chekmate

How do you guys explain that feeling that you sometimes get. You know they one I'm talking about. The one that causes you to slow down, seconds before you see a police officer on the side of the road. Or that makes you stop, in the middle of sex, and put your cloths back on, minutes before your parents get home a day early from vacation. Or that makes you take the longer way home that one day, only to find out that there was an accident the way you normally would have gone, and you would have been stuck in traffic for hours had you goen that way. Maybe it's luck I guess, but all three of these things happened to me this weekend, and I swear that there was a weird feeling that caused me to deviate from what I had originally planned. What is that? <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

elwoodblues

A number of things. Mostly confirmation bias. There probably is some mechanism at work here, but I certainly wouldn't classify it as supernatural, or future-predicting in any sense except a very mundane one. Perhaps a subconscious summation and integration mechanism that doesn't employ the forebrain and conscious thought, but delivers the verdict as a _feeling_.

No reason to believe this phenomenon is really future predictive unless it's proven to be so in a lab. If that happens, tell me.

tronvillain

No, I do not know the feeling you are talking about, and have no experiences comparable to your examples. Anyway, elwoodblues' explanation is the one that occurred to me while I was reading your post.

B. H. Manners

It's those pesky demons at work again trying to deceive the elect!

The Lone Ranger

As for the "feeling" involved, sometimes, apparently, we notice some signs, but don't become quite consciously aware of what they may signify. In any event, "confirmation bias" is a very real phenomenon; as has been repeatedly demonstrated, people tend to remember when their "feelings" or "hunches" pan out, and blithely overlook the vast number of times when they don't.

Quote:

The one that causes you to slow down, seconds before you see a police officer on the side of the road.

Traffic coming from the opposite direction will be moving somewhat slower, on average, if there's a police officer just ahead. Perhaps you subconsciously notice the odd behavior of oncoming traffic.

Quote:

Or that makes you take the longer way home that one day, only to find out that there was an accident the way you normally would have gone, and you would have been stuck in traffic for hours had you goen that way.

How often have you had an odd feeling, but it didn't pan out? Fairly often, I would expect. Also, given the entirely subjective nature of "that feeling," anything unusual that happens during the next few hours can be -- and probably will be -- interpreted as having triggered that feeling.

How often have you failed to have this feeling, and wound up getting caught in a traffic jam?

***

Nothing disrespectful is meant, of course. I'm simply pointing out the nature of confirmation bias. We tend to remember the times that our hunches play out, and forget the facts that: a.) hunches are almost always so vague as to be meaningless; and b.) even when the "hunch" is quite specific ("Mary is about to call me on the telephone," for example), they tend to be wrong far more often than they're right.

Cheers,

Michael

Walross

y'know, chekmate, it's funny you bring this up. The other night I dreamt about (among other things) a very specific neighbourhood that I had never been to. Tonight, on my way to a Halloween party, I drove through a neighbourhood that could have been cut-and-pasted from my dream. The stores were the same ones and in the same places as I had imagined, same with the houses, yet I know for a fact that I've never been there before. Beyond that, there was a feel to the place that was familiar. I suppose it could be a coincidence, or it could be something else. I'm too much of a skeptic to just pass the buck to the "supernatural". I'm sure there's a rational explanation for this event, but in any case, I quite enjoy the mystery. Regards,

Walross

slept2long

I have had dreams that involved truly messed up situations I could only laugh at myself getting into then gotten into those situations YEARS later. I can't explain it but what the Lone Ranger said makes sense and seems most likely to be the case.

Ernest Sparks

Don't forget about selective memory. How often does one have premonitions that end up being nothing. These tend to be unremembered because of lack of reinforcement. On the other hand, premonitions that lead to real consequences are not only remembered, but their intensity is apt to be amplied in the memory after the fact, upon recall. That is why in experimental situations it is essential to keep the archive of ALL trials taken, even the ones that were ruined by outside interference or mistakes. There are good reasons to reject experimental trials, but they should still remain part of the record.

This is similar to the tendency for people addicted to lotteries remembering the tickets they bought that pay off at least a little, and immediately forgetting the ones they bought that don't pay off.

echidna

Further on feelings, people often underestimate the role of the subconscious. We seem incredibly and almost imperceptibly attuned to very small signals, facial expressions, gestures, clothing, scents & so forth which give off their own meanings & hints. Operating at a fairly base level, we are not often consciously aware of these signals so they usually come across as feelings.

Cold readers and such demonstrate that it’s possible to meaningfully draw these signals into the conscious, with great effect, but for the rest of us we assume that because we weren’t deliberately aware of it, then it must have been ESP, Synchronicity, Elvis, etc.

Hardly surprising that this function is relegated to the subconscious. Information overload would simply make the conscious digestion of this level of detail impossible.

(Good to see you back Ernest, I thought we’d lost you.)

echidna

Tron, I find it very difficult to believe you have not experienced this.