Can the future be predicted? The pure scientific answer is that… yes. A ball thrown upwards will surely fall down (as long as it doesn't leave the earth's gravitational field). But is it possible to predict the future even when it relies on completely random events? New and respected psychological research claims that humans are capable of doing this. And the whole community is under stress.
At the end of this year, eight years of hard work on the part of Daryl Bam will come to an end, with the publication of the results of nine psychological experiments, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The experiments were conducted on more than a thousand students, during which they repeated familiar and well-known psychological experiments - but reversed the order of events.
What is meant by?
Well, in one of the experiments he used a method known as 'priming'. In the experiment as it is, a word should appear quickly on the board standing in front of the subject.
The word can be positive (eg, happiness) or negative (disgust). After the word has been presented, a pleasant or frightening picture appears on the screen - like a cute kitten, or a dangerous snake. The subjects are asked to determine whether the image is pleasant or discouraging. If they were first exposed to the positive word, then they will determine more quickly that the pleasant image is indeed pleasant. And if they are exposed to the negative word first, they will determine more quickly that the snake is intimidating. This is the experiment in the usual way.
Bem chose to make an unusual twist in the experiment, changing the order of events. The subject first sees the picture, and is asked to determine whether it is pleasant or frightening. Only then is the word 'framing' presented to him. Because both the pictures and the words are randomized, the subjects cannot know what word will appear after the picture. But - and here is the surprising part - Bem's results show that there is a small effect of the priming word even if it is presented after viewing the image and determining the emotion it evokes. In other words, the subject is affected by the priming word before it even appears on the screen, or the random generator has determined what the word is!
In another experiment, Bam informed the volunteers that an image was going to appear on one side of the screen, and asked them to guess which side it would appear on. The position of the picture was determined randomly, and from this it follows that the volunteers' chances of succeeding in guessing were supposed to be exactly 50%. But the end result was 53 percent success. It's not much more than expected, but when surveying a large number of people, even a small change from the expected average might suggest that there really is something out of the ordinary here.
If your salivary glands also start to work, you probably understood the meaning of the studies correctly. This may be the tip of the iceberg for true divination! And to tell the truth, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping there's something behind these results. They are against all the laws of physics and chemistry known to us, but after all - this is the way science progresses. Over the years, extraordinary observations accumulate. They reveal problems with existing theories, and the scientific community tries to explain these problems, until the theories themselves change to include the explanations. Is there a chance that the scientific community will receive the proof of the ability to predict the future?
In a word, yes.
In other words, not yet.
First of all, there are problems with the research. He does not always use the most powerful statistical tools to analyze the results. I will not add more, because statistics is my weak field, and I hope that the statistician Yossi Levy fromThe excellent blog 'The Princess of Science' He will lift the glove and examine the research in depth.
Another problem is in Bem's own words to the online magazine New Scientist - "I purposely waited until I thought there was a critical mass that was not a statistical error." Bam falls here into a well-known trap in statistics. He collected data until the result matched the expectation. It is possible that if he had continued to collect the data we would have seen that the pendulum balanced in the other direction, and summing up all the results would have shown that the subjects did not achieve better than expected by pure luck.
But even if there is no significant problem with the research (and right now there doesn't appear to be), and even if we ignore the problem with the fragmented data collection, it is important to understand that one experiment, or even a large number of experiments all coming from the same laboratory, does not constitute real proof in science. Bem is indeed a world-renowned researcher, and is known for his honesty and the precise and rigorous studies he conducts. And yet, he may have falsified data. The PhD students working under him may have falsified data. And even if there were no fakes, there will always be human error - for example, a random generator with a bug, which tends to display the images with a probability of 60% on the right side, and 40% on the left side. The researcher preparing the subjects has learned to unconsciously recognize that the random generator has a preference for the right, and draws (again, without even noticing) the subjects' attention to the right side of the screen.
Maybe.
This means that we must wait until more researchers repeat Bam's experiments, before we go dancing in the streets with Oren Zarif and a friend of his cheerful flock. If subsequent experiments yield similar results, I'll still be skeptical. But if the experiments that follow them show feasibility, and the next ones, and the next ones, I will start to be convinced. And that would be amazing. What new and exciting world will open outside the doors of the body? What strange information can we acquire about the mind, or perhaps the arrow of time?
but.
As you can guess, the psychology research community is buzzing and noisy around the study, and a number of researchers have already started trying to repeat the experiments themselves. At least one of them has already reported on A failure to repeat one of the experiments described in Bem's work. But he repeated the experiment in an online version, while at Bem he performed the experiment with flesh and blood volunteers. Bam claims that this is the focus of the problem, and it is possible. Unlikely, but possible. Anyway, I'm not worried. According to New Scientist, Bem claims that a dozen other researchers have already contacted him to get details of the experiments, with the aim of replicating them in their laboratories. Probably in the coming years we will know whether another parapsychological experiment has failed miserably, or maybe we will finally get a tangible hint of supernatural abilities...
...at least until we investigate and quantify them as well.
40 תגובות
Obviously it's possible because I started seeing the future 4 years ago as I saw a star every time I closed my eyes and since then I've been connected to some star that I just see every time
It is clear that you can predict the future just as well as you can predict the past.
The past is also constantly changing, open old history books and see for yourself. When you ask a historian about an event that happened five years ago, he will say: "It's still too early to say"...
So this is also the case for the future in five years: it is still too early to say. Regarding the future in five billion years - everything is much clearer. I can also make good predictions about the future in five thousand years. For example: the Arab-Israeli conflict will end long before then.
And another prediction: As long as there are humans, the repeated attempts to contradict the laws of conservation will continue.
The source of the deviations in the results is a statistical error or a poorly conducted experiment or fabricated results.
There are too many "studies" published in the press.
Even in 2010 there was common sense...
Please relax!
Roy published this in 2010 when repeated experiments had not yet accumulated and he emphasizes this in the article. Everything is fine, they tried over the years to restore it and in 2013 it seems they didn't succeed at all and this article from 2010 has no meaning.
Great, that's how science works.
Attention-grabbing headline and self-refuting ridiculous content.
How did you let such an article get published?? Even Ynet would not publish it
Roy, you are becoming a cheap populist and a very small publicist. If you want to be perceived as more of a clown, you'd better write about less exciting and sexy but more serious things.
I worked with birds, the kind we know from everyday life. I tested their ability in learning a simple distinction, both complex, and the volume of memory, and learning without any experience at all but only from looking at another bird, also the range of attention between near and far. The results showed similarity, almost equality to the achievements of chimpanzees in similar experiments. – The world is surprising. I've seen experiments of Pashnota discrimination with dolphins. They had to respond by touching the proboscis of one of two colors that brought a minnow to its mouth. The groi (colors) appeared in two separate places in the pool and at a considerable distance from each other. After a short experience with this game, the dolphin knew how to swim to the correct place even before it changed - - - so... what is it?
come on…
As someone who has dabbled a bit in time reversals, although from a physical point of view if we use things that are statistically dependent it is easier, from a psychological point of view the relation computer/person - person/soul must be taken into account, and just as computers can reproduce history in software but a person is often involved, so is a person/ Soul - the soul can be involved if it wants to. There are those who came to this from dealing with physics and encountered souls or realized that they are also involved, be careful, you don't always play on your home field with souls. Respectfully blowing water
I found the article.
Eitan is absolutely right.
And now seriously: a 0.33 second Google search sheds light on this story. There is a study by Bem B http://psych.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/PrecogAversion.pdf
Here are some quotes:
As can be seen from our published report in PLoS ONE, none of us produced results that supported the effect reported by Bem (neither did Eric Robinson in a paper published in July 2011 in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research). Our failure to replicate Bem's results will, no doubt, not come as a surprise to many readers as they will have assumed from the outset that the alleged paranormal effect was not real. Indeed, many commentators strongly criticized the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology for publishing Bem's paper in the first place, although it had been put through the same peer review process as other submissions.
ow a second group of scientists has also replicated Bem's experiments, and once again found no evidence for ESP. In an article forthcoming in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers Jeff Galak, Robyn LeBoeuf, Leif D. Nelson, and Joseph P. Simmons, the authors explained their procedure: "Across seven experiments (N = 3,289) we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding. We further conduct a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of these experiments and find that the average effect size (d = .04) is no different from zero.” In other words there was no evidence at all for ESP. The paper, "Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi," is available on the web page of the Social Science Research Network.
I am badly surprised by the publication of the article here in "Yaden". I did not see that Bam asked for the "Randy Award". I really wonder why…
Roy - what's wrong with you???
Such a process is possible without metaphysics. Where is Daryl Benno's article?
Roy please help me if you agree.
Equally the conclusion of the study can be-
"A random generator has human intelligence"
It may contradict all the principles of science...but what results
What to do???
It may sound funny but if we think about it seriously
There is no excess logic in the original conclusion
Of course you can see into the future!!
When I fill out a lottery form I know in advance that I will not win.
Here, I proved!
Naomi:
What is happening to you is exactly what Aryeh Seter described.
You are welcome to read something related here:
http://davidrosenthal1.googlepages.com/libet.pdf
There are many things the mind knows before the mind becomes aware of them.
If they happen quickly enough - it happens that the mind does not become aware of them at all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli
There are also situations in which, due to a brain defect, he is able to know things that never reach consciousness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_sight
Naomi - your experience, that is, what you feel is a jump before the sudden noise, but as long as you are not measured, it is impossible to prove anything - not every subjective report reflects reality. Apart from that, a situation is possible where the noise has not yet reached consciousness, but is activated in response to it (after it) - a recoil reflex and only then does the noise reach consciousness; In any case, your report does not support the existence of the concept of the future.
For years I've noticed that every time I hear a sudden and bouncing noise (like a door slamming or a glass falling) I jump a few hundredths of a second before the boom is heard.
And it surprises every time
Did reality happen a few hundredths of a second before I saw and heard it?
I think a comment-to-comment system on this site would be wonderful. This is a popular WordPress plugin
To 21: The reference is to the famous study where they took off the wings of a fly and told it "fly" but it did not fly, so the conclusion was that a fly without wings is deaf...
Yes! I remember it! They even made a movie about it! It is called 'The Fly'.
I have to admit that this is one of the most rambling rants I've ever read. It is clear that a word will not affect deep associations that a person has regarding objects, animals and/or anything else, associations that are established during his entire life starting from the dawn of his childhood, therefore the claim that a framing word has any effect on the subject's reference to the image is a big vanity. This is also the reason why the results of the new study supposedly demonstrate the ability to predict the future - of course not bears and not a forest and a field that does not see the future. The above study is very reminiscent of the study conducted by the Kurdish scientist with the fly.
Today is a disaster - a fire.
Yesterday was a disaster - Cellcom.
There is no choice, you have to check the mezuzahs.
Some unbelievable nonsense..
If I take a die, and throw it three times, expecting to get 6-6 in a row, and let's say it comes out the first time (probably obviously the chances are much lower than one try), what does it mean that I have 100 percent success?
In short, no one promised him 50 percent accuracy, with random things.. this experiment is a complete confusion of the mind..
And regarding the pictures with the word, what did he actually do? Made a man by the influence of a picture or a word, feel another picture, so that he guesses something after that?
He followed what he felt from the impact of what he saw before.
It has nothing to do with predicting the future.
In short, man is blessed with a lot of reason, intuition driven by emotions, he cannot predict any future, of course everything happens randomly in such a way that man cannot try with the help of emotions to guess what will happen..
Free your time for other things..
First of all, kudos to Cezana for bringing these articles, the content of which is not acceptable to everyone, it is an integral part of science!
After reading the article (yesterday you were tired) and the comments, I started thinking, what is actually predicting the future?
And since I, like others, "predicted" some things based on various data while making an informed guess in various cases without intending too much, the impression may be created that I can "see" the future...which is far from reality, I am simply one of those who listen relatively more than others, and therefore perhaps the fact that the students They guessed better is because the experiment forced them to listen to what was said and this contributed to their informed guess especially when very few elements were used in this experiment/research and not like in reality where there are often more things to consider and therefore it is more difficult to reach the correct guess!
Speaking of Oren Zarif, you were here in Russia who promised to extend limbs and several other "organs" only with supernatural energy.. I was there but at the last moment I cut in the direction of biofeedback! If anyone has tried, report the results!
Does anyone remember the water memory experiment?
Even Wikipedia is not clear on what the decisive conclusion from the experiment is.
Link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory
So there is no shortage of crazy experiments and I believe this is one of them.
Instead of hallucinating conclusions, one can learn that the brain managed to decipher a little the algorithm behind the non-random randomness generator.
Basically, a similar experiment is carried out regularly, on a weekly basis.
The lotto and toto lotteries and various casinos.
In lotteries, the house always wins because the probability is in its favor (but only slightly).
If he was really in the ability to predict, the amount of winnings would be greater.
In case of an inappropriate advertisement, please give me the address to which the advertisement refers so that I can mark it as blocked in Google's engine.
I would like to reply urgently:
Is the ad on the left for Russian escort girls?
And if so - is it possible to translate into Hebrew?
When does she take off her pants?
A harmless picantry here and there. 99.999% that this research was not carried out successfully. Most likely this is nonsense that the scientific hysterics would be happy to forget, but it's worth checking again. will not harm. This research will indeed occupy and waste additional time and resources, but the "reward" that the proof of the experiment will provide is worth the terrible waste.
Similar things can be seen in the quantum field. This perhaps explains why predicting the future tempts people, even respected scientists, to dabble in the field bordering on mumbo-jumbo.
Is there a chance to prove the experiment as valid: not really
Is it a revolution: certainly not
Is it worth checking out: why not. I have no problem being surprised but if I am allowed to predict the future then I predict that the whole experiment is wrong. I also envision a Jewish state, but that's another story.
Zvika,
I admit that I am surprised by your wonder. It is important, in my opinion, to also report on interesting experiments in the field of parapsychology, provided that they are treated with the appropriate skepticism. The current experiment was carried out by a reliable and organized researcher, and is about to be published in a scientific journal with careful peer review. Many psychologists are going to repeat the studies reported in it in the hope of reproducing their results.
Do I believe that the results indicate a real phenomenon? No.
Do I believe that it is appropriate to report the research and the small storm it created in the scientific community around it? Definitely yes.
For starters, I would like to see a serious examination of the data received from the random generator to check if it was really "random" (meaning statistically fair). How many times have we heard in the past about "studies" that supposedly prove supernatural phenomena of all kinds? Remember the research that proves plants have feelings?
Roy, I'm really surprised by you, and even more surprised that such an article gets a platform here at all.
deer,
Although I completely agree with your statement and personally I believe that when they try to repeat the experiment it will turn out to be a statistical error or a problematic methodology (Richard Wiseman, whose excellent blog is highly recommended, is one of the researchers documenting repeating the experiment and he has already encountered a problem in the experimental process, you can read More in h
http://www.planetnana.co.il/4x4xm/cell_phone_hazards.htm
), nevertheless I would like to point out one possibility that does come into consideration and is compatible, at least in a theoretical way, with evolutionary processes - your third paragraph may not be correct, that is, it is possible that we all have a weak ability to predict the future, an ability that is not noticeable without a careful experiment such as Daryl Bem tried to perform.
To the question of whether such an ability exists, why did it not develop and become stronger as time went by (since such an ability is a tremendous survival advantage) I have no answer, it is possible that for one reason or another the ability to predict future events is limited in its "power" or it is possible (as I truly believe) that there is no Any such ability and that the results of the experiment will not be reproduced by other researchers.
'Man of the human race'? That is in contrast to some commenters here who are humans who are not of the human race?
'future bra'?? My girlfriend will be happy… 🙂 🙂 🙂
Chen T,
You have a logical error in your inference
The fact that 1000 people cannot run 100m in less than 10s is not what needs to be checked
What needs to be checked is that out of the 1000 people, everyone can run - and this is a feature that provides an evolutionary advantage (for example, running away from a lion) and therefore exists in everyone..
Evolutionary proof that there is no mumbo jumbo..
1. A trait that gives a distinct evolutionary advantage spreads checker-check in the population (all males/females will want to reproduce with him/her)
2. Predicting the future (or any other paranormal feature) gives a distinct evolutionary advantage (I will know not to go there because there is a lion there or where you can find food, etc.)
3. I (a human being) do not know how to predict the future
4. Because there exists a person who does not know how to predict the future (me) -> in the entire human race there is no feature of a future bra
parable
Chen T,
Your assumption is baseless.
On what basis did you decide that this is a personal and unique ability?
As far as I know most human traits are normally distributed, so there are people who are better and there are those who are less good - and most people are average - in every capacity. For example, in running ability.
This year is 2010 and such an ability, extraordinary or not, has not yet been proven in any human being. ever in any scientific experiment.
quantitative or qualitative.
So where are these people who are able to predict the future or move objects by thinking??!
So as it stands right now, there are no humans with any supernatural abilities.
We would of course be happy to be wrong, it would be very interesting!
I think the initial trial approach is wrong. After all, if we took 1000 random volunteers and asked them to run 100 meters fast, how many of them would be able to reach 10 seconds? Does this mean that if none of them succeeded then the experiment failed and the human race cannot generate the speed required to cover the distance in 10 seconds?!
This is a personal and unique ability, and because of its uniqueness it should not be tested quantitatively.
If there are people who are able to predict the future, move objects by thinking or read minds, then they have an extraordinary ability and therefore this will not be proven by quantitative research but only by qualitative research. Bam set out to prove that the ability exists through quantitative research and this is an error. If he collected for ten years people who claim to be able to see the future and did a priori experiments on them to test their claim, then he could bring proof that such an ability exists.
It is possible that if he had repeated and performed the experiment on the group of volunteers who succeeded in predicting above say 51%.
And it turned out that the percentage of success increased.
He could go on and choose the most successful group in the prediction and repeat the experiment again.
In the end it might turn out that the percentage of success increased each time more.
Perhaps something can be inferred from this.
Oh really, neither serious nor scientific. It's enough that people believe everything anyway, it's unnecessary to fabricate studies to encourage them.
If enough researchers repeat the experiment some will receive a clear positive answer, if only because the experiment is repeated many times.
I wouldn't be so excited about an experiment that collected results until it was successful.