My "ESP" experiences

[Stereolab]

Hi all,

I have a degree in engineering, and am currently going for my MBA. Everyone who knows me agrees that I am as logical as they come. I have no burning desire to "believe" or "disbelieve" things...I just want to know the truth. I am not a religious person. I consider myself a skeptic.

All that said, I have experienced some things in my life that simply cannot be explained, as far as I can tell. I am wondering if anyone might have some insight as to what has happened to me, or if anyone has similar experiences to share.

I have had roughly 15 "ESP" experiences during my lifetime. I am going to explain the two most "powerful" in some detail. I will be happy to share others if there is any interest.

1. About 17 years ago, I was upstairs in my old house, and Wheel of Fortune was on on the downstairs television. It was prime-time, and we did not have cable TV, so there was no way I could have seen this particular episode before. I could not see the television at all, but when I heard Pat Sajak introduce the letters as "Place," I KNEW that the answer was "THE LAND OF OZ." I walked downstairs to see the TV, saw that the letters were placed just that way (even though none had yet been flipped around), and I informed my parents what the answer was going to be. I KNEW. I stuck around to see that I was right, and then went back upstairs. It really didn't strike me as all that odd, because I was only 12 at the time and didn't know about being "skeptical" yet.

2. This one was even more powerful. About 4 years ago, I was at my desk at work when the phone rang. I work with about 10,000 people--and there are literally hundreds of people that might have reason to call me at any particular time. I get calls all day long. Yet, this one instance, I immediately KNEW who was calling...what he was going to say...and what he wanted. It was like my thinking was about five seconds ahead of what was going on in reality. The person who called me only calls maybe two or three times a year, and the report he asked me for (and I KNEW that he would) was something I had done years before, I hadn't touched since, and I had absolutely no logical reason to believe that anyone would ever want to see it again.

Please understand that these were not just "coincidences" that I convinced myself were "ESP" after the fact. I've had plenty of "coincidences," as has everyone I'm sure. But...in these instances I KNEW, was absolutely 100% sure, what was going to happen.

Please let me know if you have ANY possible explanation for these occurences. I readily admit that I may not have thought about every possible explanation. But I've tried.

Please do NOT attack me personally. I will be happy to provide more details, and I am willing to present more of my credentials if need be. But I cannot stress enough that I am NOT exaggerating, and NOT trying to put one over on anyone.

And yes, I know there's a million dollars for me if I can do this type of thing on command. I have never been able to do so, nor has it ever come in handy for anything "important." I never know when it's going to happen, and I can't do anything that I know of to trigger it.

 

[pupdog]

On a number of occasions, I've been sure who was ringing my phone--but I've also been wrong, and sometimes it was someone who calls often. When it has been someone who doesn't call often, it does strike me as remarkable. But I think if one adds up the remarkable intuitions and compares the tally against the incorrect or trivial ones, it's rather humdrum.

On other occasions, certain events seem remarkably familiar--but this I think is "deja vu", or my brain getting ahead of my senses--a new experience somehow getting refiled as an old memory. I think it's a matter of how the brain works, rather than foresight of events. If it actually was foresight, then I think it should be possible to write down "predictions".

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Coincidence. You just happened to feel sure about it.

Regarding #2, I wonder if it's possible that you really didn't predict the call, but just remember it that way. In other words, I wonder if your thinking was five seconds behind what was happening. Also, is it possible that in a previous conversation he had given you a hint that he would ask for the report later?

I see Pupdog had the same thought.

~~ Paul

 

[Smartyfarty]

Regarding #1, it is entirely possible that you did see the episode before, even without cable. It could have been a rerun. Maybe hearing other parts of the show triggered your memory of a past show, and you really did KNOW the answer.

It's a possibility.

 

[!Xx+-Rational-+xX!]

Coincidence. You just happened to feel sure about it.

Regarding #2, I wonder if it's possible that you really didn't predict the call, but just remember it that way. In other words, I wonder if your thinking was five seconds behind what was happening. Also, is it possible that in a previous conversation he had given you a hint that he would ask for the report later?

I see Pupdog had the same thought.

~~ Paul

Don't forget to bring a towel!

 

[plindboe]

Welcome to the forum.

I think there's a good chance that in the first case you had prior knowledge of the event. Though almost forgotten and tugged away in your memory. As soon as your brain recognized familiar sounds, from the TV, the knowledge shortly surfaced. Perhaps you hadn't watched a full episode before, but had noticed a snippet from a prior broadcast, while at a friend's house or somewhere else.

With event no. 2, I think the possibilities pupdog and Paul provided are quite likely.

Memory is a funny thing.

 

[Tanja]

I watch a lot of TV, but while watching it I usually do about five different things at the same time as well. It happened to me several times that I watch a film, have no instant recollection that I have already seen it, but then a detail of some sort triggers my memory so I remember what comes next (like "oh yes, now they are going to enter this house and be attacked by a mad lady with a parrot" or something like that). This still does not mean I explicitly remember seeing the film, I just remember this particular event.

I never tried to attribute it to ESP, I just assumed I must have seen the film while I was not really concentrating on it, or that I saw it long time ago.

 

[CFLarsen]

Stereolab,

1st experience

It's not even necessary to have seen the show before. Imagine the X's are the letters:

XXX XXXX XX XX

OK, we know it's a place. We also know that it's a sentence, not a one-word place. What do sentences usually begin with in English?

THE

It's a place. A house, a room, a cellar, a basement, a...land.

So, far, we have two possibilities:

THE ROOM

or

THE LAND

A two-letter word following each possibilites? In English, that has to be:

OF, IN, AT, ON

So, we have:

THE ROOM OF/IN/AT/ON

or

THE LAND OF/IN/AT/ON

And then, we need a two-letter word, which most likely is a place-name?

THE LAND OF OZ.

We also know that you lived in the US, where L. Frank Baum's story of Dorothy's adventures are much more known than in other parts of the world.

You said you were 12 at the time: When had you last read it, or had it told? Was it a favorite of yours?

No mystery at all.

2nd experience

A classical example of selective memory. Michael Shermer explains it too, in his book "Why People Believe Weird Things". We remember the times when we guessed right, but forget the many times we guessed wrong.

You also have to realize that memory is not a tape-recorder. We do not remember events, we reconstruct events. Each experience you remember is not a piece of film, ready to be played.

No mystery at all.

Be very careful with taking examples like these as evidence that the paranormal exists. They are merely quaint reminders of just how complicated we are.

 

[Richard]

We get questions like this all the time. The best answer is,

I don't know what happend to you.

It might have been psychic, it might have been something else, it might not have happend the way you remember or at all.

 

[Lucianarchy]

Hi, Stereolab.

You provide some interesting experiences. As a skeptic myself, I have also experienced some interesting 'coincidences' and, as a skeptic, I have applied critical thinking to try to explain what happened. To date, I have no rational explanation for what happens, and it does indeed appear that effects like 'esp' may well be beyond the the understanding of current mainstream science.

See the links in my sig for my examples.

Best wishes and good luck to you.

 

[dharlow]

Claus, I believe he said he thought of the phrase "The Land of OZ" before seeing the television (although it could be a misremembering of the sequence of events). Nevertheless, we cannot be sure that this was not a rerun. Sometimes the same show is run at a different time on different channels. I did not have cable in my house either, but we had access to local channels from the neighboring state, and the same show of Jeopardy was run at 5:00 on one station, and 5:30 on another. I would sometimes watch the 5 show, then watch the 5:30 with my family and "know" all the answers, having memorized them before. A possible explanation would be that the poster caught a glimpse of the show run at an earlier time when this phrase was displayed, then remembered it when the show was rerun later.

 

[Jeff Corey]

I get the #2 thing all the time.
But there is a mundane explanation.

 

[CFLarsen]

dharlow,

You're right, my bad. Stereolab could not see the TV.

However, we do not have the date of broadcast, so we cannot track down to see whether it was a rerun.

Of course, we also have to take into account that it could simply be blind luck. What we would need is independently repeated experiments, not anecdotes.

 

[uneasy]

Stereolab,

1st experience

It's not even necessary to have seen the show before. Imagine the X's are the letters:

(snip)

No mystery at all.

2nd experience

A classical example of selective memory. Michael Shermer explains it too, in his book "Why People Believe Weird Things". We remember the times when we guessed right, but forget the many times we guessed wrong.

(snip)

No mystery at all.

In the first case, that is the most complicated way to say "You took a guess and got lucky" I have seen in a while.

In the second case, wait a second, in the first case you proved his ESP wrong because he was smart, but now he has faulty memory.

Never mind...


Stereolab, it frightens me that someone with a degree in engineering can believe those experiences are significant. Do you remember hearing something about scientists or engineers in your studies? Did any of them promote theories by saying, "I saw something that no one else saw, and I can't measure, and no one else can measure, but I know it's significant"?

 

[CFLarsen]

In the first case, that is the most complicated way to say "You took a guess and got lucky" I have seen in a while.

In the second case, wait a second, in the first case you proved his ESP wrong because he was smart, but now he has faulty memory.

I did not "prove" his ESP wrong. I provided a perfectly rational explanation, one much more probable than a supernatural one. I see no problem with elaborating on an explanation. Simply saying "You took a guess and got lucky" explains very little in itself.

I did not say he has faulty memory, I explained that the memory is not a tape recorder.

In any case, I don't see why being smart excludes a faulty memory.

 

[SteveGrenard]

Stereolab:

There is an emergent literature poviding hard, neuralistic evidence for the precognitive faculty. The fact that there are people here challenging Occam by looking for complicated, elaborate rationales for your experience is well and good but they continue to remain close minded regarding the scientific evidence and ignore it. Fortunately they are in a minority but happen to congregate here led by a person who epitimizes close-mindedness. This makes me uneasy.


JSE: Volume 16: Number 2: Article 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Differential Event-Related Potentials to Targets and Decoys in a Guessing Task
Bruce E. McDonough, Norman S. Don, and Charles A. Warren, Kairos Foundation, University of Illinois at Chicago

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 20 subjects performing a computerized, forced-choice guessing task. On each of 40 trials, ERPs were elicited by digitized images of 4 playing cards, sequentially presented on a video monitor for 150 ms. After the last card was presented, subjects guessed which of the 4 cards would be the target for that trial. Following the subject's guess, the computer randomly selected one of the 4 cards to be the target and presented this as feedback; the remaining 3 cards served as nontarget decoys for the trial. We found that a negative Slow Wave measured at 150-500 ms post-stimulus had greater amplitude when elicited by targets than when elicited by nontarget decoys (p ¾ .05). This result indicates an apparent communications anomaly because no viable conventional explanation of the ERP differential could be identified. It is the fourth study in our laboratory employing essentially the same design to yield this or a similar ERP effect.

Keywords: event-related potential (ERP), slow wave, communications anomaly, anomalous information transfer, ESP, guessing task, target stimuli
-------------------------------------------------

Here's a primer on event related potentials for those who don't know about or understand them from:

Arbib (Ed.) The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, pp. 412-415.

(Event-Related Potentials by Steven L. Bressler)

www.ccs.fau.edu/~bressler/pdf/HBTNN.html

 

[uneasy]

I just found it amusing, that's all.

Case 1:
(2 pages of explanation)
No mystery at all.

Case 2:
Oh, that's just faulty memory.
No mystery at all.

 

[CFLarsen]

There is an emergent literature poviding hard, neuralistic evidence for the precognitive faculty.

Same old manure from you, Steve. "Emergent"...right. It's always right around the corner. However, it never really emerges, this evidence of yours, does it?

The fact that there are people here challenging Occam by looking for elaborate rationales for your experience is well and good but they continue to remain close minded regarding the scientific evidence.

Thanks for admitting that you do not have me on ignore, Steve.

You have been asked to provide that evidence so many times, but you never do.

 

[Stereolab]

Stereolab, it frightens me that someone with a degree in engineering can believe those experiences are significant. Do you remember hearing something about scientists or engineers in your studies? Did any of them promote theories by saying, "I saw something that no one else saw, and I can't measure, and no one else can measure, but I know it's significant"?

The events are significant only because I cannot explain what happened. While I've come up with some "theories" that might be considered "supernatural" or whatever, I admit I have no hypothesis to test. (Oh, and my parents did see this occur. They're not the deepest thinkers, though, so it probably didn't make much of an impression.)

What I'll never be able to convince any of you (or, for that matter, you'll never be able to convince me otherwise), is the 100% confidence that I had in the outcome of those events before they happened. Again, I've had tons of weird coincidences that seemed like precognition at first, but in retrospect they could have just been lucky guesses that I choose to remember, or knowledge that was triggered by something in the past. I'm really not one to look for something magical in everything.

But thank you all for discussing this intelligently with me! Since I'm new here, I was worried that I might not make it out of this thread alive

 

[T'ai Chi]

1st experience

It's not even necessary to have seen the show before. Imagine the X's are the letters:

(snip)

As pointed out, as he reported, he thought of the exact answer without seeing the program.

2nd experience

A classical example of selective memory. Michael Shermer explains it too, in his book "Why People Believe Weird Things". We remember the times when we guessed right, but forget the many times we guessed wrong.

Doesn't that assume he was guessing????

What we would need is independently repeated experiments, not anecdotes.

One can always say that when investigating anything wierd.

Pay attention 12 year olds! Next time you have a 'ESP' experience about anything, make sure to call in scientists (before it occurs!) and set up a controlled, randomized, double-blind, replicable experiment.