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So for example, say you're trying to measure the ability of someone to write a poem. You stick them on a big stage, and you have 1,000 highly skeptical, angry people in the audience, none of whom believe this person can make a poem on the spot, and they're all making a lot of noise and throwing paper at the person. Pretty soon they’re going to go away saying ‘See, we told you so. He couldn't come up with a decent poem. So we don’t believe in poems.’ Well, this is because of the inherent difficulty of the creative task combined with the context, which made it even more difficult. It’s an extreme example, but you get the idea.
WTB - Taking the sports analogy here, sometimes the example of a fastball pitcher in baseball is used to exemplify how mysterious the brain's functions really are, because studies show that a good fastball pitch comes at a batter too fast for the batter's brain to process and to actually coordinate a hit. In a lot of the experiments you talked about in the book, it seems the brain is capable of processing future events – which might explain how a fastball pitch can be hit. Could you go into that?
Radin – There’s a line of research which considers the brain as an anticipatory system, which means that a lot of what our brain is engaged in is trying to figure out what's coming next. These anticipations also give us a kind of an illusion of continuity in our experience, and they help us to avoid the tiger that might be waiting for us around the next corner. Our brain is always unconsciously scanning for potential danger and for other possibilities. This anticipatory processing means that a large chunk of our cognitive processing is devoted to figuring out probabilities of future events. The probabilities are based on sensory information we’re receiving now, and also on inferences about what might happen based on past experience. That some of this information might also contain information from the future is usually not considered part of this equation.So we started doing experiments, that I talk about in the book, to see if the mind can perceive the future, and not just infer it. We set it up in such a way that there's no way you can outguess what the future is. It's a truly random future that appears as a stimulus; we wanted to see if the nervous system began to respond before a stimulus appeared. This gave us a way to see if the nature of anticipation might also include elements of the actual future. If it does, then it helps in understanding how anticipatory systems work. I mean, as an anticipatory system it would be much more efficient to actually reach into the future a little bit to know what’s about to happen, rather than try to predict the future based only on what you know right now. This line of research I’ve called presentiment, which is an unconscious form of precognition.
WTB - That’s very interesting. So in presentiment, is it possible that anticipation can be read across world lines, as in the many worlds theory? Or in other words, does psi reach across different world lines, or multiple realities, which could be perhaps one of the reasons why psi is not a 100% accurate process?
Radin – Possibly. It’s an interesting theoretical idea, but I'm not sure that we need it. Maybe there’s just one universe. Continued on page 7
