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Premonition?

RandomElement said:
I think this is exactly the same as that phenomenon when you're driving down the road, and happen to glance over right into someone's eyes.

It really does seem like you looked exactly there because you somehow sensed someone's gaze on you. In fact, you probably glance a lot of different directions many, many times while driving. The vast majority of them are utterly unremarkable, and forgotten. When, on occasion, you happen to glance toward a face, it is remembered and marked down as "evidence" that you can sense someone's gaze on you.
I never do that sort of post hoc analysis. Nor do I play the telephone game. This was CLEAR action taken BEFORE the event.

And I'll bet there are many times when you do slow a bit and glance to the right when approaching an intersection, even with a green light. In driver's ed, I recall they advised doing just that when it's a "stale green"--meaning it could change as you approach it, and someone trying to shave a bit off their red light to avoid braking might be coming.
I understand safe-driving practices. Hitting the brakes hard is quite different than feathering them just-in-case.

Again, what if there wasn't a car approaching this particular time? I guarantee this thread would not exist.
Naturally. You guys seem to be taking the bent that I am trying to prove something. I had an unusual 'vision' that seemed to be tied to an external event and I put it up for dissection, nothing more.
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Yet, you come in here guns blazing, ready, and willing to insult others. You then try to pass yourself off as victim of our bias. :p
 
RandomElement said:
OK, I will try to follow your respectful style. :boggled:

Aggressive means - well, you can look it up at dictionary.com. Safe means zero accidents.
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Safe means zero accidents? :confused: Should we look that up on dictionary.com then? I prefer Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary but for a person of your type, I'm sure the "magic" of the internet is just fine.

Definition of safe, from dictionary.com.

That's strange, "zero accidents" is not listed as a definition for the word safe. Could it be that "zero accidents" is your definition of the word safe? Which therefore means absolutely nothing to anyone (but you). :p
 
RandomElement said:
Does repetition make things clearer? Reread the post where I go through the math.

Is it ordinary for YOU to brake hard on a green light with no apparent stimulus?
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I think you've nailed the crux of your question here. No apparent stimulus?

I would hazard that there WAS a stimulus for your action, but it wasn't apparent at the time to you. Perhaps seeing the vehicle in your peripheral vision, perhaps, as you say this was a length of road that you travel regularly and know it well, you'd unconsciously reckoned the timing of the green light. After that I can't guess any more.

But you definitely have provided your own answer to this: No apparent stimulus.
 
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Burner said:
Yea, I love it how some people will ask you the same thing you just written, and then even go to lengths to defend their clear mistake.
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I didn't ask him the same thing he just written. He said he had never slowed down at that particular intersection in perhaps a thousand times. I asked if he had ever slowed down at an intersection. Everyone else understood I was asking about intersections in general, and not this specific one. MetalPig even posited this. I confirmed it a few posts later. I asked this question to see if RE would see for himself that this incident may have been confirmation bias. It seems this idea flew right over his head.

Yea, I love it how some people will call you out for not reading one of their posts when it is quite clear they have either not read, or not understood the post they are complaining about. It's a good thing there are community colleges all over the country.
 
RandomElement said:
Last year, I was driving home on a suburban four lane road. I was several hundred feet from a somewhat blind intersection, meaning that I could see to the left, but the right-hand view was blocked by buildings until almost upon the intersection. I have driven the same intersection perhaps a thousand times and have NEVER slowed down unless the light just changed. I am an aggressive, but safe driver.

On this particular day, the light had been green for maybe 5 seconds and I was clipping along about 45 mph when a scene popped into my head of me being T-Boned from the right. I slowed down to about 15 mph and craned my head to the right just in time to see a car zooming through the red light at high speed.

Let's recap:

1. Driving timidly is not my style.
2. I was in autopilot mode driving on familiar turf.
3. There were no visual or auditory cues at the time I applied the brakes.
4. I would likely have been seriously hurt (or worse) had I not slowed down.

Disclaimer: (I have to keep adding this because you guys are so abusive and quick to attack!:D) I am as hardcore a skeptic as they come.
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Lots of possibilities:

1. Pure coincidence. Occasionally you will do something you have never done before, and on some of these occasions something else will happen by chance that seems to be causally related to that action.

2. You have in fact slowed down at intersections before, but are quite sure that you have not because human memory is fallible.

3. There was some cue in the environment that warned you that something odd was about to happen, even though it was below the threshold of sensory awareness. For example, the sound of a car zooming along at high speed reaching your sensory apparatus without any conscious awareness of it. I don't see how you can say that there were no auditory cues, only that you were unaware of any.
 
How often do you imagine potential future events, and how often are you right?
 
I find this whole thread offensive. I used to go to a community college.

I'm the worst driver on earth, Helen Keller could do donuts on me. When I used to be able to drive, I would drive like a maniac. I drove 140mph at night down roads I never been through before.

this was in the country where no one was at and like at 2am, so if something did happen, I'd only die
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And some times out of nowhere I would just stop because I'd think, "Man I wonder if a cat would just fly right by me and like flip this car over somehow." Not like slamming stops, but I'd say I'd go down to 60-80mph where I felt I could efficiently kill the cat, and not do harm to myself. But I the only time I ever killed a cat was when I was going extremely slow because of one of those school signs where you have to go like 25MPH. Sadly the Cat must not of had any premonitions of my car slowly going by to know to either put on the breaks or go a bit faster. So he got messed up pretty good.

Premonitions just don't seem to make sense. If one gets one and uses it to their advantage, which I'm sure that's how the brain works. Then why doesn't everyone get them all the time? Why is it some people seem to get them, and others just don't? Did the person who was going to T-Bone get one also? Maybe their premonition was going to be them getting T-Boned because they couldn't slow down in time, or maybe a car behind them wouldn't have slowed down in time and would have hit them?

I think it's all pretty silly thinking things like these actually occur. Maybe we're all watching a little too much Final Destination or Heroes, and confusing ourselves with what reality really has to offer.
 
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Burner, explain how your recent quote from RE has anything to do with my question asking him whether he has ever slowed down at an intersection when a car has not run a red light. Or do you just like posting random quotes?

RandomElement, you didn't by chance happen to have an infra red garage remote in the car with you when this non-event happened? I just wonder if maybe it somehow caused your foot to press the brake pedal.
 
Well, one thing that alleged psychics have really screwed themselves on is this notion that EVERYONE can be psychic. If such a thing exists, I really dont think everyone can. Technically, everyone can, but realistically, not everyone can. Its like telling kids, "well, you can be great in math if you really really try". The point is, the kids that do really well in math are geniuses in the area, or they have qualities, like hard work, or interest in the subject matter to do well. I think a similar thing holds true in this area.

You have to be open-minded, you cant be scared, you have to be able to listen to things around you, etc. Not everyone can do that.

So, as the poster from above suggested, I dont think every person should be able to have these premonitions.
 
And this thread is a lot like the one that I started.(asking if I was psychic)

To the original thread starter, dont take offence, but people will be skeptical. And you have to be. Unless you can do what you say consistently, it is hard to place it in to any other category but chance.
 
MondoAtheist said:
I think it's all pretty silly thinking things like these actually occur. Maybe we're all watching a little too much Final Destination or Heroes, and confusing ourselves with what reality really has to offer.
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I'm not so sure. There was a time I'd be tempted to agree with you, but personal experience is often very effective at overturning logical argument. Having said that I suppose it boils down to the individual's threshhold at which the notion of coincidence becomes untenable. I'm not talking of this sorry escapade, of course, there's nothing to address here.
 
RandomElement said:
Nice commingling of a thought with an action. That is not critical analysis nor a good analogy.

I have been driving 35 years. Let's say 20K miles per year, so roughly 700,000miles. Let's say 71% driving in the city or 500,000 miles. I will be generous and say only two intersections per mile or a total of 1,000,000 intersections.

Number of clear intersections where the light was green that I have braked at without hearing a siren or seeing someone crossing against the light - one.
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I'd say you were danged lucky on that particular day.

I've had several near misses in which "that little voice" alerted me in time. Most of them occurred when I drove cabs back in the 70s.

I don't see anything odd about that, or your experience, for that matter.

I would advise you to drive safely, but then you already do, don't you?

M.
 
Reno said:
Maybe it was the same phenomenon that occurred the day RandomElement just got up out of the blue and discovered a vase in a box hidden in a deadspace in a cupboard.

What other mystifying events of this nature have you experienced, eh RandomElement?
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I was going to point that out, and wonder if it was the sign of a troll.

Also, what's to say that had you kept going at your speed that you would have been involved in an accident? Perhaps you would have cleared the intersection first. Perhaps the other car would have. Perhaps the other driver would have stomped on his brakes. Perhaps he would have just barely clipped you, or vice versa.

This is not a premonition, as it was not a vision of things to come. Had you kept going, and had he T-boned you....then it would have been a premonition. Though not necessarily a psychic one.
 
Dedicated said:
Well, one thing that alleged psychics have really screwed themselves on is this notion that EVERYONE can be psychic. If such a thing exists, I really dont think everyone can. Technically, everyone can, but realistically, not everyone can. Its like telling kids, "well, you can be great in math if you really really try". The point is, the kids that do really well in math are geniuses in the area, or they have qualities, like hard work, or interest in the subject matter to do well. I think a similar thing holds true in this area.

You have to be open-minded, you cant be scared, you have to be able to listen to things around you, etc. Not everyone can do that.

So, as the poster from above suggested, I dont think every person should be able to have these premonitions.
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No one does... its confirmation bias.

Inevitably, everyone has a "premonition" moment because our minds are always coming up with cause and effect answers.

Again (second time in this thread), what some people think of as psychic occurances always seems to vanish when put to the test. Of course, the standard answer is "My powers aren't 100% reliable. But I'm right X percent of the time."

Well, X has always been found to be about the same as chance.

It's like winning the lottery twice in a row. It will -never- happen to everyone but given the vast numbers playing and the length of time involved, it's almost inevitably going to happen to someone someday!
 
I find that it helps to break down to possibilitys to see the big picture. Looking at the population of drivers that cross that intersection we have the following 4 cases:
  1. Drives straight through intersection, No accident, nothing to report.
  2. Slows down at intersection, proceeds through, nothing to report.
  3. Drives straight through intersection, "T"'d by cross traffic and killed instantly, nobody left to make report.
  4. Slows down at intersection, avoids accident, reports coincident.

So far, we have 1 report of case type 4 and no other reports. Since this exactly matches the expected ratio I see nothing unusual here.
 
RandomElement said:
I was several hundred feet from a somewhat blind intersection, meaning that I could see to the left, but the right-hand view was blocked by buildings. I have driven the same intersection perhaps a thousand times and have NEVER slowed down unless the light just changed. I am an aggressive, but safe driver.
1. Driving timidly is not my style.
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Reno said:
Burner, explain how your recent quote from RE has anything to do with my question asking him whether he has ever slowed down at an intersection when a car has not run a red light. Or do you just like posting random quotes?
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Premises:
1. He NEVER slows down before a difficult blind intersection if the green light is on
2. He's an agressive driver

Conclusion:
He usually slows down before every intersection, even the visually clear ones when the green light is on. Eh Aristotle?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasoning
 
Premise 1 is wrong: He has NEVER slowed down in perhaps a thousand times at THIS intersection unless the light has just changed.

Premise 2 is irrelevant to my question.

With both your premises being wrong, your conclusion is as much use as a fart in a spacesuit. Eh, Einstein?
 
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