Driving through busy downtown streets, you approach an intersection governed by a traffic light, the signal is green for you, but for some reason you have the urge to stop or slow down. At the time you haven’t the slightest idea why or where this urge comes from, but in a split second the answer is revealed when a speeding truck careers through the opposing red light, creaming a delivery van that was in the very spot you would have been had you not slowed down. Are you psychic? Possibly, though there may be another explanation.
You sit quietly in your favourite reading chair, enjoying a new novel, when suddenly you’re hit by the worst feeling that something has happened to a dear friend, someone you’re very close to. Seconds later the phone rings, it’s that friend and you hear, tragically, through the sobbing, that her beloved husband has just had a heart attack. Is this ESP? Perhaps, though we might be able to define it a bit more narrowly.
What I’m referring to here is a little known but supremely interesting phenomena called Presentiment Effect. A term coined by Dean Radin, PhD and Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Sonoma State University, and author of Entangled Minds; Extrasensory Experiences in an Quantum Reality. Dr. Radin has been working for more than two decades to provide answers to some of the more difficult questions regarding consciousness, and in that field there are many difficult questions.
Presentiment Effect is the term used to describe anticipatory responses to emotionally significant events prior to the occurrence of the event. Quite simply, it is a confirmation (of sorts) of precognition.
Dr. Radin and others have been conducting experiments for nearly 20 years in an attempt to isolate and define the effect, and what they’ve learned is quite impressive. Most of these experiments consisted of double-blind studies wherein subjects were exposed to emotionally significant visual stimulus (whether positive or negative), while a skin-conductance measure and a photoplethysmograph for fingertip blood volume (an indicator of autonomic arousal) were monitored to look for reactions to the media being presented.[1]
The results of these experiments were intriguing to say the least. What Dr. Radin and his colleagues found was that a significant incidence of test subjects showed a premonitory ability for visual media that would generate an emotional response. His subjects would be isolated in a room and asked to look at a series of images on a computer screen. The images would be displayed at regular intervals of sixteen seconds (later revised to an acceptable period of time as to ensure the subject had returned to baseline physiology). The images were randomised and included both emotionally significant and insignificant material. As it turned out with the majority of subjects, milliseconds before the image was displayed, both a galvanic skin response and blood flow responses were recorded prior to the image appearing on the screen. This only happened when the image was emotionally significant, with the highest positive result correlating to erotic images.
In short, the test subjects were able to react to the content of the image before it was presented to them, and this is a fascinating idea indeed.
Further study has Dr. Radin working to determine if calm stimuli results in a calm premonitory reaction, as compared to arousing pictures eliciting an aroused reaction.
Now, what we’re talking about here is milliseconds of precognition on a subconscious level, but the basic facts of the issue are clear; there is a certain incidence of people in the general public who have precognitive ability. I don’t necessarily think that this makes them psychic, though I can see how some might jump to that conclusion. I personally see a connection between Dr. Radin’s work and the Akashic Record or Zero Point Field phenomenon, as I’ve discussed in previous articles.
According to philosopher of science Erwin Laszlo[2], the akashic records are not confined by the boundaries of time. Information has no past or future, it has only the present, and so it should be possible to access “records” from our future, accounting, at least in part, for the results of Dr. Radin’s experiments. It would appear that zero point field research is bound to converge with studies into the presentiment effect.
Speaking to real world applications or uses for such ability, in our distant past, those who were able to anticipate danger first survived longest, and thus their genetic material was pushed forward through the evolution of the species. And as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, through the study of the work of French biologist Rene Peoc’h and his robot loving baby chickens[3], premonitory or extra-sensory talents may have been far more prevalent in prehistoric times, with the incidence and effectiveness of those traits waning like a vestigial tail among the population.
The facts are that presentiment effect appears to be a real and measurable phenomenon, and that it appears to be congenital among our entire population. Whether there is cause to connect it with any higher form of psychic aptitude remains unanswered, but the research is ongoing, and I suspect that we’ll be seeing some interesting conclusions in the near future.
[1] This is essentially the same principle by which polygraph (lie detector) machines work to determine truthfulness.
[2] See Commercial Indignation’s previous article titled: Consciousness and the Zero Point Field: Are Akashic Records real?
[3] See Commercial Ingination’s previous article titled: PSI…Where Does It All Come From?