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A recent paper released by Daryl Bem, Professor emeritus of Cornell University, suggests precognition to be a reality. While Bem himself remains principally skeptical, there has been little such virtuous response from the parapsychological community. Bem’s team instructed participants to visualize a series of objects (if it was written balloon, they were to visualize a balloon), and gave them a surprise free recall test where they were told to type in as many words as they could remember from the previous given set. Following this, they were given an activity that involved a series of words that they were previously told to remember. According to Bem’s study, the participants recalled words that were included in the activity significantly better than words that were not. If all else is controlled for, the only solution can be that the implicit rehearsal of words following a recall test boosts performance after it has actually taken place!

So what seems to be the problem? Daryl Bem seemingly followed all the right protocols, controlled for the right things and yet he is facing unrelenting attacks, even on the journal that allowed his paper to be “let through” peer review in the first place. Why is it that the scientific community generally seems to be unwilling to accept evidence for parapsychological phenomena? One reason often cited by proponents of parapsychology is that scientists, and cognitive scientists in particular, find these results to be irreconcilible with the modern understanding of the brain and mind. When confronted with the claims put forward by parapsychological researchers, cognitive scientists often have to integrate their knowledge about the brain as an information processing unit that is separated into modules who interact to form internal representation of the outside world with these mysterious ideas. Often, and I imagine especially to the biologically literate, this seems to be nigh impossible, and many discard it as a statistical anomaly, poor research or fraud. It begs the questions, are they wrong in doing so, and are they being close-minded? As the great late Carl Sagan often reminded us, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

However, when Jeff Tollaksen and his team showed that measurements made on quantum particles in the future can affect their behaviour in the present, the screams of skepticism were nowhere the levels of those directed to Bem. Naturally, there are differences between the two. For one, Tollaksen experimentally showed something that was already a theoretical possibility, and by many also assumed. Another, that follows from the first, is that the theoretical framework and mechanisms of which the phenomenon happened was already established making it much easier to explain. In Bem’s case there are very few suggestions as to how something like this can occur, and none that meet the modern standards of a scientific theory. This simple fact that there is no known mechanism for how this could occur is one thing, another is that these experiments have not been sufficiently replicated. Bem agrees with this and states in an interview with NewScientist that “replication is the gold standard of whether you should believe something”. There has always been a problem in science that experiments that do not acquire statistically significant results are very unlikely to be published when the phenomenon being investigated has not been widely recognised within the community. After all, why would anyone report that, contrary to no one’s belief, pigs cannot fly?

Of course, a phenomenon shouldn’t be rejected simply because there are no known laws that allows it to be possible. However, parapsychology has a bad track record when it comes to honest and good research, and often no relationship is found when experiments are replicated by skeptical scientists. When this happens in the rest of the academic community, one generally attempts to explain the anomalous results. Regrettably, parapsychological research papers are lacking the key ingredient in science: skepticism and open-mindedness. Perhaps the most important quality a scientist can have is to be able to realise that his own ideas may be wrong. Parapsychological researchers often control for fictional variables such as psychokinesis (moving objects using the power of mind), mind-reading – you name it, it’s there! The problem here is obviously that these so-called variables are not variables at all. They are fictional constructs until they are demonstrated through years of rigorous research to be otherwise. How do you imagine astrophysicists would view their colleagues of a different area of research if they were controlling for variables such as leprechauns and unicorns in their experiments?