“A Computer expert who dreamed of scooping the Euro Millions jackpot has won £6.4million in the draw. Ryan Magee had a premonition last week he would win a share of a £96million stake on Friday – and was so certain he bought 11 tickets in four different towns on the day.” (Extract from metro online August 2008)Ryan Magee would appear to be a very lucky man. Not only did he win the lottery but according to metro online he also has some form of supernatural/paranormal ability to see into the future. So what is going on here? I would suggest nothing paranormal, but a lot of other interesting things that can tell us a lot about how we think. To suggest that someone could see into the future, retrieve information and then act on it is rather far fetched and problematic. It would require us to completely re-think our knowledge of space, time and free will. Luckily there are a number of other explanations.
First of all we seem to have a natural problem handling very large numbers and working out probabilities. To the naked eye, what happened with Ryan Magee is far too much of a coincidence to be explained away by chance or numbers. He had a dream he was going to win the lottery and then goes and does it. But some very quick calculations can show us that it really isn’t that much of an impressive coincidence. If we guess that the average person has 3 dreams a night that he/she can recall then over a space of a week that is 21 dreams and over the space of a year it is around 1150. I have 601 friends on Facebook (nearer 6 actual friends). So between me and my Facebook friends we experience over an astonishing six hundred thousand dreams a year (600,000). We dream about things that go on in life all the time – sooner or later a coincidence will happen. It is inevitable.
Furthermore, we possess extremely selective memory systems. What stands out from the ordinary is more easily remembered than what doesn’t. Thus, all the seemingly realistic and wishful dreams of getting a raise, meeting a handsome dark stranger or winning the lottery that don’t come to fruition are quickly forgotten. The number of forgotten dreams that Ryan will have experienced that never ‘came true’ will be in the tens of thousands probably. A further consideration in this particular case is the idea of supposed ‘visions’ causing a self fulfilling prophecy. If we are told by a psychic at a gipsy fair that we will be meeting a new love this month, then there is a very realistic chance we will be on the look out for one and thus change our behaviour based on what that bizarre old hag said. Ryan went and bought a load of more tickets and in doing so increased the likelihood of him winning the lottery by over 1000%. If you believe something is going to happen then there is a decent chance you will start to behave in a manner that will make it a lot more likely.
A final interesting explanation for why it is all too often easy to jump to paranormal explanations is that we sometimes often struggle to understand how cause and effect work. A study by American parapsychologist Cox (1956) is a fine example. Cox tried to examine whether we could unconsciously sense danger and avoid it. Cox’s analysis interestingly showed that passenger rail traffic was significantly lower on days of accidents in comparison to days on which everything went tickityboo. A suggestion here is that some individuals were unconsciously ‘sensing’ the accident yet to occur and avoiding the train that day for whatever reason. But things aren’t this simple. A lot of other stuff could be going on to decrease the number of passengers using trains on days when there are accidents. Let’s look at the weather for example. Bad weather puts people off leaving the house and increases the chances of a rail accident. The problem is that if your attention is drawn towards two things that are superficially related we appear to have a tendency to jump to conclusions about cause and effect, without too much consideration of what else could be going on. Perhaps it can be traced back to it being fairly adaptive many millennia ago. To understand and navigate through our worlds we have to continuously infer cause and effect. It is key that we will readily attribute cause and effect – ‘eating that plant caused me to be sick’, ‘speaking loudly attracted that rather nasty looking animal’s attention’. But occasionally this mechanism will misfire as it isn’t perfect.
So, if we can’t trust self reports of these supposed premonitions, what should we do? Scientifically test for such ability is the obvious answer. Do I happen to know anybody that has done it? Yes. Yes I do. There are a few researchers that report odd results supporting the idea that this might actually go on. But luckily I have conducted and supervised a number of experiments testing this seemingly crazy idea. In the first experiment we asked participants to try and use any precognitive ability to guess which image from pairs of pictures would later be presented on the screen. Males, females, believers and non-believers all scored what we would expect through pure chance. In the second, participants kept dream diaries to examine whether the content of their dreaming could in any way predict the contents of a video clip they then watched the following day. Did our group of participants do anything that goes beyond chance expectation? Not really I am afraid. I’m sure that Ryan won’t lose too much sleep though.
Implications
1. Be very wary of weirdo’s with crystal balls.
2. Avoid journeys when it is raining or the carriages seem a little empty. Something bad might happen.
3.Take a bit of time to think through actual causes of effects in your life, rather than settling with what sounds alright.
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