Every year thousands of dollars are spent on psychics who claim to "know" the future. The present research questions why, despite no evidence that humans are able to psychically predict the future, do people persist in holding irrational beliefs about precognition? We argue that believing the future is predictable increases one's own perceived ability to exert control over future events. As a r...

It has been hypothesized that illusory agency detection is at the basis of belief in supernatural agents and paranormal beliefs. In the present study a biological motion perception task was used to study illusory agency detection in a group of skeptics and a group of paranormal believers. Participants were required to detect the presence or absence of a human agent in a point-light display. It ...

A recent meta-analysis of experiments from seven independent laboratories (n = 26) indicates that the human body can apparently detect randomly delivered stimuli occurring 1-10 s in the future (Mossbridge etal., 2012). The key observation in these studies is that human physiology appears to be able to distinguish between unpredictable dichotomous future stimuli, such as emotional vs. neutral im...

“Precognition” is an installation that seeks to explore the liminal space between actor and environment, human and technology, and self and Other through the performativity of flow. Deleuze and Guattari use the term “flow” to describe a deliberately imprecise way of knowing or understanding meaning beyond, across, and within the existing category of the form (trans. 1987). Within the materialis...

INTRODUCTION Although claims of precognition have been prevalent across human history, it is no surprise that these assertions have been met with strong skepticism. Precognition, the ability to obtain information about a future event, unknowable through inference alone, before the event actually occurs, conflicts with the fundamental subjective experience of time asymmetrically flowing from pas...

Research on psychic functioning, conducted over a two decade period, is examined to determine whether or not the phenomenon has been scientifically established. A secondary question is whether or not it is useful for government purposes. The primary work examined in this report was government sponsored research conducted at Stanford Research Institute, later known as SRI International, and at S...