Exploring the History and Psychology of Precognition

The idea that we may be able to see into the future is a concept that has existed for as long as humans began understanding what the past, present, and future even meant. What if it was true? I was recently told a story by my father of his grandfather’s passing and about a feeling that he had, that has also been described from other sources from around the internet. In the 90’s when he was living in Ft Stewart, Georgia, his grandfather began having heart complications. For about a week there was a period where he would slightly recover, then start to turn worse. He went up and down in his health for a while, until eventually my father received a phone call from his mother that his grandfather was going to be okay and released from the hospital soon. Later that day after the phone call, he got a strange feeling that something was wrong with his grandfather and that he was not okay. He originally shoved the feeling down and ignored it, reassured by his mothers call. Later that same day, his grandfather passed away. This imminent feeling of something being wrong before something is wrong is not an experience that is unique only to him. This feeling of unease that something was wrong without it actually being wrong, can be understood as a precognition. There have been studies conducted by government officials into the validity of people who claimed to get precognitions on a regular basis. One of the clearest examples of the government taking these ideas seriously was Project Stargate, a government backed research effort that began during the Cold War and studied whether psychic perception could have any intelligence value. It was primarily focused on remote viewing, which is the claimed ability to mentally perceive a hidden or distant location without physically being there. Instead of asking someone to predict a random future event, researchers were often asking whether a person could describe a military site, hidden object, or distant target using only their mind. From the little information that was released to the public we are able to determine the type of tests that they ran along with some of the methods used to engage in precognition. One of these methods was through sound frequencies, known as the Gateway Experience, which was performed primarily at the Monroe Institute, was a test in which various frequencies were played at specific tones that allowed the researchers to test vibrational frequency patterns in their patients. Some people involved in the larger world of remote viewing research trained with the Monroe Institute. The frequencies were not invented by the government, but they became part of the same larger question of The Gateway Experience. Could the brain be placed into a specific state where it becomes more sensitive to information it normally filters out? This collides with precognition because remote viewing and future sensing both fall into the same larger category of the mind receiving information that it should not logically have access to. The government was not testing a strange sci fi idea for fun. They were trying to determine if human intuition, altered states of consciousness, and perception could be turned into a reliable tool. If someone could describe a place they had never seen, then it was not a massive leap to wonder if the same kind of ability could also apply to events that had not happened yet. From this we can determine that there was at one point credibility to the idea of precognition, so much so that the government took interest in it. While they may not have publicly been able to find the truth, perhaps it was more a method of incorrect testing rather than the lack of precognitive abilities that led the government to determine that it was not possible. Despite the findings, there were a few individuals whose precognition results were statistically significant. Meaning that more often than not, their insights and intuitions were actually correct. The government’s mistake was attempting to use this ability for bomb threats and terrorist attacks. They believed if they could understand and eventually control precognition, then it would allow them to reliably stop threats before they happened. While great in theory, it did not work in reality, and project stargate and the related gateway experience were both eventually shut down by the government. One theory into what went wrong is that in order for someone to have a precognition about an event, they must have had at least some prior connection or level of awareness about the event and its many details. If an event is outside the realm of what a person understands, then there is no possible way for them to precognate it as it does not exist inside of their minds. Logically this makes sense, especially when looking deeper into the human mind. The brain is not able to think of entirely new ideas on its own. Every idea, thought, or explanation that has crossed your mind was not a 100% new and original thought or idea. Instead it was a combination of your past experiences, previous ideas, thoughts you may have seen someone else express, and a whole plethora of borrowing ideas from other brains until you came up with a unique twist on it. This process is very similar to how an artificial intelligence agent learns information and comes up with “new” ideas, though that is deserving of its own article. So if all of your thoughts must come from somewhere else, then how is anyone able to claim precognition at all? This is where things get even more interesting. Fundamentally, precognition involves the concept of being aware of something that has not yet happened, but is going to happen. The fact that the event is going to happen is the key that unlocks these thoughts. When the government conducted its testing, the events displayed to people who had precognition abilities were events that were completely random in order to purely test these skills. This method of testing may have been why they did not discover anything substantial. If you ask a person who has never learned anything about literature in their life how you could get started writing, they would be unable to answer you. On a basic level the concept of writing itself would be so far abstracted from them, that they would not be able to help you understand it or even begin to understand it themselves. So how would this person ever have the precognition to perceive that one day George RR Martin would finish his Game of Thrones series? This same concept can be used with the government tests. If a government were to test a person on their knowledge of a terrorist attack, but they did not understand a terrorist’s motives, nor how a bomb works, or any other relevant information, then trying to conceive that something might happen before it does happen in this way would not be possible. If they had instead been given an inkling of concept towards who the terrorists could have been, or what the bomb might have looked like, it may have been possible to put together the rest of the picture. When we look at precognition in this way it becomes less magic and more like a mad libs. There is enough context surrounding the event, that the brain is able to fill in the gaps and make a realistic prediction as to what might come next. So how are people able to fill in these gaps? Surely if it were that easy the lottery would no longer be able to exist as you could just look at all the past winners and predict the next one. There are several theories around this, ranging from an infinite loop of time that the universe is caught in, to a more relevant idea of simulation theory. Manifestation is one such concept of simulation theory that aligns with the idea of precognition through its core of vibrational frequencies. The idea of manifestation is that everything and everyone in the universe emits a certain vibrational frequency. By tuning your inner thoughts to match these frequencies, it allegedly becomes possible to morph reality. So perhaps those with precognitive abilities are not actually predicting the future at all, but are instead shaping it with their present thoughts. If you have been on the internet for any amount of time, you have undoubtedly heard the joke of “The Simpsons Predicted It”. This comes from the popular animated TV show The Simpsons, in which many of their episodes have ended up playing out in real life. One of the most notable Simpsons Predictions to become reality is Donald Trump being president, long before he even began campaigning. These predictions becoming true has happened so often that it is now common to look through old Simpsons episodes to see if a world event has already happened. At its peak, The Simpsons had hundreds of millions of people tuning in every night to watch the latest episode. Even today it is still one of Fox’s most successful shows ever, with reruns and new episodes still being mixed into regular viewing for many Americans. Many of these episodes presented ideas, such as Donald Trump being president, that were so insane many people had never had these thoughts before. But after watching the show, and being shown this new information, their brains were able to form new connections. This eventually led down the path of manifestation, as millions of people were all thinking the same wild thought “well, what if Donald really was president?” The thoughts from so many similar brains happening all at the same time eventually could have caused these instances to become reality. Intentional or not, our thoughts shape reality around us. Your own perspective and past experiences can make you view the same exact sequences of events in a completely different light than those around you. For example an idea that you had might spur you into action to complete a task that unlocks an entirely new experience, thus shaping the world around you. So maybe the entire idea of precognition is flawed. It is not that people are predicting what is going to happen, it is that their predictions are instead shaping the future. If this holds any weight, then the future is far from a fixed destination that we just happen to catch a glimpse of through some stroke of luck. Instead, it functions more like a developing pattern that is being molded by our memories, our attention, our beliefs, and our actions. In this context, a precognition is not a perfect window into tomorrow. It is instead the moment where the mind gathers enough pieces of a puzzle that it begins to perceive where things are headed long before the conscious brain can even find the words to explain it. This perspective is exactly why experiences like my father’s are so hard to just ignore. It might not be that he was viewing the future in a magical sense, but rather that some deeper part of his psyche understood the reality of the situation more clearly than the comforting words of a phone call. That deep seated understanding manifested as an intuitive feeling before it ever had the chance to become a coherent thought. This all points back to the same concept, that the future isn’t just something that happens to us. It is something we are actively helping to construct, one thought, one fear, one belief, and one action at a time. This begs the final question, how many of our strongest instincts are actually random, and how many are pieces of a pattern we have not learned how to explain yet? Perhaps we will never know, or maybe the version of you reading this right now at this very moment has already started to figure it out.