To predict the future, the brain uses two clocks
news.berkeley.edu
news.berkeley.edu
One of my passengers once said something about a "psychic" having told [him/her] something-or-other. I huffed, delivered a short reply about humans' ability to see the future, then resumed my standard talk. If I was good at future-seeing, I would have tried to avoid what was to come to pass on account of that passenger.
About three years ago I had the sense, "this 'project' is going to take about 3 years..." I'd say I was approximately correct, but the whole time I've been thinking it'd be finished with the next step.
It's said that Abraham Lincoln was greatly interested in the predictive power of dreams. He may [0] (or may not [1]) have foreseen his own death in a dream. He was bummed out, but wasn't able to adequately interpret his dream so as to avert his own assassination.
[0] https://rogerjnorton.com/Lincoln46.html [1] https://www.history.com/news/did-abraham-lincoln-predict-his... (autoplay video)
[2] "Jules Verne: The Sci-Fi Author Who Predicted the Future" - https://thehustle.co/jules-verne-the-sci-fi-author-who-predi... - advice at the end, "How you can see the future", is quite solid.
Discussion questions:
1. Have you ever had a dream that was predictive of the future?
2. Have you ever "foreseen" what came to pass? Or maybe you didn't like what was to come, decided that you wanted something else, and thereby deliberately changed your own future?
3. Everyone uses 'predicting' all the time for evaluating which path to take. Some people are better at this than others (e.g. Jeff Bezos 'foresaw' the transformative power of the internet).
When did you pick correctly, even if it was a long shot? What about times that you picked incorrectly, maybe even though it was the 'safe' choice? Have you had a gut feeling that the long shot was actually a better bet, but you ignored your gut feeling?
Some people think in pictures. My oldest son is one such person. I sometimes have what might be termed "visions". I have come to believe these are not psychic events, but are brief episodes of my brain thinking in pictures -- like my son does normally and like we all do while dreaming.
I was raised with really scary, terrifying ideas that such "visions" were inescapable Destiny and I spent years fighting against a mental model of Greek Tragedy style fate. I was raised with the idea that seeing the future in a dream meant it would happen and you could not stop it.
Dreams that I believed predicted the future haunted me like my own personal Hound of Tindalos. I spent years waking in a cold sweat, desperate to figure out how to avoid the future I saw before me.
The two things I most frequently foresaw in my youth never came to pass and they no longer can come to pass. I am no longer terrified of my dreams and "visions". I see them as prediction in the vein of how we crunch data to do weather prediction on TV.
Except it predicts my future. Since it is my life, I can change that future by making different choices informed by the prediction that "The path you are on currently leads to X."
A picture is worth a thousand words. A flash of imagery is an information dense means for the mind to spit out an inference based on "big data." I see it as the mind's own charts and graphs, so to speak. It's now useful information for me, instead of something that leaves me paralyzed with fear. It's now "Ah, so my mind spit out this information rich thought. I wonder what I was trying to tell myself."
As for "gut" instinct, I think there is a book called "Blink" that talks about how the mind comes to first impressions and that they are frequently more reliable than things we actively thought through. You might also want to look up "amygdala hijack."
In some circumstances, we react faster than we can consciously process what we are seeing. Our body takes action before our mind spits out the reason. A classic case is jumping in a river, not realizing why, then seeing the child you are there to save. That's an amygdala hijack.
That's because symbolic form can be interpeted in many ways, so it's easy post-factum to interpet them in a way that predicts the future :)
They are a form of thinking, not some kind of magic voodoo whatever. And they constitute the vast majority of reported predictive dreams.
Among other things, I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project for a time. This is an organization that serves the educational, social and emotional needs of the gifted community. We talked a lot about how brains worked, among other things.
I also founded and ran an email list for a time called Wired For Science. It was designed to serve the needs of my oldest son and members were generally a parent and child or a parent and both of their children or two parents and their child. It was a family discussion group for people living with various neurological issues, such as ASD and OCD.
We posted articles about neurological research and discussed what it means in human terms to actually live with stuff and talked about what the research could tell us about how to more effectively cope with such issues.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. So I guess this is where we agree to disagree and I go off and do other things.
But if one is indeed right about their intuitions/senses/dreams containing some truth beyond the computable bayesian prior probability, they would definitely stand to make quite a sum on the stock market.
What particularly bothers me is that, say that the brain had somehow managed to develop a science-defying future-prediction ability, why on earth would it not develop and explicitly use that ability rather than subtly injecting vague clues in dreams, or say raising vague feelings in one direction or other? In a darwinian context, wasting such effort and valuable computation is rather atypical.
And if it did indeed somehow inject this future-prediction in its subconscious estimates for likelihoods, we would be seeing humans doing things which defy the accepted laws of knowable randomness, like predicting coin outcomes with better than 50% probability (similar, longer-timespan experiments could trivially be devised ).
Did you mean to refer to "seeing into the future" in terms of extrapolation, the way a futurist might extrapolate current technology trends to make predictions or Lincoln may have extrapolated from political unrest and division to an assassination attempt? It doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that when we dream, the extrapolating and predicting that happens in our subconscious mind all the time might bubble to the surface.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias
Sure it does. Medical science deals with delusional people all the time.
Are you arguing that some people have some kind of mystical prophetic ability that manifests in gut feelings and dreams?
None of this detracts from the literary genius of Verne, of course :)