{"id":406,"date":"2011-01-04T22:07:20","date_gmt":"2011-01-05T04:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/?p=406"},"modified":"2011-01-04T22:07:20","modified_gmt":"2011-01-05T04:07:20","slug":"glimpsing-into-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/?p=406","title":{"rendered":"Glimpsing into the Future?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw this blog posting on NPR<\/a> about some recent experiments by Dr. Daryl Bem of Cornell that are so very weird and interesting that I just had to share.\u00a0 The blog, by Robert Krulwich, delves into a recent paper by Dr. Bem<\/a> in which he describes 9 experiments meant to probe extrasensory perception — ESP.\u00a0 I haven’t read the paper myself, as it is quite long and I haven’t found the time, but if Krulwich’s understanding of the results is correct, it is fascinating stuff.<\/p>\n

Krulwich describes two of Bem’s experiments in detail.\u00a0 In the first, Bem had students sit in front of a computer, which showed two curtains on the screen.\u00a0 Behind one was an image, behind the other nothing.\u00a0 The computer randomly determined where the image would go.\u00a0 The students’ job was to pick the curtain hiding the image.\u00a0 As you might expect, this is a purely random process and, sure enough, in the first variant of the experiment, the students picked the curtain with the image 49.8% of the time, essentially random guessing.\u00a0 However, when they were told that erotic images might be behind the curtain — porn if you will — they picked the curtain with the image 53.1% of the time.\u00a0 Not a whole lot more, but statistically different than random.\u00a0 Somehow, they were able to “see” where the image was without any more information, given the right motivation.<\/p>\n

In the second, even more intriguing experiment (to me), Bem had the students again sit at a computer.\u00a0 They were shown 64 words, one at a time for 3 seconds each, and asked to visualize the word for those 3 seconds.\u00a0 So, if the word was tree, the students were supposed to visualize a tree.\u00a0 After they went through all the words, they were given a quiz on what words they were shown — a memory quiz.\u00a0 All fine so far.\u00a0 After the quiz, they were shown 24 of the words, chosen at random, and again asked to visualize them.\u00a0 That was the end of the experiment.\u00a0 However, what Bem found is that the students did much better with those 24 words on the quiz than any other random selection of 24 words, even though they only saw those 24 words after the quiz.\u00a0 That is, studying those words after<\/strong><\/em> the quiz somehow helped them during<\/strong><\/em> the quiz.\u00a0 Studying after the fact improved their test score.<\/p>\n

Bem is interpreting this as some kind of seeing into the future, or that time is fluid or porous.\u00a0 And already it seems one paper has not been able to reproduce the results of one of his experiments (not either of these two described here).\u00a0 And I would say it is way too early to speculate about what these results mean about the nature of time and seeing the future.\u00a0 But, I have to say, these results are very strange, completely counter to anything we might have expected, and certainly very intriguing.\u00a0 It certainly begs more study, and I’m sure an army of scientists are trying to reproduce Bem’s results as you read this.\u00a0 I for one will definitely be following this story to see where this all leads.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw this blog posting on NPR about some recent experiments by Dr. Daryl Bem of Cornell that are so very weird and interesting that I just had to share.\u00a0 The blog, by Robert Krulwich, delves into a recent paper by Dr. Bem in which he describes 9 experiments meant to probe extrasensory perception — … Continue reading Glimpsing into the Future?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[170,173,175,171,172,174],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-daryl-bem","tag-esp","tag-future","tag-npr","tag-robert-krulwich","tag-time"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":407,"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions\/407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/buber.net\/Blah\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}