Views of the block universe

In the beginning of my as-yet unpublished novel In the Midst of Lions, the character of Mary Hansard realizes one day that she can no longer tell apart the past and the future.

She has memories of both -- if you can call a mental picture of something from the future a memory -- and they both carry equal weight in her brain.  She can determine which is which only in the rare cases where she can verify if an event has occurred yet, such as her "memory" that a building in her neighborhood had burned down, when the (intact) building itself is right in front of her.  But in other cases, such as a conversation between her and a friend, she has no way to know whether it has already happened, or will happen in the future.

For Mary, there aren't three classes of events -- past, present, and future.  There are only two: present and not-present.  A good chunk of the first part of the book is an exploration of how that would affect someone psychologically.  (A summary: "not well.")

The funny thing is that there's nothing in this situation that specifically breaks the laws of physics.  (It's not accidental that I made the character of Mary a high school physics teacher.)  In 2019 I wrote about the peculiar and unresolved problem of "the arrow of time" -- that virtually all physical processes are time-reversible, meaning that they work equally well backwards and forwards.  A simple example is if you watched a video of a pool ball bouncing off the bumper of a billiards table, then ran it backward, there would be no obvious way to tell which was which.  (If you had a longer video, you might be able to tell, because friction with the table would bleed away energy from the ball, causing it to slow down -- so the forward version is the one that shows the ball slowing down, and the backward version is the one in which it speeds up.  This is the approach of the arrow of time problem from the angle of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; if you want to know more, you can check out my post linked above.)

So in terms of physics, it's mystifying why we perceive an arrow of time, when it seems like there's no reason we shouldn't have equal access to both past and future.  "Time is an illusion," Albert Einstein said, "but it is a remarkably persistent one."

Things get even weirder when you start looking into physicist Hermann Minkowski's idea of a block universe, where the three dimensions of space and one of time are mapped onto a three-dimensional solid.  Picture it as a loaf of bread that you can slice at any angle.  The angle of the slice is determined by the relative speed of your reference frame in comparison to the reference frame of what you're looking at, but what it leads us to is that the present loses its simultaneity -- two events that are simultaneous in one reference frame might occur sequentially in another.  Pushed to its ultimate conclusion -- and it must be interjected at this point that once again, there is nothing about Minkowski's ideas that breaks any known law of physics -- this means that an event that is in the past for me might be in the future for you, and therefore all of temporal sequencing is relative.  Minkowski showed that you can model the universe as a block within which exists not only everything in space, but everything in time.  The fact that we haven't gotten to events in the future is no more remarkable than the fact that we haven't gotten to some locations in space yet.  They're still out there, they still exist, even if we haven't seen them.

Kind of casts a harsh light on the concept of free will, doesn't it?

In any case, the topic comes up not because of physics, but because of an article by science writer Eric Wargo over at the site Inner Traditions called "The Amazing Reality of Dream Precognition."  It's an unfortunate choice of titles, because the article is well written and way less woo-woo than it sounds.  Wargo is seriously trying to figure out if people have access to the future, specifically through dreams, and has a project going to do some citizen science and have a large number of people record their dreams, then sift through them to see if there are examples of actual precognition.

It's an interesting idea, although there are some difficulties.  One is that Wargo claims that a lot of dream precognition is symbolic in nature; for example, you might dream of seeing a photograph of a friend shattered into pieces, and soon after she is injured in a terrible automobile accident.  But this requires that we rely on our own interpretation of the symbols after the fact.  And if there's one thing I've learned from ten years of writing here at Skeptophilia, it's that humans are really good at remodeling what actually happened to fit with what they think happened.

That said, Wargo is going about things the right way.  One of the things that has plagued serious research into precognition is that you only know a dream (or thought) is precognitive after the event has occurred, at which point there's always the possibility that your memory of the allegedly precognitive event has been contaminated by your knowledge of what really happened.  Also, there's the unfortunate fact that there are lots of cases of outright falsification.  If the records are made beforehand, this reduces the likelihood of this sort of thing, although it still requires that there be some kind of rigorous standard for keeping track of when the records were written down relative to the event they allegedly predicted.

So the idea is interesting, to say the least, and I need to keep in mind that my inclination to say "this is impossible" is itself a bias.  Even the lack of a mechanism for precognition -- something about which I've written before -- sort of evaporates if Minkowski was right about the block universe.  It still might not explain how you and I, both on the same planet moving at the same speed in the same reference frame, have access to different slices of the spacetime loaf, but at least it takes away one of the most consistent objections, which is that the future is fluid and therefore precognition would constitute looking at something that has no physical reality.

Reminds me of the "fixed points in time" in Doctor Who.  Maybe the truth is that everything is a fixed point in time, not just big events like the eruption of Pompeii.

So I'll be interested to see what Wargo comes up with.  Me, I'm keeping an open mind about the whole thing, as counterintuitive as it may seem to me.  If he can come up with actual evidence of precognition, dream or otherwise, it'll force me to re-evaluate a good chunk of how I think the world works.  And my character of Mary Hansard in In the Midst of Lions may turn out to be a rather alarming case of Plato's belief that "art mimics life."

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If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Lines of sight

What amazes me about so many crazy claims is that you get the impression that the people making them didn't even try to find a natural explanation.

It's one thing to speculate wildly about a phenomenon for which science is still searching for explanations.   Déjà vu, for example, is one experience that virtually everyone shares, and for which no convincing explanation has yet been found.  It's no wonder that it's fertile ground for people who prefer to ascribe such occurrences to the paranormal.

But in other cases, there is such a simple, convincing natural explanation that you have to wonder why the claimant isn't going there.   Such, for example, is the suggestion over at the phenomenally bizarre quasi-religious site The Watchman's Cry that geographical locations on the Earth that have been the sites of disasters (natural or manmade) fall along connecting lines, making some sort of mystical, meaningful pattern.

The article starts out with a bang, with the phrase, "Several months ago, I had four prophetic dreams which took place on the same night."  Four precognitive dreams is pretty impressive, I have to say, especially since most skeptics don't think precognition occurs at all.  Be that as it may, these dreams involved train wrecks, which is ironic, because that is what the rest of the site turns out to be.

Both literally and figuratively.

The site goes into great detail about various train derailments, and how if you connect them by lines (great circles, to be more precise), those lines then go around the Earth and connect to other sites that have had bad things happen.  These then intersect other such great circles, which go other interesting places, and so on.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's just ley lines all over again, isn't it?  If your search parameters are wide enough -- basically, "anywhere that anything bad has happened in the past two centuries" -- you can find great circles that link them up.  Which is entirely unsurprising.  I could draw a great circle anywhere on Earth and pretty much guarantee that I'll find three or more sites near it that had some kind of natural or manmade calamity in the past two centuries.  The Earth is a big place, and there are lots of calamities to choose from.

But what gets me most about this guy is that he doesn't even seem to understand that given the fact that the Earth is a sphere (an oblate spheroid, to be precise, but let's not get technical), a given point on Earth has an infinite number of great circles passing through it.  Just as two points on a plane define a line, two points on a sphere define a great circle.  And his lack of grasp of simple geometry becomes apparent when he tells us that it's amazing that two intersecting great circles (ones connecting Houston, Texas to train derailment sites in Rosedale, Maryland and Bear Creek, Alabama, respectively) were "only 900 feet apart."

How can you say that two intersecting lines are any specific distance apart?  If they intersect, they are (at that point) zero feet apart.  Farther from the intersection, they are farther apart.  Because that's how intersection works.

But the author of this site trumpets this statement as if it were some kind of epiphany.  It's like being excited because you found a triangle that had three sides.

I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, if you're curious to see more of this false-pattern malarkey, but suffice it to say that there's nothing at all mystical going on here.  He's adding geometry to coincidence and finding meaning, and it's no great surprise that it turns out to be the meaning he already believed going into it.

So like the ley lines people, this guy doesn't seem to be trying very hard to see if there's a natural explanation that sufficiently accounts for all of the facts, a tendency I have a hard time comprehending.  Why are people attracted to this kind of hokum?  Science itself is a grand, soaring vision, telling us that we are capable of understanding how the universe works, from the realm of the enormous to the realm of the unimaginably small.  With a little work, you can find out the rules that govern everything from galaxies to quarks.

But that, apparently, isn't enough for some people.

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Have any scientifically-minded friends who like to cook?  Or maybe, you've wondered why some recipes are so flexible, and others have to be followed to the letter?

Do I have the book for you.

In Science and Cooking: Physics Meets Food, from Homemade to Haute Cuisine, by Michael Brenner, Pia Sörensen, and David Weitz, you find out why recipes work the way they do -- and not only how altering them (such as using oil versus margarine versus butter in cookies) will affect the outcome, but what's going on that makes it happen that way.

Along the way, you get to read interviews with today's top chefs, and to find out some of their favorite recipes for you to try out in your own kitchen.  Full-color (and mouth-watering) illustrations are an added filigree, but the text by itself makes this book a must-have for anyone who enjoys cooking -- and wants to learn more about why it works the way it does.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Been there, done that

One of the strangest and most ubiquitous sensations is déjà vu, that bizarre sense that you're experiencing something that's happened before.  The name is French and means "already seen," but for some of us -- myself included -- the experience is almost always auditory.  It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's absolutely convincing.  The last really striking experience I had with déjà vu occurred about three years ago, when I was talking to the seventh-grade life science teacher about some interesting concept in genetics, and I was suddenly certain that I'd had this conversation before.

I recognized it -- the exchange, where we were standing, what we were discussing, even what particular words were spoken.  It was uncanny -- and unnerving.  My perplexity must have shown in my face, because my colleague said, "What's wrong?"  I explained to her what was going on, and asked if we'd discussed this before.

She shrugged.  "I don't think so.  At least not that I recall."

But her reassurance did nothing to change the feeling.  After the discussion was over, I was still sure -- despite my rational knowledge to the contrary -- that she and I had had that exact conversation before.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons hagerman, Déjà Vu (Six Flags Over Georgia) 01, CC BY 2.0]

I've heard a few explanations of déjà vu, none of them convincing.  Certainly, the paranormal ones don't seem to me to hold any water -- that it's evidence of reincarnation, or precognition, or astral transport (the subject having visited the place in spectral form, apparently), or telepathy (you're picking up the memories of someone else).  One at least minimally plausible one is that the information our brain is receiving from the senses is out of sync with our processing, so by the time the input is integrated and interpreted the sensory parts register it as already having happened.  But even this one doesn't make a lot of sense, given what I know of neuroscience; the time for sensory processing and interpretation in a normally-functioning brain is on the scale of milliseconds, so it seems highly unlikely to me that there could be a significant enough delay in one branch of the system to account for some kind of out-of-sync reception of the signal.

Last week, though, a study from Colorado State University was published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that is the first explanation of the phenomenon I've heard that really makes sense.  In "A Postdictive Bias Associated With Déjà Vu," Anne M. Cleary, Andrew M. Huebert, Katherine L. McNeely-White, and Kimberly S. Spahr show that in the middle of an episode of déjà vu, we're actually lousy at predicting what's going to happen next (which surely should occur if we really did somehow live through this moment before), but that the familiarity of some feature of the event triggers a response in the brain after the fact that gives rise to the feeling we knew what was going to happen before it did.

The authors write:

Recent research links reports of déjà vu – the feeling of having experienced something before despite knowing otherwise – with an illusory feeling of prediction.  In the present study, a new finding is presented in which reports of déjà vu are associated not only with a predictive bias, but also with a postdictive bias, whereby people are more likely to feel that an event unfolded as expected after the event prompted déjà vu than after it did not.  During a virtual tour, feelings of predicting the next turn were more likely during reported déjà vu, as in prior research.  Then, after actually seeing the turn, participants exhibited a postdictive bias toward feeling that the scene unfolded as expected following déjà vu reports.  This postdictive bias following déjà vu reports was associated with higher perceived scene familiarity intensity.  A potential reason for this association may be that high familiarity intensity as an event outcome unfolds falsely signals confirmatory evidence of having sensed all along how it would unfold. 

"If the entire scene feels intensely familiar as it unfolds, that might trick our brains into thinking we got it right after all," said study lead author Anne Cleary, in an interview with Science Daily. "Because it felt so familiar as you were going through it, it felt like you knew all along how it was going to go, even if that could not have been the case."

So unfortunately for those who like a supernatural explanation for things, it looks like déjà vu might well be another case of our brain being presented with conflicting explanations for something, and putting them together the best way it can (which in this case, is wrong).  In that sense, it's a little like those optical illusions showing forks with three prongs at one end and two at the other, or circular staircases that keep rising but end up where they started.  Your brain tries to shoehorn what it's getting into some kind of sense, and ends up with an incomplete, or outright erroneous, picture of things.

What I find funny is that even though this explanation makes good sense to me, when I experience déjà vu I am still left with the completely persuasive feeling that something uncanny has happened.  All of which once again illustrates that even us skeptics aren't as purely rational as we'd like to be -- or as we'd like everyone to think we are.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book recommendation was a fun book about math; this week's is a fun book about science.

In The Canon, New York Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Natalie Angier takes on a huge problem in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere), and does it with her signature clarity and sparkling humor: science illiteracy.

Angier worked with scientists from a variety of different fields -- physics, geology, biology, chemistry, meteorology/climatology, and others -- to come up with a compendium of what informed people should, at minimum, know about science.  In each of the sections of her book she looks at the basics of a different field, and explains concepts using analogies and examples that will have you smiling -- and understanding.

This is one of those books that should be required reading in every high school science curriculum.  As Angier points out, part of the reason we're in the environmental mess we currently face is because people either didn't know enough science to make smart decisions, or else knew it and set it aside for political and financial short-term expediency.  Whatever the cause, though, she's right that only education can cure it, and if that's going to succeed we need to counter the rote, dull, vocabulary-intense way science is usually taught in public schools.  We need to recapture the excitement of science -- that understanding stuff is fun.  

Angier's book takes a long stride in that direction.  I recommend it to everyone, layperson and science geek alike.  It's a whirlwind that will leave you laughing, and also marveling at just how cool the universe is.

Reversing the arrow

After a deep philosophical discussion, a friend once said to me, "You're only a skeptic because you don't have the balls to be a mystic."

I bristled (of course) and explained that my skepticism came from a desire to base my understanding on something more concrete than feelings and desires.  She shot back, "So you wouldn't have accepted the truth of atoms before the experiments that proved their existence."

"I would not have known they were real, no," I responded.

"So there could be great swaths of knowledge outside your direct experience, of which you are entirely ignorant."

"There could be, but I have no way of knowing."

She gave me a wicked grin and said, "The mystics do."

Predictably, neither of us convinced the other in the end.  I don't think any amount of mysticism would have arrived at the Bohr model of the atom and the periodic table, for example.  But the reason her arrow went in as deeply as it did is that she wasn't entirely wrong.  I have had a fascination with "other ways of knowing" -- mysticism, psychic phenomena, altered states of consciousness, and the like -- for as long as I can remember.  The lack of evidence for most of it has not dulled my interest -- if anything, it's piqued it further.

Woodcut by Camille Flammarion (1888) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I have this sort of dual life.  On the one hand, I consider myself of the hard-edged, evidence-demanding skeptical type.  On the other, I'm drawn to all sorts of woo-woo stuff that, despite my scoffing at it by day, has me researching it in the wee hours when I figure everyone's asleep and I won't get caught out.

It's also why all of my novels have a paranormal twist.  Living vicariously through my characters, I suppose.

Understandable, then, that my ears perked up immediately when I saw an article written by Dr. Julia Mossbridge in (of all places) The Daily Mail.  I've written about Mossbridge before -- she's been researching telepathy and precognition for fifteen years -- and my problem with her research, then and now, is that I don't see any possible mechanism by which either of those could work.

But.  That a scientist of her stature would continue to stand by this claim means it's worth consideration.  And I have to be careful of my own biases -- we all are prone to confirmation bias, and if my bent is to look at the world in a mechanistic fashion, it might well blind me to what's really going on.  It's never a good idea to jump from "I don't see how this could be true" to "this isn't true."  It's just a thinly-disguised version of the argument from ignorance, isn't it?  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Going from an abject statement of ignorance to an abject statement of certainty."

As far as what Mossbridge is actually claiming, it's more than a little fascinating.  She writes:

I led a team at the respected Northwestern University in the U.S. that analysed 26 experiments published over the previous 32 years, all of which examined the claim that human physiology can predict future important or emotional events. 

These studies had asked questions such as: ‘Do our bodies give different unconscious signals when we’re about to see a picture of someone pointing a gun at us, versus when we’re about to see a picture of a flower?’ 

In all of the experiments we analysed, a random number generator was used to select the future image so it was impossible to cheat.  The answer, our research concluded, is ‘yes’.  When you add all these experiments together, it became clear the human body goes through changes in advance of future important events — alerting our non-conscious minds seconds earlier to what is likely to happen. 

On average, participants’ bodies showed changes that were statistically reliable.  For instance, they would sweat more (a behaviour associated with fear) before they were shown an image of a gun, and less before they saw a flower. 

This happened too often to be scientifically considered chance.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the sense most of us have that time flow is one-directional.  How could the future influence the present?  But as Mossbridge correctly points out, the "arrow of time" problem is one of the great unsolved mysteries of physics.  Virtually all of the physicists' equations are time-symmetric -- the math works equally well whether time is flowing forward or backward.   One of the only exceptions is entropy -- which deserves a bit more explanation.

We observe that systems tend to progress toward more chaotic (high entropy) states.  A glass breaks, but the pieces never spontaneously come together and reassemble into a glass.  The sugar you've stirred into your coffee never comes back together into solid crystals sitting at the bottom of the cup.  Why is that?

The simplest explanation of this can be illustrated using a deck of cards.  If you were to shuffle an ordinary deck, what's the likelihood that (by random chance) they'd end up in numerical order by suit?

Nearly zero, of course.  The reason is that there are only 24 different states where they are organized that way (depending on the order of the suits), whereas there is a nearly infinite number of possible other arrangements.  So if you jump from one arrangement to another (by shuffling), the chance of landing on one of the 24 ordered states is very close to zero.  Progression toward disorder is the rule because, in general, there are way more disordered states than ordered ones.

But this still doesn't explain all of the other cases where time is completely symmetric.  Why do we remember the past but know nothing about the future?  The simple answer is that no one knows.  Einstein himself said, "The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a remarkably stubborn one."

So I'm curious to find out more of what Mossbridge is claiming.  And I'll soon have my chance, as I just ordered her new book The Premonition Code, which details the evidence that has convinced her and others that precognition actually exists.  (If you'd like to order the book as well, click the image below.)

 

Until then, I have to say the jury's still out on this one.  I'm trying to push aside both the disbeliever and the mystic that cohabit in my brain, and stick with the skeptic -- look at the argument as dispassionately as I can, and see where it leads.  Faced with a huge, mysterious, and complex universe, that's about the best we can ever do.

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You can't get on social media without running into those "What Star Trek character are you?" and "Click on the color you like best and find out about your personality!" tests, which purport to give you insight into yourself and your unconscious or subconscious traits.  While few of us look at these as any more than the games they are, there's one personality test -- the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which boils you down to where you fall on four scales -- extrovert/introvert, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving -- that a great many people, including a lot of counselors and psychologists, take seriously.

In The Personality Brokers, author Merve Emre looks not only at the test but how it originated.  It's a fascinating and twisty story of marketing, competing interests, praise, and scathing criticism that led to the mother/daughter team of Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers developing what is now the most familiar personality inventory in the world.

Emre doesn't shy away from the criticisms, but she is fair and even-handed in her approach.  The Personality Brokers is a fantastic read, especially for anyone interested in psychology, the brain, and the complexity of the human personality.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Dream a little dream of me

I got a "what do you think of this?" sort of email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday, along with a link to an article over at Collective Evolution entitled, "Scientist Demonstrates Fascinating Evidence of Precognitive Dreaming."

I tried not to read it with my scoffer-hat on.  I have to admit, though, that my immediate bias is to disbelieve in precognition of any sort -- if there was true precognition, there'd be no cases of psychics getting in car accidents and lots of cases of psychics winning the lottery.  Also, there's the troubling lack of a mechanism by which this could happen; regardless of where you fall on the free-will-versus-determinism spectrum, the one-way flow of time seems to preclude information of any kind going the other way (although it must be admitted up front that the "arrow of time" problem -- why time is asymmetrical, moving only one direction -- is a perplexing conundrum in physics that is far from settled).

So I tried to keep my mind open, but not so far open that my brains fell out.  And here's what I learned.

Stanley Krippner, professor of psychology at Saybrook University (Oakland, California), and was curious about the alleged phenomenon of precognitive dreams.  So he set up an experiment as follows, described in an interview with Geraldine Cremine of Vice Motherboard:

Each night, the subject dreamer would go through an ordinary night of dreaming, with an intent to dream about an experience he would have the following morning.  The dreamer was woken 4-5 times throughout the night to relay his dreams to an experimenter.  The following mornings, experimenters randomly selected an experience from a number of prearranged options, and the dreamer was subjected to that experience.  Dr. Krippner said there was no way for the participants to know what experience they would encounter before it was selected and administered.

One participant stood out.  He dreamed of birds several nights in a row, and the randomly-selected video and audio he was presented with was -- bird songs.

Job's Evil Dream, by William Blake (1805) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, you don't get very far by picking out the bit of your data that conforms best to your hypothesis, and putting all the weight on that.  But according to Krippner, the independent judges who evaluated the evidence found at least one correspondence between the dream content and the video or audio experience they were given the next morning.

Okay, this experiment does have something going for it, at least over the anecdotal, after-the-fact reporting that most instances of alleged precognition rely on.  The fact that the experience the next morning was chosen at random, and thus was uninfluenced by what the dreamer's reported dream content was, is certainly suggestive.  Having independent evaluators analyze the dreams and the experiences and see if there was a correlation is certainly better than having it done by someone with a preconceived notion of what they were going to find.

But... the problem with this study is the same one that plagues all dream-content studies; there's a relatively small number of dream types, and we all tend to dream about the same stuff.  Friends, family, being in danger (e.g. being chased, falling, being held captive), not to mention the inevitable erotic dreams we all have from time to time.  So in general terms, if you have the video/audio experience reflect any of these, chances are there'll be correlations at some point.

It very much remains to be seen if the number, and specificity, of those correlations was significantly over what you'd expect from chance alone.

Then Krippner does something that I find absolutely maddening; attributing the effect to quantum physics.  Krippner says,  "Quantum events happen on a different time scale to what most people live and experience in the West.  We have this understanding of time that is: ‘past, present, future.’ But quantum physics gives you a different concept of time."

Predictably, this made me weep softly while banging my head on the keyboard.

Quantum events happen on a different scale than we're used to, kind of by definition; quantum mechanics describes the behavior of matter and energy on the submicroscopic scales.  Yes, it's counterintuitive, even if you're not here "in the West."  But quantum effects such as entanglement are so difficult to observe in the macroscopic world that it's only in the last few years that physicists have been able to demonstrate conclusively that they exist.  The idea that entanglement explains why I and a friend showed up at work yesterday wearing nearly identical shirts is blatantly idiotic.

Actually, it's worse than that; it's lazy.  Instead of doing the hard work to learn some quantum physics -- an endeavor that would rapidly put to rest any idea that it has to do with dreams -- Krippner just goes, "Blah blah dreaming blah blah shamanic consciousness blah blah quantum mechanics," and people apparently just nod and say, "Cool.  Makes sense."

So the problem here is twofold.  One piece is to demonstrate that there's anything here to study, something that could be established by replicating Krippner's dreaming experiment and seeing if you get the same results.  This should be straightforward enough; after all, the experiment doesn't require much in the way of sophisticated technology.

But the second problem is the tendency of people to take stuff like this and run right off a cliff with it.  It's no different than young-Earth creationists saying that scientists say the Big Bang means "nothing exploded and made everything" and evolution means "humans evolved from a rock" (both statements are, by the way, direct quotes from creationists I've run into online).  A very brief amount of research would establish that in neither case have scientists claimed anything of the kind.  So if you're going to use scientific research, either to support/explain some claim of yours or to argue against one you'd like to disprove, then for cryin' in the sink find out what the scientists are actually saying.  It's way more interesting than the shallow, screwy misconceptions you often hear people trumpet, and it'll keep you from making silly mistakes and discrediting your entire argument.

Which, I'm afraid, is exactly what Stanley Krippner did.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

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Dream weavers

Hard-nosed science types like myself are often criticized by the paranormal enthusiasts for setting too high a bar for what we'll accept as evidence.  The supernatural world, they say, doesn't come when called, is highly sensitive to the mental states of people who are nearby, and isn't necessarily going to be detectable to scientific measurement devices.  Also, since a lot of the skeptics come into the discussion with a bias toward disbelief, they'll be likely to discount any hard evidence that does arise as a hoax or misinterpretation of natural phenomena.

Which, as I've mentioned before, is mighty convenient.  It seems to boil down to, "It exists, and you have to believe because I know it exists."  And I'm sorry, this simply isn't good enough.  If there are real paranormal phenomena out there, they should be accessible to the scientific method.  Such claims should stand or fall on the basis of evidence, just like any other proposed model of how things work.

The problem becomes more difficult with the specific claim of precognition/clairvoyance -- the idea that some of us (perhaps all of us) are capable of predicting the future, either through visions or dreams.  The special difficulty with this realm of the paranormal world is that a dream can't be proven to be precognitive until after the event it predicts actually happens; before that, it's just a weird dream, and you would have no particular reason to record it for posterity.  And given the human propensity for hoaxing, not to mention the general plasticity of memory, a claim that a specific dream was precognitive is inadmissible as evidence after the event in question has occurred.  It always reminds me of the quote from the 19th century Danish philosopher and writer, Søren Kierkegaard: "The tragedy of life is that it can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards."

This double-bind has foiled any attempts to study precognition... until now.  According to an article in Vice, a man named Hunter Lee Soik is attempting to create the world's largest database of dreams, in the hopes that the evidence from it will establish once and for all that clairvoyance exists.

Soik is the man behind Shadow, an app for recording your dreams.  You enter them into the app upon waking, and they are timestamped and placed in a worldwide dream database.  The database software is able to identify keywords; what Soik is hoping is that prior to major world events, there will be a spike in keywords relating to those events.  And given that the transcripts are timestamped, such spikes (should they occur) would be incontrovertible evidence that precognition, or at the very least some kind of collective consciousness, is occurring while people are asleep.

[image courtesy of photographer Rachel Calamusa and the Wikimedia Commons]

"(W)hat happens if we can start looking at precognitive dreams, and say, 'Oh, there are actually correlations that are happening in real time?'" Soik asks.  "If we had this data back during 9/11, we could point to a time-stamped audio file describing the dream that predates the actual event. So, how could you then refute that kind of hard data?"

Which certainly is approaching the question the right way.  My only concern is that the keywords would be specific enough, and the spikes analyzed for statistical significance.  Even if you accept particular accounts of dreams as true, the difficulty is that humans have dreams about a rather narrow range of things -- some of the more common ones reported are dreams of being chased, of falling, of death (either our own or of someone we know), of sex, of being naked, of being lost.  To represent an actual signal -- evidence of precognition -- you would have to establish (for example) that a statistically-significant spike in dreams about death had a direct relationship to a particular violent occurrence in the world, and wasn't just representing an upsurge in anxiety over the state of things.

But like I said: Shadow, and its creator Soik, seem to be taking the correct approach.  I do wish, however, that Soik wouldn't sail off into the ether so regularly, because it doesn't do anything for his credibility.  In his Vice interview, he states that precognition is like Schrödinger's Cat (a comparison that escapes me completely) and goes on to say, "Who else is dreaming what you're dreaming, for example?  I really believe a lot in quantum field mechanics.  And I believe that a lot of the science jargon [means] simply: If you're happy, and you hang out with someone, you make them happy, and they make someone else happy."

To which I respond:  (1) No, that is not what the science says.  (2) What the fuck does this even mean?

Be that as it may, I encourage any of my readers who are interested in contributing to get the Shadow app (you can download it from the link I included above).  The bigger the database, the easier it will be to establish whether any data generated is statistically significant.  And it would be nice to have a wide variety of people involved with contributing dream data, not just the woo crowd that usually gravitates toward such endeavors.

I'm thinking of doing it myself.  I could include last night's dream, which was about a state senator from Alaska who accidentally chopped my dog's tail off, and whom I was trying to talk into paying me $10,000 in damages for the mental anguish she was experiencing, because she could no longer wag to express "I'm happy" and "Oh, look, a squirrel," which seem to be the two most sophisticated concepts her lone functioning brain cell is capable of processing.

I wonder what world event that might be predicting?

Lord Dufferin and the man in the garden

For better or worse, being a skeptic doesn't mean that you don't find stories of the paranormal interesting -- nor that you can't react to them on an emotional level.

I mean, I'm the guy who thinks that television programming went into a nosedive the day The X Files was cancelled.  I am also the guy who would love to spend a night in a haunted house, but would be likely to piss my pants and then have a stroke if anything untoward happened.  So while I'd be a good guy to have on a team of ghost hunters, from a scientific and rational perspective, I'd be a bad choice from the standpoint of practical application and laundromat charges.

I still recall many of the ghost stories of my childhood.  My uncle was a grand storyteller, and had lots of tales (usually told in French) of the scary creatures of the Louisiana bayou, including the Loup-Garou (the Cajun answer to a werewolf) and Feu Follet (the "spirit fire," or will-of-the-wisp, which would steal your soul if you saw it -- unless you could cross running water before it caught you).  Later, I voraciously read Poe and Lovecraft, and dozens of books with names like True Tales of the Supernatural.

It was in one of the latter that I ran into the story of Lord Dufferin, a 19th century British statesman who spent most of his career shuttling all over the world -- from Canada to Syria to Russia to India to Burma.  His actual name was Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin, and his life coincided almost perfectly with Queen Victoria's -- she lived from 1819 to 1901, Dufferin from 1826 to 1902.

Dufferin was, by all accounts, well known in the social circuits of high society.  His biographer calls him "imaginative, sympathetic, warm-hearted, and gloriously versatile."  He also was an excellent storyteller, and there was one story he became famous for -- mostly because to his dying day, he swore that it was true.

One night, Dufferin said, he was visiting a friend who owned an estate in Ireland.  For some reason, he was unable to sleep, and after tossing and turning for a while, he finally got up and went out through a door and onto the balcony overlooking the estate gardens.

He became aware that there was a figure moving down in the garden, and as he watched, the figure got closer.  It was a man, carrying something on his back, but he was in shadow and it was impossible to tell anything about the man or his burden.  But after a moment, the man stepped out into a patch of moonlight, and looked up at Dufferin.

Dufferin recoiled.  The man was the most hideously ugly individual Dufferin had ever seen -- and the object on the man's back could be clearly seen to be a coffin.

Terrified, Dufferin retreated to his room.  The next morning, he told his host about what he'd seen, and Dufferin's friend brushed him off -- there was no one in the garden the previous evening, the friend said.  It must have been a nightmare.

Dufferin more or less forgot about the incident.  But many years later, when he was British Ambassador to France in the early 1890s, he was in Paris for a diplomatic meeting and was about to step onto an elevator when he glanced at the elevator operator, and saw that it was the same memorably ugly face as the man he remembered from his vision in the garden.  Alarmed, he backed away, and the door closed.  He was standing there, trying to make sense of what he had just seen, when there was a tremendous crash -- the elevator cable had broken, sending the elevator compartment hurtling down the shaft.  Everyone inside, including the operator, was killed.

Dufferin sought out hotel officials to ask about the elevator operator -- but the officials said that the man had just been hired that day, and no one knew anything about him.

Dufferin lived for another ten years, and enjoyed many a glass of brandy over the telling of this tale.  And you can see why; it's got all of the elements -- a terrifying vision that turns out to be a warning of danger, a scary-looking guy carrying a coffin across a garden at night, a near brush with death.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I doubt very much if the supernatural aspects of this story are true.  Human memory is a remarkably plastic thing, and I strongly suspect that most stories of precognition rely on imperfect recollection of the original premonition, be it a dream or (as in this case) a vision.  That Dufferin saw something in the garden that night is possible; that he had a nightmare is also possible.  That it was true precognition, I seriously doubt.  It is far more likely that, years later, a shock like seeing an ugly guy in an elevator, and narrowly escaping being killed when the elevator cable broke, would have conflated in his mind the incident with the earlier nightmare (or whatever it was).

But you have to admit that despite all of that, it makes a hell of a good story -- even one that a diehard skeptic might read with a cold shudder twanging up the spine.

And with that, I'll wish you all a very spooky and fun-filled Halloween.

Premonitions, the lottery, and statistics

An interesting post appeared yesterday over at Occult View.  Entitled, "If Psychic Ability Exists, Why Can't Anyone Predict Winning Lottery Numbers?", the post makes the claim that (1) psychic ability does exist, and (2) there have been people who have won the lottery based upon a premonition.  So, q.e.d., more or less.

As evidence, the author gives us three examples of people who allegedly won the lottery (or could have, in one case) because of precognition: Steve (dreamed of the numbers "2895," didn't play them, and six months later, those were the winning numbers); Frank (a friend of a friend who won a seven million dollar payout "around two decades ago" and "said he dreamed the winning numbers"); and Lillian (bought five Pick-Three tickets with the same three numbers, because she'd heard the numbers told to her by "a voice;" the tickets won, despite the fact that the odds were "one in a thousand").

So.  Where to start?

First, as a scientist, I must with some reluctance point out the quality of the evidence.  All of them are after-the-fact reporting -- the person had already won (well, other than Steve, who didn't even win), and reported afterwards that the numbers had come to them in a precognitive fashion.  So first, we run headlong into the problem with anecdotal reporting, which is the plasticity of the human memory and the unfortunate capacity of humans to make stuff up.

But let's assume, just for fun, that all three of these stories are true as written -- all three people did have some sort of hunch about the numbers ahead of time.  Does this constitute evidence for precognition?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.  I say "unfortunately" because it sure would be cool if it worked, wouldn't it?

Let's just look at the statistics first.

According to Matthew Sweeney, author of The Lottery Wars: Long Odds, Fast Money, and the Battle Over an American Institution, about $60 billion is spent annually on lottery tickets.  The number of tickets sold per year proved to be a hard number to find -- I'm not sure why -- but from a paper I looked at called How to Analyze the Lottery, by John Corbett and Charles Geyer, the number looked to be about 400 million annually.

Now, what about premonitions?  According to a 1987 survey conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, 67% of adults report having "regular episodes of precognition."  The current population of the US stands at a little more than 311 million people, so if we assume that the rates of precognition haven't changed in the last thirty years, it means that something on the order of 100 million people experience regular, accurate precognitive events.

Now, I'm no statistician, but we're talking about very big numbers here, both of ticket sales and of precognition. And with all of those precognitives walking around, you're telling me that the best evidence you could find were (1) a guy who dreamed of four numbers, didn't buy a ticket, and they came up six months later, (2) a guy who "heard from a friend" that the friend had dreamed his winning numbers "a couple of decades ago," and (3) a woman who won a one-in-a-thousand Pick-Three lottery because she heard the numbers from "a voice?"  Given that 67% of Americans claim that they have been able to predict the future, you would think that guessing the correct numbers would happen so often that the lottery commission would go bankrupt from the number of winning tickets sold.

One possible objection to all of this might be that precognitives can't control what their episodes of precognition are about; i.e., they can't choose what their mysterious skill will predict next.  But doesn't this just make all of this a giant case of dart-thrower's bias -- people only remember the times when their hunches proved correct, and forget about all of the hundreds of times that they didn't?  In order to be fair, we'd have to have some sort of accurate way of estimating the number of people who dreamed numbers, were told them by "a voice," or just had a hunch, and didn't win.  And because no one tends to advertise it when that happens, it's impossible even to venture a guess.  But if I can indulge in a hunch of my own, here, I suspect that it occurs a lot -- far more often than such "precognitive events" actually predict the future.

So, that's our look at psychic abilities for today.  If any Skeptophile in the studio audience is good at statistics, let me know what you thought of my analysis, and whether you think my point stands; and if you know of a quantitative way of approaching these data, do post it in the comments section.  Because, after all, the last thing I want to do is to do the same thing that our friends at Occult View did, which is to throw around a few numbers, tell a few stories, wave their arms around, and state a conclusion as if it were self-evident.