There's a reason why most people don't consider parapsychology a real science: the methods are usually suspect and the results are usually crazy. But a leading social journal is publishing a paper proving that people can predict the future, and this time, the research is solid.

Precognition is the ability to accurately predict future events without having any information about those events, and it's impossible. If it weren't impossible, it would mean that there was some kind of totally bizarre violation of the rules of time and space going on. Despite the inclination of the rest of the universe to behave itself, one psychologist has been able to provide experimental evidence that humans are actually capable of precognition.

Over the past eight years, Daryl Bem of Cornell University conducted a series of well-established psychological experiments on some 1,000 college students. One experiment involved 'priming,' where the word "beautiful" or "ugly" was flashed on a screen so fast that only the subconscious mind could recognize it. Then, a picture was displayed, of either something beautiful (like a puppy) or ugly (like a maggot), and student had to decide as fast as they could whether the picture was beautiful or ugly. As you might expect, people were faster at associating "beautiful" with the puppy picture and "ugly" with the maggot picture if they were "primed" with the correct word first.

What Bem did next was to run the same experiment backwards. He showed subjects the picture first, kept track of how long it took them to respond with either "beautiful" or "ugly," and then had a computer randomly generate the priming word. The result? Subjects responded faster when the priming word turned out be correct, almost as if they had already been primed, or subconsciously knew what priming word would be chosen.

The size of the effect that Bem observed isn't that big, it's just on the order of a few percent better than completely random. But the point is that it's statistically significant, and exhibits about the same relationship (statistically) as the relationship between aspirin and heart-attack prevention, or second-hand smoking and lung cancer. So, something is definitely going on.

As far as just what, exactly, is going on... Well, nobody has a clue yet, although "quantum mechanics" is being bandied about by other psychologists, but that may be just because it sounds cool. Obviously, it's going to take a lot more studies to figure it out, but all of a sudden, precognition might be considered actual research, and not just something out of tolerably bad science fiction movies.

Feeling the Future (PDF), via New Scientist and Psychology Today