the test or information flowed from their future back to their past to influence their performance on the test. Bern conducted other kinds of standard psychology tests, also reversing the time order of the normal procedure, and got the same results. While statistically the results are small, they are far enough above chance to be meaningful. Bern claims he took extreme precautions to prevent cheating or other kinds of contamination of the experimental protocols, and that precognition is the only logical explanation for the results.


While Bern admits that his particular way of experimenting has yet to be replicated (which may not be accurate, as there are many similar experiments that have been conducted by parapsychologists that have confirmed his results; they just haven’t been accepted for publication in conventional journals), he prepared for the outcry from skeptics and counters by following commonly accepted, rigorous experimental protocols, and he says, about writing up his conclusions for publication, “I tried to cover my ass in every possible way against critique.”


The furor over his results and over the journal’s peer-review committee for accepting his paper for publication is far from over. However, Bern’s results give us hope for the legitimization of many “psi” phenomena. Maybe the paradigm really is shifting, and we are indeed on the cusp of “frontier” science finally gaining a toehold in the mainstream.


www.quantumhealthmagazine.com


Science in the News


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76