Is precognition a reality

I was having a chat today with an old friend and colleague Jen (not her real name). Once again and as we do every year reflect on the year we had, obligatory observations about the pace by which the years are passing us by and something Jen had first told me about more than 10 years ago. Jen contracted type I diabetes after a protracted illness when she was 16 years old. She is now in her 40’s and practicing medicine in a large hospital. What makes this tale interesting is the fact that Jen had read about diabetes when she was just seven years old. She says she remembers clearly that day and how she had formed a belief that she would one day contract the diseases. Jen’s story is not an isolated case. Over the years I’ve had countless such conversations – admitingly some much more convincing than others.

                                       

At the same time, I’ve been stuck with a quandary – is it possible, somehow, for our brain to have the potential to predict what will happen in the future? Is our brain, a system ultimately based on properties of quantum mechanics, be capitalising on phenomena that could aid our survival.

It turns out that in 2011, one of the most notorious scientific supporters of precognitive phenomena, Cornell University’s Professor Daryl J. Bem, urged researchers to attempt to replicate his time-reversed experimental findings, in order to create a database that as it grows, will increasingly allow for a more scrupulous analysis of precognition research.

Bem and colleagues have since published a meta-analysis based on this database that included 90 experiments from 33 laboratories across 14 different countries involving 12,406 participants. The analysis yielded an overall positive Hedges’ effect size (~ difference between 2 means), albeit relatively small, in favor of the theory that a persons’ cognitive and affective response in the present can be influenced by events in the future that are yet to occur. This was coupled with pretty strong statistical significance (p=1.3×10-11) indicating that the experimental results are not due to chance.

Are these results due to precognitive thought? A good question indeed…

Could we be living in the White Queen's kingdom?

Remembering the past is one thing but can we remember the future. That is, can we remember today what might happen to us tomorrow? We know for example that causes precede their effects and our actions are directed towards the future. This is true for what we know of memory. Our perceptions are the effects of external stimuli and causeality in the same way hinders our ability to remember the future.

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that in her land, "memory works both ways." Not only can the Queen remember things from the past, but she also remembers "things that happened the week after next." Alice attempts to argue with the Queen, stating "I'm sure mine only works one way...I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen replies, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

How much better would our lives be if we could live in the White Queen's kingdom, where our memory would work backwards and forewords? For instance, in such a world, you could take an exam and then study for it afterwards to make sure you performed well in the past.

Could we be living in the White Queen's kingdom?

Yoon-Ho Kim, R. et al,  reported in early 1999 an elaboration on a quantum eraser experiment (Quantum Eraser Delayed Choice) involving the concepts considered in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. What was able to be gleaned from this experiment is interrupted by many as evidence for backward causation.

The experiment doesn’t make bedtime reading but goes a little like this: two photons A‘ and B‘ are put into an entangled quantum state. The state or behavior detected in photon A is dependent on the detection of its entangled twin photon B. However, the detection of A‘s behavior occurs some nanoseconds before the detection of photon B. Thus, it would seem that the detection of photon B has a (nonlocal) effect on the behavior of photon A, which is temporally prior to it, and so can potentially be interpreted as a case of backward causation.

At the same time research from a different domian  may be indicating that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to "see into the future" is often referred to as psi phenomena.

Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. One such experiment involves recalling a list of given words.

We know that rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall in the future, but what if the rehearsal occurs after the recall? In one of the studies, college students were given a list of words and after reading the list, were given a surprise recall test to see how many words they remembered. 

Psychology in the new world physics

We have a reasonably good working knowledge of brain structure as a substrate supporting information processing. This structure–function relationship presupposes that physically describable brain mechanisms explain, questionably, the processing of every kind of psychologically described experience.

There are cases, for instances in which the conscious act of willfully altering the mode by which experiential information is processed itself changes, in systematic ways, the cerebral mechanisms utilized. More recently, neurological literature has coined the term "self-directed neuroplasticity" to serve as a general description of the principle that focused training and effort can systematically alter cerebral function.

At the same time attempts to understand the functional activity of the brain have so far mostly been based on some principles of classical physics that have been challenged by more contemporary quantum-based, uncertainty-bearing new physics.

According to the classical conception of the world, all causal connections between observables, tangibles are explainable in terms of mechanical interactions between material realities. But this restriction on modes of causation is not fully maintained by the currently applied principles of physics, which offer an alternative conceptual foundation for the scientific description and modeling of the causal structure of self-directed neuroplasticity.

Utilizing the conceptual framework of contemporary physics has at least one advantage for neuroscience and neuropsychology - Notions such as "feeling," and "knowing" are intrinsically mentalistic and experiential, cannot be described exclusively in terms of material structure.

Contemporary physics might allow data from the emerging field of self-directed neuroplasticity to be described and understood in a way that is more rationally coherent and ultimately useful than what is permitted by theories in which all causation is required to be fundamentally mechanical.

The quantum brain and consciousness

I’ve been having an on-going discussion with a colleague about mind-brain duality and the nature of consciousness – when we both came across a piece of writing (author unknown) which goes something like this:

“If we work up a competent knowledge of the physics and electrical engineering of our TV sets, that knowledge will not help us to decide how far to trust the person talking on the screen". This was in the context of Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue’s theoretical framework, Quantum Brain Dynamics (QBD) to help examine consciousness scientifically.

I wanted to pull together my thoughts and at the same time try and better understand QBD. This work seems to be based on the original physical theory of memory and brain functioning found in the work by Ricciardi and Umezawa in the 1960s. Jibu and Yasue aim to reveal the kind of physical phenomena that might underpin the process of consciousness from a physical point of view.

As we know there are numerous models explaining consciousness and even George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four bleak outlook is a contender in Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model of consciousness; a theory of consciousness based upon Cognitivism.

David Bohm took the view that quantum theory and relativity contradicted one another, and that this contradiction implied that there existed a more fundamental level in the physical universe pointing towards a deeper theory. This more fundamental level was proposed to represent an undivided wholeness and an implicate order, from which arises the explicate order of the universe as we experience it.

Bohm's proposed implicate order applies both to matter and consciousness, and he suggests that it could explain the relationship between them. Mind and matter are here seen as projections into our explicate order from the underlying reality of the implicate order. Bohm claims that when we look at the matter in space, we can see nothing in these concepts that helps us to understand consciousness.

Bohm sees the movement, change or flow and also the coherence of experiences, such as listening to music as a manifestation of the implicate order. He claims to derive evidence for this from the work of Jean Piaget in studying infants. Bohm, however, never proposed any specific brain mechanism by which his implicate order could emerge in a way that was relevant to consciousness, nor any means by which the propositions could be tested or falsified.

Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff collaborated to produce the theory known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) although each initially developing their ideas independently.  Penrose came to the problem from the point of view of pure mathematics and in particular Gödel's theorem.

Gödel, in 1931 proved that any theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. Further to that, for any consistent formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory. To put this in more simple terms; any system which is expressive enough to be consistent and complete is also expressive enough to contain self-referential statements which doom it to incompleteness.

In the 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind, Penrose argued that the theorem showed that the brain had the ability to go beyond what could be achieved by axioms or formal systems. He argued that this meant that the brain had some additional function that was not based on algorithms.   

Penrose went on to consider what it was in the human brain that was not driven by algorithms. Given the algorithm-based nature of most of physics, he decided that the random choice of position etc. that occurs when a quantum wave collapses into a particle was the only possibility for a non-computable process. However, Penrose conceded that the randomness of the wave function collapse, although free from algorithms, is not really a basis for any useful form of human understanding.

Penrose proposed a second form of wave function collapse that could apply where quanta did not interact with the environment, but might collapse on their own accord. He suggests that each quantum superposition has its own piece of space-time curvature, and when these become separated by more than the Planck length, they become unstable and collapse.