Listen to Your Intuition, Because Your Body Can Predict Future Events Without Conscious Clues | Popular Science
Humans can predict the future when we have some evidence--like clouds and the smell of rain hinting at a storm. But can we anticipate future events without sensory clues?
Can your body sense future events without any external clue?
ScienceDaily (Oct. 22, 2012) — Wouldn't it be amazing if our bodies prepared us for future events that could be very important to us, even if there's no clue about what those events will be?
Presentiment without any external clues may, in fact, exist, according to new Northwestern University research that analyzes the results of 26 studies published between 1978 and 2010.
A business person playing a video game during working hours. Wouldn't it be amazing if our bodies prepared us for future events that could be very important to us, even if there's no clue about what those events will be? (Credit: © Vitaly Raduntsev / Fotolia)
Can Your Body Sense Future Events Without Any External Clue?: Northwestern University News
This phenomenon is sometimes called “presentiment,” as in “sensing the future,” but Mossbridge said she and other researchers are not sure whether people are really sensing the future.
“I like to call the phenomenon ‘anomalous anticipatory activity,’” she said. “The phenomenon is anomalous, some scientists argue, because we can’t explain it using present-day understanding about how biology works; though explanations related to recent quantum biological findings could potentially make sense. It’s anticipatory because it seems to predict future physiological changes in response to an important event without any known clues, and it’s an activity because it consists of changes in the cardiopulmonary, skin and nervous systems.”
The study, “Predictive Physiological Anticipation Preceding Seemingly Unpredictable Stimuli: A Meta-Analysis,” is in the current edition of Frontiers in Perception Science. In addition to Mossbridge, co-authors of the study include Patrizio Tressoldi of the Università di Padova, Padova, Italy, and Jessica Utts of the University of California, Irvine.
Visual Perception, Neuroscience, and Cognition Lab Northwestern University
Some more specific research questions our lab focuses on:
- How do we perceive scenes, space, faces, objects, form, motion and time?
- How do awareness, intention, and short/long-term experience influence perception and attention?
- How does auditory, tactile, and visual information integrate to generate coherent perceptual experience?
- What are the neural (EEG) correlates of dynamic perceptual and attentional states?
- What mechanisms keep our mind in a balanced (metastable) state, enabling us to generate different perceptual interpretations?
- How do people differ in their abilities to control attention?
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