IS THIS REALLY PROOF THAT MAN CAN SEE INTO THE FUTURE?
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IS THIS REALLY PROOF THAT MAN CAN SEE INTO THE FUTURE?

Do some of us avoid tragedy by foreseeing it? Some scientists nowbelieve
that the brain really CAN predict events before they happen
Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened
room. The gentle whirring of machinery can be heard faintly in the
background.
He smiles and presses a grubby-looking red button.

In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain
scanner. If it wasn't for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker
across the woman's face, you could be forgiven for thinking this was
just a normal health check.
But this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal
experiments of all time, one that may well prove whether or not it is
possible to predict the future.
For the results - released exclusively to the Daily Mail - suggest that
ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them 'see'
the future.

Such amazing studies - if verified - might help explain the predictive
powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such Extra
Sensory Perception, deja vu and clairvoyance. On a more mundane level,
it may account for 'gut feelings' and instinct.
The man behind the experiments is certainly convinced. "We're satisfied
that people can sense the future before it happens," says Professor
Bierman, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam.

"We'd now like to move on and see what kind of person is particularly
good at it."
And Bierman is not alone: his findings mirror the data gathered by other
scientists and paranormal researchers both here and abroad.
Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from
Cambridge University, says: "So far, the evidence seems compelling. What
seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.
"In fact, it's not clear in physics why you can't see the future. In
physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this effect."

Virtually all the great scientific formulae which explain how the world
works allow information to flow backwards and forwards through time -
they can work either way, regardless.
Shortly after 9/11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky
few who had escaped the outrage.
It transpired that many of the survivors had changed their plans at the
last minute after vague feelings of unease.

It was a subtle, gnawing feeling that 'something' was not right. Nobody
vocalised it but shortly before the attacks, people started altering
their plans out of an unspoken instinct.
One woman suffered crippling stomach pain while queuing for one of the
ill-fated planes which flew into the World Trade Center.
She made her way to the lavatory only to recover spontaneously. She
missed her flight but survived the day. Amid the collective outpouring
of grief and horror it was easy to overlook such stories or write them
off as coincidences.

But in fact, these kind of stories point to an
interesting and deeper truth for those willing to look.
If, for example, fewer people decided to fly on aircraft that
subsequently crashed, then that would suggest a subconscious ability to
divine the future. Well, strange as it seems, that's just what happens.

The aircraft which flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11 were unusually
empty. All the hijacked planes were carrying only half the usual number
of passengers. Perhaps one unusually empty plane could be explained
away, but all four?
And it wasn't just on 9/11 that people subconsciously seemed to avoid
disaster. The scientist Ed Cox found that trains 'destined' to crash
carried far fewer people than they did normally.
Dr Jessica Utts, a statistician at the University of California, found
exactly the same bizarre effect.

If it was possible to divine the future, you might expect those at the
sharp end, such as pilots, to have the most finely tuned instincts of
all. And again, that's just what you see.
When the Air France Concorde crashed in 2000, it wasn't long before the
colleagues of those killed in the crash spoke about a sense of
foreboding that had gripped the crew and flight engineers before the
accident.
Speaking anonymously to the French newspaper Le Parisien, one spoke of a
'morbid expectation of an accident'.
"I had this sense that we were going to bump into the scenery," he said.
"The atmosphere on the Concorde team for the last few months, if one has
the guts to admit it, had been one of morbid expectation of an accident.
It was as if I was waiting for something to happen."

All of these stories suggest that we can pick up premonitions of events
that are yet to be.
Although these premonitions are not in glorious Technicolor, they are
often emotionally powerful enough for us to act upon them.
In technical parlance it is known as 'presentiment' because emotional
feelings are being received from the future, not hard facts or
information.

The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many years
the US military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme
known as Stargate, which set out to investigate premonitions and the
ability of mediums to predict the future.
Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by
the ability of 'lucky' soldiers to forecast the future.
These are the ones who survived battles against seemingly impossible
odds. Radin became convinced that thoughts and feelings - and
occasionally-actual glimpses of the future - could flow backwards in
time to guide soldiers.
It helped them make life-saving decisions, often on the basis of a
hunch.

He devised an experiment to test these ideas.
He hooked up volunteers to a modified lie detector, which measured an
electrical current across the surface of the skin.
This current changes when a person reacts to an event such as seeing an
extremely violent picture or video. It's the electrical equivalent of a
wince.
Radin showed sexually explicit, violent or soothing images to volunteers
in a random sequence determined by computer.

And he soon discovered that people began reacting to the pictures before
they saw them. It was unmistakable. They began to 'wince' a few seconds
before they actually saw the image.
And it happened time and time again, way beyond what chance alone would
allow.
So impressive were Radin's results that Dr Kary Mullis, a Nobel
Prizewinning chemist, took an interest. He was hooked up to Radin's
machine and shown the emotionally charged images.
"It's spooky," he says "I could see about three seconds into the future.
You shouldn't be able to do that."

Other researchers from around the world, from Edinburgh University to
Cornell in the US, rushed to duplicate Radin's experiment and improve on
it. And they got similar results.
It was soon discovered that gamblers began reacting subconsciously
shortly before they won or lost. The same effect was seen in those
terrified of animals, moments before they were shown the creatures.
The odds against all of these trials being wrong are literally millions
to one against.

Professor Dick Bierman decided to take this work even further. He is a
psychologist who has become convinced that time as we understand it is
an illusion. He could see no reason why people could not see into the
future just as easily as we dip into memories of our past.
He's in good company. Einstein described the distinction between the
past, present and future as 'a stubbornly persistent illusion'.
To prove Einstein's point, Bierman looked inside the brains of
volunteers using a hospital MRI scanner while he repeated Dr Radin's
experiments.

These scanners show which parts of the brain are active when we do
certain tasks or experience specific emotions.
Although extremely complex, and with each analysis taking weeks of
computing time, he has run the experiments twice involving more than 20
volunteers.
And the results suggest quite clearly that seemingly ordinary people are
capable of sensing the future on a fairly consistent basis. Bierman
emphasises that people are receiving feelings from the future rather
than specific 'visions'.

It's clear, though, that if ordinary people can receive feelings from
the future then perhaps the especially gifted may receive visions of
things yet to be.
It's also clear that many paranormal phenomena such as ESP and
clairvoyance could have their roots in presentiment.
After all, if you can see a few seconds into the future, why not a few
days or even years? And surely if you could look through time, why not
across great distances?It's a concept that ties the mind in knots,
unless you're a physicist.
"I believe that we can 'sense' the future," says the Nobel Prizewinning
physicist Brian Josephson.

"We just haven't yet established the mechanism allowing it to happen.
"People have had so called 'paranormal' or 'transcendental' experiences
along these lines. Bierman's work is another piece of the jigsaw. The
fact that we don't understand something does not mean that it doesn't
happen.'
If we are all regularly sensing the future or occasionally receiving
glimpses of it, as some mediums claim to do, then doesn't that mean we
can change the future and render the 'prediction' obsolete?

Or perhaps we were meant to receive the
premonition and act upon it? Such paradoxes could go on for ever,
providing a rich seam of material for films such as Minority Report -
based on a short story of the same name - in which a special police
department is able to foresee and prevent crimes before they have even
taken place.
Could such science fiction have a grain of truth in it after all? The
emerging view, Bierman explains, is that 'the future has implications
for the past'.

"This phenomena allows you to make a decision on the basis of what will
happen in the future. Does that restrain our free will? That's up to the
philosophers. I'm far too shallow a person to worry about that."
The problem with presentiment is that it appears so nebulous that you
can't rely on it to make reliable decisions. That may be the case, but
there are plenty of instances where people wished they had listened to
their premonitions or feelings of presentiment.

One of the saddest involves the Aberfan disaster. This occurred in 1966
when a coal tip collapsed and swept through a Welsh school killing 144
people, including 116 children. It turned out that 24 people had
received premonitions of the tragedy.
One involved a little girl who was killed. She told her mother shortly
before she was taken to school: "I dreamed I went to school and there
was no school there. Something black had come down all over it."

So should we listen to our instincts, hunches and dreams? Some experts
believe we may already be using them in our everyday lives to a
surprising degree.
Dr Jessica Utts at the University of California, who has worked for the
US military and CIA as an independent auditor of its paranormal
research, believes we are constantly sampling the future and using the
knowledge to help us make better decisions.
"I think we're doing it all the time," she says. "We've looked at the
data and it does seem to happen."

So perhaps the Queen in Through The Looking Glass was right: "It's a
poor sort of memory that only works backwards."