Could humans predict the future? A surprising experiment says maybe

An EEG experiment suggests people may subconsciously react to future events before they happen. Here’s what researchers found.

You’ve heard of being on island time. But it’s possible your brain is doing a whole different type of time-hopping. There are several theories, studies, and hypotheses that complicate and explicate the relationship between consciousness and ideas of nonlinear time, according to Popular Mechanics. And while science can’t really explain why it happens, the phenomenon of precognition has been documented more than you might expect.

Can humans see the future?

One such experiment comes from Dean Radin, pHD, a Bell Labs alum who now runs his own research nonprofit and company and writes books on his discoveries, according to his website. His famous book, Entangled Minds, explores the idea that subatomic particles and their interactions could impact us over here in the regular world and explain phenomena like common intuition.

At the University of Nevada, he built a model of experiments along this vein, according to Popular Mechanics. In it, people were hooked up to an EEG machine that measured their physical response to stimuli. Then, they were asked to press a button to display an image. 

The images might be good, bad, or neutral. Before the “bad” images would play, test subjects showed an increase in brain activity, in a way they did not before the positive or neutral images, according to the outlet. 

This result has been replicated and the CIA even declassified its studies on ESP in the mid-90s, per Popular Mechanics. 

How does consciousness overlap with time?

There are other theories that posit various relationships between consciousness and time. 

Per Popular Mechanics: “Retrocausality” imagines that time is like a block. So, past, present, and future, are different pieces on the block and exist concurrently. Thus, they are able to impact one another, squished together as they are. 

Another, similar idea is called retrocausal consciousness, which imagines that the future touches the past the way water ripples. Or, maybe, time is a loop, with a subatomic form and function. But all are very theoretical, and science has maintained that the brain fizzes around, and then consciousness happens afterwards, per Popular Mechanics. 

So, who knows. But, next time your boss gets upset about a deadline, just blame your future self. It’s science. 

This post originally appeared at inc.com.

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