Presentiment and non-conscious precognition: What the data can tell us about mechanism
Julia Mossbridge, MA, PhD
Northwestern University; Mossbridge Institute, LLC
Dutch SPR- IONS talk
February 1, 2015 (11:00 Pacific Time, 20:00 Central Europe)
Abstract: For most of us, our everyday conscious minds feel the stream of conscious experience flowing linearly through what we call the past, present and future. But how do non-conscious mental processes interact with events that take place in time? By definition, we aren’t privy to our non-conscious minds, so to get at this question, we have to look deeper. I will first briefly describe current neuroscientific and psychological ideas about how everyday conscious awareness creates a sense of order and temporal flow. Then we will delve into the methods used to examine how non-conscious processes interact with events, and how the results of such experiments can inform our understanding about the nature of reality and time. Specifically, I will describe the methods and implications of experiments examining non-conscious “time bending” (i.e., differences between our everyday conscious version of time and the versions accessed by non-conscious processes), including presentiment/precognition experiments and their implications. Finally, I will discuss the requirements for any model that attempts to describe how the so-called past, present, and future seem to fall away, and to what extent they actually fall away, under the influence non-conscious processing. Taken from another point of view, any model that successfully describes this phenomenon could also be used to addresses how a sense of past, present, and future are manufactured for use by everyday conscious awareness
Bio: Julia Mossbridge uses computational, behavioral, and physiological techniques to examine how humans integrate what we experience over time into a so-called “stream” of consciousness. Her interest in this topic has led her to examine aspects of both cognitive and perceptual timing (e.g., order effects on reading comprehension, perceptual integration across senses) as well as the more controversial reverse-temporal effects she analyzed in her recent meta-analysis (covered in ABC News 20/20, Wall Street JournalIdeas Market, Fox News, and other mainstream media outlets). Dr. Mossbridge has received post-doctoral funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Bial Foundation, and the Monroe Institute in her role as a Research Associate in the Psychology Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Julia's Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders is from Northwestern University, her M.A. in Neuroscience is from University of California at San Francisco, and she received her B.A. with highest honors in neuroscience from Oberlin College. In addition to continuing to pursue her research interests and inventing apps (www.choicecompass.com), she is currently working with Imants Baruss on a book taking a post-materialist approach to consciousness, Transcendent Mind: Re-thinking the Science of Consciousness. The book will be published by the American Psychological Association in 2016. Julia lives in Evanston, IL with her partner and son.