Precognition vs. Postdiction: You Decide
Your brain is a crazy place, and for the most part, we don’t know much about all that it can do. Even though we aren’t entirely sure how it works, I think we should place more trust in what it is aware of, even when we may not have the evidence to back it up.
To avoid any ‘priming’ from taking place with this article, I want to first present you with a fascinating study that was conducted in which participants were seated in front of a computer screen to watch two dots. The first dot would be presented as a black dot on one side of the screen, vanish, and reappear on the other side along with a change in its color. Participants were then asked how the dot behaved and what color it displayed.
It gets interesting when the percipients’ recollection of events were recorded.
But before we get further into that, let’s get a better idea of what precognition and postdiction are.
Postdicition: Hindsight is 20/20
Your brain will fill in the missing pieces so that when you look back and try to remember what happened, the facts that you have now are also present in those memories.
The neighbors of serial killers may think all is well during their neighborly time together, but once the true nature of their peer is revealed, they suddenly knew something was ‘off’ about that person. The frequent late nights out, all the garbage bags, or the random yard work makes sense now.
Postdiction, essentially, is your mind filling in the blanks in order to complete the narrative. Our brains really like stories and patterns. It helps them create a narrative of the world around us so that we can better survive whatever tomorrow will bring.
Precognition: I had a Feeling that Would Happen
Precognition is your mind's ability to pick up on something that hasn’t happened yet. You caught a bad vibe from someone, and later you find something out that confirms that initial reaction. We’ve all heard a story about someone having a bad feeling about something and not going or asking someone else not to do something, and it turned out that they would’ve been in some accident or another.
Acting as a prediction in its own way, this phenomenon occurs without all of the background information that can go into making a prediction. A prediction is seeing dark clouds and thinking it’s going to rain. Precognition is something like when you’re thinking about someone, you look down and see they’re calling you. It’s something that you mutter about and call weird, but at the same time, you’re not terribly surprised.
Precognition and Postdiction in Experiments
This brings us back to the color phi phenomena experiment first discussed at the beginning of this article.
After the appearance of the second dot, the participant was asked what they saw, how it behaved, and what color the dot was. And needless to say, the results were intriguing.
Some participants reported that the color was the same the whole time. Some said it changed halfway through. But most importantly, they all reported that the dot actually moved across the screen rather than being shown only in two locations.
This type of observation begs the question of if the participant correctly guessed where the dot was heading (otherwise, how could they have seen it moving in the direction that the second dot would flash) or if their brain filled in the path after the fact and did so quickly enough that the participant doesn’t have a conscious recollection of the dot not moving at all. When you start to consider that some of these participants only ever saw the second color and didn’t note the switch, it’s harder to say if it was postdiction or precognition.
If you think you already know which one it was, consider this. These aren’t the only experiments done to test the human brain’s ability for precognition.
Tests were done in which men and women had electrodes hooked up to their hands in order to measure skin conductance. They were then shown images randomly chosen images on a computer screen, one being something calm and one being something stimulating. The electrodes would report feedback on skin conductance which indicts an emotional response. The computer would randomly select the images, displaying them for only three seconds, and then grant a 10-second break in between images shown.
For the last five seconds in between the images that were shown, the electrodes recorded elevated skin conductance prior but only when they were about to be shown an emotionally stimulating image. The odds of this happening out of chance is 1:500. And these odds are determined after other tools are used to consider that maybe the participants would see a couple of calm images and begin to anticipate an emotional one.
Why Does This Matter?
One. I’m a giant nerd who believes our minds and bodies are more capable than we give them credit for and think that these kinds of experiments show how incredible our brains are.
Two. When the voice in your head is telling you something, these experiments and studies suggest that you trust whatever it tells you. Your mind seems to know things before you are consciously aware of them. The same way you can get a reading on someone’s character or mood before it is confirmed, your brain literally knows things before it has evidence to back it up.
If nothing else, that alone should offer you some comfort in trusting yourself when you get the feeling to do something or about someone or something. I also hope it ignites some curiosity in you to look at the world around you in a different way, but that's just my inner nerd thinking out loud.
Check out more about these studies:
Duke University. (2018, March 29). Consciousness — and the color-phi phenomenon. The New Behaviorism. https://sites.duke.edu/behavior/2018/03/29/consciousness-and-the-color-phi-phenomenon/#_ftn1.
Radin, D.I. (1997). Unconscious perception of future emotions: An experiment in presentiment. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 11(2), 163–180.
