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Professor: effects can precede causes

By: Associate Editor

What will happen in the future might affect the decisions made now.

That is the premise of a lecture to take place Friday at the Rhine Research Center by Daryl Bem, professor of Psychology at Cornell University.

Bem conducts experiments in precognitive habituation, a branch of psychology which flirts with quantum mechanics and looks into whether upcoming events influence the present.

"I challenge you to find any phenomenon where information goes backward in time," Bem said.

In 1980, Bem was asked to speak at a gathering of the Parapsychology Association.

He said he'd been a performing magician for quite some time, and the association wanted him to speak about how one could use magic tricks to fake the results of a scientific experiment dealing with psi - the scientific term for extra-sensory perception.

"Up till that point, I was a skeptic," he said. "I didn't think there was anything real to ESP."

Since then, Bem has held positions at colleges such as Harvard and Stanford, conducting experiments, which he says produce evidence that premonition is real.

"My strategy then is to take well-known phenomena and reverse cause and effect," he said.

In Bem's study, he shows a subject two pictures on a computer screen. The subject chooses the image they like better.

The computer then randomly chooses to flash one of the images on the screen for a duration of 17 milliseconds - not enough time to be consciously registered by the subject.

Bem said subjects chose the image which will be flashed approximately 3 to 5 percent more often than pure chance would predict.

"The important thing about a precognition experiment is that no one knows, not even the computer, what the pictures will be," he said.

Bem said the harshest criticism of this research comes from psychologists.

"Psychologists are very aware of how evidence can be wrong," he said, adding that he won't make claims if he doubts the findings.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," he said. "That's something that we all believe."

Bem said he that has found quantum physics to be entwined with his work.

"The general idea here is that I don't think it will ever be possible to explain psi by using a Newtonian view of the world," he said.

The challenge of proving the reality of precognition is a driving force, Bem said.

"One of the reasons I so much enjoy doing work on precognition is that it's the most difficult to explain," he said.

"We have no way of knowing how this works."