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Q. What is "presentiment"?
A. You can define it lots of ways. In the meta-study we're looking at here, it is "an unexplained anticipatory effect" in which human physiology predicts stimulus before they occur. People have shown the ability respond to threats before the threats even exist.
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Q. This is documented, how?
A. Typically, scientists have used a protocol in which they show test subjects two kinds of images: pleasant images, and unpleasant ones. They monitored response such as pupil dilation, EEG activity, electrodermal activity, etc., in order to measure how fast people would respond to threats.
Much to their surprise, they found that people geared up to react to threats well before shown the threats.
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Q. What kind of negative images?
A. Like snakes, or Hostel-style butchered corpses, or close-ups of Dr. D grinning, or anything that tends to produce a violent emotional reaction.
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Q. Probably the researchers were "cueing" the subjects subconsciously.
A. That's what they figured. So they used a computer to select the pleasant-vs-unpleasant images. Randomly. In real-time.
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Q. This had to have been jimmied by somebody at skeptiko.com?
A. This was a meta-analysis of 26 such studies -- it is a "replicable" effect -- done by Dr. Julia Mossbridge of Northwestern University and published under standard peer review. Here is the meta-analysis.
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Q. Any word on whether Mike Zunino can use this effect to adapt to low-away sliders?
A. No, but Dr. D is developing a decided pre-flinch towards Mariner games.
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Q. C'mon. What would a debunker say to this.
A. What debunkers do say is that we "know" this to be impossible without looking at it, so let's move on and do some science. ;- ) (Science is the method by which we investigate.)
But, the problem is that this effect is so replicable that eventually some reply has to be made. The last foxhole in this situation is this: that there must be so many failed experiments that have been hidden, this is the one lucky experiment that was reported, and the probabilities are within sensible bounds. ... of course, you could apply this objection to practically any experiment. No, that's not right; people do apply this objection to any experiment.
In this case, the objection is not reasonable. You could say, well, there have been some cases in which gangrene was cured by antibiotics. But how do we know there weren't 10 times as many cases where antibiotics didn't help at all, and the doctors just hid the evidence? At a certain point it becomes a question of "How do we know that Casper the friendly ghost isn't orbiting the moon?" It's tough to disprove a negative. The discussion becomes senseless, which is what "debunkers" (as opposed to sincere skeptics) are shooting for in the first place. Just muddying the water.
The PDF is linked. It's a slam-dunk. People get scared up to 7 seconds before a threat actually exists.
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Q. Supposing this were absolute truth, why wouldn't I have heard about it?
A. It gets shown on TV sometimes and articles show up in the papers occasionally. But it's not part of approved curriculum, K-12 and first-year college, so the dissemination is going to be slowed down a lot.
Either way, truth can't be suppressed forever. As time goes on, "presentiment" will either become public knowledge or the reverse will take place. Bill James is a case in point. One guy with the truth can be voted down by the whole world ... for a decade or two. But one guy with actual truth makes a majority.
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Q. What would be the implications of this "effect before cause" phenomenon?
A. Mossbridge, in her implications section, moves quickly and decisively to say the right things per a materialist establishment. It's pretty easy for a scientist to get disfellowshipped by materialists. Sigh.
But she does print this "below the fold," so to speak:
More importantly, we feel that these predictive anticipatory effects constitute a fourth category in addition to three broad categories of anticipatory effects that have already been established in psychophysiology and neuroscience.
The first category includes physiological anticipation of intentional motor activity, e.g., physiological anticipation of a willed movement begins at least 500 ms before the conscious report of the intention to move (Libet et al., 1983; Haggard and Eimer, 1999; Soon et al., 2008). The explanation for these effects is that human conscious expe- rience is preceded by subconscious initiation of that experience (Libet et al., 1983). (In other words, reflexes should not be as fast as they are - Dr. D)
The second category consists of experiments for which the EEG signals during the pre-stimulus period from trials on which stimuli will later be detected differ significantly from the pre-stimulus signals from trials on which stimuli will later be undetected. The general explanation for these effects is that specific phases and/or amplitudes of neural oscillatory firing (Ergenoglu et al., 2004; Mathewson et al., 2009; Panzeri et al., 2010) facilitate detection (or non-detection) of an upcoming stimulus. (The most bizarre of all four categories - Dr. D)
Recently, a third category of anticipatory effect, dubbed “pre-play,” was discovered when the pre-maze activity of mouse hippocampal neurons was shown to mimic the activity recorded during and after being in the maze, even in mice for whom a maze was novel (Dragoi and Tonegawa, 2011). The authors also found that the firing patterns typically recorded in one maze are predictably different from those recorded in another maze. They offer the explanation that preplay patterns may reflect a sort of recycling phenomenon in which the hippocampus uses generalizable firing pattern templates from its recent history to code for a ... (if we can believe this, then the first three are a walk in the park - Dr. D)
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What are the REAL implications for somebody -- like you -- with no dog in the fight? You're as equipped as Dr. D is to answer that. But I'll plump for this one: Reality is TOO complex. It just wouldn't work unless it were rigged.
Enjoy,
Dr D
