1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:10,200 I'm speaking about pre-sentiment which means feeling the future and this is just one of the 2 00:00:10,200 --> 00:00:16,860 ways in which we seem to be influenced by things that happen in the future particularly things 3 00:00:16,860 --> 00:00:25,560 that happen to us ourselves. Another way of experiencing this is through precognition 4 00:00:25,560 --> 00:00:34,480 which means knowing the future as in precognitive dreams or premonitions feeling warnings about the 5 00:00:34,480 --> 00:00:43,400 future. Now this is a wide range of phenomena. I'm mainly going to concentrate on the short-term 6 00:00:43,400 --> 00:00:50,620 pre-sentiment but I'll say something about precognitive dreams to start with and premonitions. 7 00:00:50,620 --> 00:00:57,700 Ever through recorded history people have mentioned the fact that some people dream 8 00:00:57,700 --> 00:01:04,920 of things that happen in the future and this has been studied scientifically for about a hundred 9 00:01:04,920 --> 00:01:13,240 years now. The classic study was a book by J.W. Dunn, a British aeronautical engineer published 10 00:01:13,240 --> 00:01:21,880 in the 1920s called An Experiment with Time. It's still in print. Dunn, who was serving in the army 11 00:01:21,880 --> 00:01:34,320 in South Africa, noticed that his ability to dream things that hadn't yet happened seemed to be 12 00:01:34,320 --> 00:01:40,020 happening quite often. He started dreaming about things then they happened and then at first he 13 00:01:40,020 --> 00:01:47,120 thought it was a false memory of the dreams. So he systematically recorded his dreams and then he 14 00:01:47,120 --> 00:01:53,780 found that he was quite often, several times a week, dreaming about things that hadn't yet happened. 15 00:01:55,180 --> 00:02:03,340 Sometimes they were newspaper headlines, sometimes they were fairly trivial events and he became 16 00:02:03,340 --> 00:02:10,380 convinced that our dreams often contained elements from the future as well as memories from the past 17 00:02:10,380 --> 00:02:18,960 and other elements that we can't actually identify. He persuaded several friends to do this too and they 18 00:02:18,960 --> 00:02:26,400 also found they were dreaming about things that hadn't yet happened. In his book he tells you that 19 00:02:26,400 --> 00:02:34,220 you won't believe him unless you try it yourself and so I tried it myself writing my dreams down and 20 00:02:34,220 --> 00:02:43,780 sure enough I soon experienced things that hadn't yet happened. In one dream for example I dreamt that 21 00:02:43,780 --> 00:02:51,020 I was in a room with a number of friends and there was somebody came into the room with a needle and was 22 00:02:51,020 --> 00:02:57,800 going around the room trying to inject people and I found it very sinister and it was a disturbing dream 23 00:02:57,800 --> 00:03:04,420 and I interpreted it as trying to inject people with heroin or something like that. 24 00:03:05,700 --> 00:03:13,620 Two or three days later I was at a friend's birthday party in South London and what was happening was that 25 00:03:13,620 --> 00:03:21,000 suddenly in the middle of the party someone came in with an ear piercing device which had a shiny needle on it 26 00:03:21,000 --> 00:03:29,780 and went around the room offering to pierce people's ears. Well I hadn't dreamt exactly about an ear piercing 27 00:03:29,780 --> 00:03:37,180 device but as John Dunn says what you do is write down the visual impressions and the visual impression was one of 28 00:03:37,180 --> 00:03:45,000 somebody coming in with a needle trying to pierce people and that's what happened. I had quite a number of other striking 29 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:52,780 examples so many that I was convinced this is real and undoubtedly if you haven't experienced this 30 00:03:52,780 --> 00:04:00,220 yourself you'll doubt that it's possible or that it's real but read Dunn's book and follow his method 31 00:04:00,220 --> 00:04:07,780 and I think you'll find that you do have precognitive dreams. We don't normally remember them because we 32 00:04:07,780 --> 00:04:14,620 don't normally remember most of our dreams anyway. There are many records of people dreaming of disasters 33 00:04:14,620 --> 00:04:22,040 in advance and when the 9-11 disaster struck New York with the collapse of the World Trade Centers 34 00:04:22,040 --> 00:04:30,780 I thought this would be a great opportunity for looking for precognitive dreams. I put out appeals for 35 00:04:30,780 --> 00:04:40,200 information in New York soon afterwards and I got over 75 reports of precognitive dreams. In some cases 36 00:04:40,200 --> 00:04:48,940 people didn't go to work as a result of their dream or other intuitions and so their lives were saved. 37 00:04:49,940 --> 00:04:59,280 In other cases people dreamed of jet planes crashing into skyscrapers, not necessarily the World Trade Center 38 00:04:59,280 --> 00:05:06,080 but sometimes other tall buildings in New York or even in Chicago. So it wasn't specific 39 00:05:06,080 --> 00:05:13,360 to that but it was images of planes crashing into tall buildings. In other cases people dreamed of being 40 00:05:13,360 --> 00:05:21,220 trapped inside burning skyscrapers and buildings collapsing. In others they dreamed of clouds of dust 41 00:05:21,220 --> 00:05:31,940 rolling down the streets with a terrible sense of foreboding. Well these were all different images of the disaster 42 00:05:31,940 --> 00:05:41,700 of the World Trade Center collapse and I think that many of them were precognitive dreams. In some cases people told 43 00:05:41,700 --> 00:05:50,820 friends or family members about them before the dramatic collision of the jet planes with the World Trade Center 44 00:05:50,820 --> 00:05:57,540 and its collapse. So there's additional evidence that these were not just made up afterwards. 45 00:05:59,940 --> 00:06:04,820 So I think there's good evidence precognitive dreaming can actually happen. 46 00:06:06,980 --> 00:06:12,900 How we explain this is another question. I'll come back to possible explanations at the end of this talk. 47 00:06:12,900 --> 00:06:20,580 There are also premonitions where people have feelings or forebodings of something that's going to happen 48 00:06:21,540 --> 00:06:24,980 and animals are actually rather better at this than people. 49 00:06:26,740 --> 00:06:34,180 Again ever since ancient times there have been reports of animals behaving strangely days or hours before 50 00:06:34,180 --> 00:06:42,340 earthquakes. And I've been tracking animal behavior before earthquakes over the last 30 years. 51 00:06:43,140 --> 00:06:52,980 And in many cases I've been able to find out soon after the earthquake about unusual animal behavior. 52 00:06:52,980 --> 00:06:57,300 For example in the 1997 Assisi earthquake in Italy 53 00:06:58,180 --> 00:07:03,860 I had had at the time an Italian research assistant and within two days she was in Assisi 54 00:07:04,580 --> 00:07:12,900 interviewing people like the mayor and newspaper reporters, restaurant proprietors, zookeepers, vets 55 00:07:14,420 --> 00:07:21,300 and other people about unusual animal behavior. Several days before the Assisi earthquake, 56 00:07:21,300 --> 00:07:31,460 rats came out of their holes and were swarming over terraces of restaurants causing alarm among people eating there. 57 00:07:31,460 --> 00:07:35,940 The restaurant proprietors complained to the mayor about this. No one knew why it had happened. 58 00:07:37,140 --> 00:07:44,020 And then the earthquake struck. Unusual howling of dogs in the night for a night or two before this happened. 59 00:07:44,740 --> 00:07:47,940 And other examples of unusual animal behavior. 60 00:07:47,940 --> 00:07:58,820 In the 1970s the Chinese under Chairman Mao had a project for earthquake warnings by asking 61 00:07:58,820 --> 00:08:04,340 peasants and workers to report unusual animal behavior. And as a result of it, 62 00:08:05,060 --> 00:08:14,660 they were able to excavate, sorry, evacuate entire cities before devastating earthquakes struck. 63 00:08:14,660 --> 00:08:20,260 These animal warning systems together with other traditional folklore type 64 00:08:22,660 --> 00:08:29,380 wisdom about what might happen, changes in wells, unusual behavior in springs and so on, 65 00:08:30,180 --> 00:08:37,140 together gave earthquake warnings, whereas modern seismologists with all their fancy apparatus can't do this. 66 00:08:37,140 --> 00:08:49,140 Well, animals can also give warnings of tsunamis. And before the December 26, 2004 tsunami, 67 00:08:49,140 --> 00:08:55,780 there were many reports of animals moving away from coastal areas in Sri Lanka and South India and 68 00:08:56,660 --> 00:09:00,420 Indonesia and in other places affected by the tsunami. 69 00:09:02,340 --> 00:09:12,580 Again, I collected stories from those parts of the world and found many examples of elephants, monkeys, 70 00:09:12,580 --> 00:09:24,100 other animals, flamingos, nesting flamingos, going away from their coastal nesting sites before these tsunamis struck. 71 00:09:25,540 --> 00:09:30,660 Now, doing research on these phenomena is complicated by the fact you can't actually predict 72 00:09:30,660 --> 00:09:38,980 very far in advance when tsunamis and earthquakes are going to happen. And in fact, animals give the best prediction available. 73 00:09:39,620 --> 00:09:47,220 So you just have to wait and see what would happen. And there haven't been many scientifically documented studies. 74 00:09:47,780 --> 00:09:53,940 One unusual one happened in Italy a few years ago when there was a major quake in Italy. 75 00:09:54,900 --> 00:10:01,780 An Oxford zoology student, a graduate student, was doing a study on the mating of toads in a lake. 76 00:10:02,500 --> 00:10:10,180 And she was documenting, day by day, how the toads came to the lake to mate. 77 00:10:11,060 --> 00:10:16,740 And then in the middle of the mating season, for several days, there were no toads. This had never been observed before. 78 00:10:16,740 --> 00:10:21,540 It was very surprising and puzzling. She told her supervisor at Oxford University, 79 00:10:21,540 --> 00:10:27,220 the records clearly show there were no toads. And then the quake struck. 80 00:10:27,860 --> 00:10:32,020 So here's, and they didn't start mating again until several days afterwards. 81 00:10:32,580 --> 00:10:38,020 So here's a particularly clear-cut example where there was continuous observation going on, 82 00:10:38,820 --> 00:10:41,780 showing this change in behaviour. 83 00:10:43,380 --> 00:10:49,220 Not only earthquakes and tsunamis lead to animals picking up that something is going to happen, 84 00:10:49,220 --> 00:10:56,900 but also avalanches. I did a study with the help of a Swiss friend, Theo Itten, 85 00:10:57,460 --> 00:11:03,620 who carried out surveys in Switzerland and Austria in relation to avalanches. 86 00:11:04,180 --> 00:11:10,260 And there it's common knowledge that animals behave strangely soon before an avalanche and, 87 00:11:10,260 --> 00:11:12,820 in effect, give warnings of avalanches. 88 00:11:13,620 --> 00:11:20,020 So that's another kind of natural disaster which leads to animal premonitions. 89 00:11:20,020 --> 00:11:25,300 They also happened before man-made disasters like bombing raids in wars. 90 00:11:26,340 --> 00:11:34,260 And in the Second World War, I've received many reports of people in Britain who were alerted to 91 00:11:34,260 --> 00:11:39,780 when there was going to be a bombing raid, long before the air raid sirens went off, 92 00:11:39,780 --> 00:11:47,460 because their animals behaved strangely or behaved in such a way as to indicate to them that the raid was about to happen. 93 00:11:47,860 --> 00:11:51,060 The animals gave warnings an hour or two in advance. 94 00:11:51,620 --> 00:11:56,420 The air raid sirens were usually much sooner before the air raid than that. 95 00:11:56,420 --> 00:12:00,900 And you might think, well, they just had the bomber planes coming. 96 00:12:01,780 --> 00:12:05,460 But actually, they couldn't have had them an hour or two in advance. 97 00:12:06,340 --> 00:12:08,500 They would have been too far away. 98 00:12:09,060 --> 00:12:11,460 And also, there were many planes in the sky. 99 00:12:12,020 --> 00:12:20,500 They wouldn't have known if they had a plane that was two hours flying time away that it was going to bomb their particular town or city. 100 00:12:20,500 --> 00:12:28,020 So, there seemed to be a premonition of an actual bombing raid locally near where they were. 101 00:12:29,060 --> 00:12:35,460 I received many of these stories from people in Britain, which I collected about 20 years ago, 102 00:12:35,780 --> 00:12:38,660 when there were still many people alive who remembered the war. 103 00:12:39,300 --> 00:12:46,500 And then I did a similar collection of stories in Germany and found very similar kinds of stories. 104 00:12:46,500 --> 00:12:51,940 I'll just give one example of a warning. 105 00:12:51,940 --> 00:12:53,380 Well, two examples, actually. 106 00:12:54,420 --> 00:12:56,180 They're both very good ones. 107 00:12:56,180 --> 00:13:04,100 And this is from a German woman called Dagmar Kessel, who had a parrot. 108 00:13:06,740 --> 00:13:08,020 Or at least, her friends did. 109 00:13:08,580 --> 00:13:14,020 During the wartime year of 1943, I stayed with acquaintances in Leipzig. 110 00:13:14,020 --> 00:13:16,100 They had an old parrot. 111 00:13:16,980 --> 00:13:27,940 Suddenly, about 9pm, it was extremely upset in its cage, lifted its left wing, and called Da Oban, Da Oban, up there. 112 00:13:29,060 --> 00:13:32,100 It even looked up, and nobody could get it quiet. 113 00:13:33,140 --> 00:13:36,820 I was surprised and asked my host what it was all about. 114 00:13:36,820 --> 00:13:40,580 He always does that before an air alert, the lady said. 115 00:13:41,540 --> 00:13:43,300 Usually two hours in advance. 116 00:13:43,300 --> 00:13:45,940 That same night, the Tommies really came. 117 00:13:46,260 --> 00:13:47,860 They destroyed the Crystal Palace. 118 00:13:49,780 --> 00:13:50,900 That's one example. 119 00:13:51,620 --> 00:13:55,300 Another example from Germany is one of the most moving of these stories, 120 00:13:56,660 --> 00:14:02,500 because it is so sad in a way, but amusing in another way. 121 00:14:02,500 --> 00:14:10,820 An Austrian sculptor, Heinz Pettere, was arrested during the war for his undiplomatic words, 122 00:14:10,820 --> 00:14:16,660 and deported to Bochum in the Ruhr to defuse unexploded bombs. 123 00:14:16,660 --> 00:14:22,180 He lived in a small room in the tower of the police administration building. 124 00:14:22,180 --> 00:14:27,220 From his window, he used to watch the pigeons that lived on the roofs, 125 00:14:27,220 --> 00:14:32,100 and he noticed that the birds often flew away suddenly, all of them, 126 00:14:32,100 --> 00:14:38,260 and half an hour later, at the most, the bombers came, afterwards the birds came back. 127 00:14:39,620 --> 00:14:41,460 This was repeated many times. 128 00:14:41,460 --> 00:14:48,980 He used this knowledge to warn his comrades and superiors of impending raids, 129 00:14:48,980 --> 00:14:51,860 and his predictions repeatedly proved to be accurate. 130 00:14:51,860 --> 00:14:59,780 But when the Gestapo heard about it, he was arrested once again under suspicion of being a spy 131 00:15:00,340 --> 00:15:02,100 in contact with the enemy. 132 00:15:05,300 --> 00:15:10,500 These are, and this is all discussed in my book, Dogs That No One Known Is A Coming Home, 133 00:15:11,060 --> 00:15:15,220 which deals with telepathy, premonitions, and the sense of direction, 134 00:15:15,220 --> 00:15:18,980 three major areas of unexplained animal behaviour. 135 00:15:21,780 --> 00:15:23,940 This kind of thing has happened more recently. 136 00:15:23,940 --> 00:15:27,860 During the NATO bombing raids on Serbia in 1999, 137 00:15:28,420 --> 00:15:33,220 animals in the Belgrade Zoo were behaving very strangely, 138 00:15:33,780 --> 00:15:38,020 well in advance of the bombing raids, long before they could have heard planes coming. 139 00:15:38,580 --> 00:15:43,620 So this seems to be a fairly widespread form of behaviour. 140 00:15:45,220 --> 00:15:52,340 There are also many examples of animals that give warnings of impending disasters to their owners. 141 00:15:52,900 --> 00:15:58,660 In one case, a woman was about to go out to work, as usual, one morning, 142 00:15:58,660 --> 00:16:01,940 and for some reason her dog just wouldn't let her go. 143 00:16:01,940 --> 00:16:06,260 It kept barring the way, tried to stop her leaving the house. 144 00:16:06,900 --> 00:16:14,740 And she left anyway, and soon afterwards was involved in a very bad car crash. 145 00:16:15,620 --> 00:16:20,260 In another case, a woman was riding a horse, and it refused to go through a gateway, 146 00:16:21,300 --> 00:16:23,300 and it absolutely refused to move. 147 00:16:23,860 --> 00:16:28,740 And shortly afterwards, a branch, a large branch of a tree fell off, 148 00:16:29,140 --> 00:16:32,340 which would have hit them if they had gone ahead as she'd intended. 149 00:16:32,340 --> 00:16:40,100 There are also many examples of animals that give warnings of medical problems. 150 00:16:40,660 --> 00:16:44,420 The best known and best documented is with epileptic seizures. 151 00:16:45,860 --> 00:16:51,460 Many people who suffer from seizures find their life very curtailed, 152 00:16:51,460 --> 00:16:57,860 because they don't want to be out and about in a public place when they're overcome with an epileptic seizure. 153 00:16:58,900 --> 00:17:05,060 And some people who have that problem have seizure-alert dogs, 154 00:17:05,060 --> 00:17:11,860 especially trained dogs, that give them warnings up to half an hour in advance before the onset of a seizure. 155 00:17:12,580 --> 00:17:17,780 Typically, the dogs will herd them to a safe place and get them to sit down or lie down, 156 00:17:17,780 --> 00:17:20,740 and then sit and keep guard over them. 157 00:17:21,620 --> 00:17:23,460 Some dogs do this spontaneously, 158 00:17:24,100 --> 00:17:28,900 but there are some charities which now train seizure-alert dogs, 159 00:17:28,980 --> 00:17:32,820 and they make a huge difference to the lives of people with epilepsy. 160 00:17:32,820 --> 00:17:36,020 Again, nobody knows how they do it. 161 00:17:36,260 --> 00:17:42,900 If it was just a simple matter of twitches in the body or even electrical signals from the brain, 162 00:17:43,140 --> 00:17:46,820 it would be possible to develop a seizure-alert device. 163 00:17:48,100 --> 00:17:51,140 But nobody has yet found out how they do it, 164 00:17:51,140 --> 00:17:55,620 and I suspect it's another form of premonition or precognition. 165 00:17:55,620 --> 00:18:01,300 Now, when we turn to human pre-sentiment, 166 00:18:02,740 --> 00:18:10,740 this has been studied by parapsychologists like Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. 167 00:18:11,540 --> 00:18:17,380 And what this shows is a short-term, very short-term, over a matter of seconds, 168 00:18:17,380 --> 00:18:25,700 of changes in physiological state before some emotionally arousing event. 169 00:18:26,420 --> 00:18:29,380 And this is called pre-sentiment, or feeling the future. 170 00:18:31,220 --> 00:18:35,860 In Dean Radin's experiments, subjects sit in front of a computer, 171 00:18:36,820 --> 00:18:41,220 and pictures come up on the screen at intervals. 172 00:18:41,220 --> 00:18:44,320 When they feel relaxed and ready, they press a start button. 173 00:18:44,320 --> 00:18:52,400 And then, after about 10 seconds, the computer selects from a large pool of photographs and pictures, 174 00:18:52,800 --> 00:18:57,680 a picture at random, which then appears on the screen in front of the subject. 175 00:18:58,400 --> 00:19:04,000 Meanwhile, they're being monitored for emotional arousal by electrodermal skin response, 176 00:19:04,000 --> 00:19:07,840 with electrodes attached to their fingers, like in a lie detector. 177 00:19:08,320 --> 00:19:10,400 This measures emotional arousal. 178 00:19:10,880 --> 00:19:14,120 When you're emotionally aroused, there's more adrenaline, you sweat, 179 00:19:15,040 --> 00:19:17,360 and that changes the skin conductance. 180 00:19:17,360 --> 00:19:20,800 So it's a very sensitive way of measuring emotional arousal. 181 00:19:21,840 --> 00:19:25,920 Now, not surprisingly, when people are shown emotionally arousing pictures, 182 00:19:26,480 --> 00:19:30,880 either hardcore pornography or scenes of extreme violence, 183 00:19:32,240 --> 00:19:33,760 they're emotionally aroused. 184 00:19:33,760 --> 00:19:34,800 This is well known. 185 00:19:34,800 --> 00:19:37,840 It's been studied by psychologists for a long time. 186 00:19:38,960 --> 00:19:40,000 It's not surprising. 187 00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:49,600 But what Dean Reddin and his colleagues found is that this emotional arousal begins at least five seconds, 188 00:19:49,600 --> 00:19:55,520 and in some cases up to 15 seconds, before the stimulus appears on the screen. 189 00:19:55,520 --> 00:20:04,640 And this is compared with control periods when the picture that appears on the screen is not emotionally arousing. 190 00:20:05,120 --> 00:20:10,160 Vaguely pleasant landscapes or neutral pictures don't bring about this effect. 191 00:20:10,160 --> 00:20:12,160 It's brought about by emotional arousal. 192 00:20:12,160 --> 00:20:15,200 This is statistically significant. 193 00:20:15,200 --> 00:20:18,720 It's been replicated in many other labs. 194 00:20:18,720 --> 00:20:29,840 And I can show you an average from about 20 or 30 subjects, which is from Dean Reddin's research. 195 00:20:29,840 --> 00:20:40,080 What you see here is the period in the middle between the two lines is when this picture is being shown on the screen. 196 00:20:41,360 --> 00:20:52,000 The dark marks represent the response, the electrodermal response, when it's an emotional picture that's being shown. 197 00:20:52,000 --> 00:20:57,840 As you can see, after the picture's been shown, there's quite a big emotional arousal. 198 00:20:58,720 --> 00:21:06,080 For calm pictures, which are not arousing, which are the unfilled, the open circles, 199 00:21:06,800 --> 00:21:17,060 the response just falls off and doesn't show any particular effect, other than a gradual decline after the picture's been shown. 200 00:21:17,060 --> 00:21:23,460 But if you look at the period before, you'll see that before the emotional picture, 201 00:21:23,980 --> 00:21:32,420 there's a very significant difference in arousal as measured by the electrodermal response compared with the control. 202 00:21:33,920 --> 00:21:40,100 This can't possibly be because they picked this information up by any normal means. 203 00:21:40,100 --> 00:21:46,100 The picture was selected at random by the computer a millisecond before it appeared on the screen. 204 00:21:46,100 --> 00:21:52,180 So nobody in the world knew it was going to be an emotional one as opposed to a non-emotional picture. 205 00:21:53,520 --> 00:21:55,260 And yet, they were responding. 206 00:21:55,560 --> 00:22:01,380 It's as if the emotion had a kind of pre-echo before the emotional arousal. 207 00:22:01,480 --> 00:22:03,920 They were already getting emotionally aroused. 208 00:22:03,920 --> 00:22:15,780 Now, one of Radin's colleagues replicated this work, Professor Dick Biermann, at Amsterdam, at the Free University of Amsterdam. 209 00:22:16,660 --> 00:22:21,420 And he invited me to be a subject in some of these experiments. 210 00:22:21,420 --> 00:22:26,840 And I was very happy to see what it was like for myself. 211 00:22:26,840 --> 00:22:32,840 I was completely unaware, consciously, of what kind of picture was going to appear. 212 00:22:33,600 --> 00:22:39,320 But during this test, I did notice that the violent images had very little effect on me. 213 00:22:39,320 --> 00:22:46,080 I think that's partly because, as a biology student, I did a lot of dissection. 214 00:22:46,980 --> 00:22:52,680 And for some reason, the pictures they showed, they didn't affect me. 215 00:22:52,760 --> 00:22:54,620 But the erotic images certainly did. 216 00:22:54,620 --> 00:23:04,180 And the result of my experiment with Dick Biermann is shown here in this graph. 217 00:23:06,660 --> 00:23:16,400 And what you see here is the middle of it where the stimulus is a black line with an arrow showing when the picture was shown. 218 00:23:16,400 --> 00:23:26,860 The blue diamonds, with the calm pictures, the control, and you see there's not much change. 219 00:23:27,940 --> 00:23:31,360 It falls off a bit after the stimulus has been shown. 220 00:23:31,980 --> 00:23:38,400 The yellow ones are the violent pictures, which, again, showed very little effect. 221 00:23:38,920 --> 00:23:42,200 But the red are the erotic ones. 222 00:23:42,200 --> 00:23:53,320 And as you'll see, the erotic response occurred very significantly before the stimulus was shown. 223 00:23:54,340 --> 00:24:01,140 The electrodermal response was very significantly different from that in the controls. 224 00:24:01,880 --> 00:24:09,020 So just in this particular experiment, with just me as a subject, it already shows this effect. 225 00:24:09,020 --> 00:24:11,420 You don't need hundreds and hundreds of subjects. 226 00:24:11,420 --> 00:24:18,500 This was a clear-cut effect with just one subject, me, with no previous training or anything like that. 227 00:24:19,220 --> 00:24:26,400 So I'm pretty convinced myself, especially having taken part in this experiment, that this is a real phenomenon. 228 00:24:26,980 --> 00:24:30,420 There is a kind of pre-echo of emotional arousal. 229 00:24:31,460 --> 00:24:35,860 This could play a role in all sorts of real-life situations. 230 00:24:35,860 --> 00:24:46,240 For example, if you were a jet pilot and you were flying along supersonic speed, you've got very little time to react to an impending disaster. 231 00:24:47,680 --> 00:24:54,740 And say you were suddenly being approached by some other plane flying towards you, you had to react suddenly. 232 00:24:54,740 --> 00:24:56,740 That would be very emotionally arousal. 233 00:24:56,740 --> 00:25:01,060 And if this effect cut in, it would prepare you for that. 234 00:25:01,820 --> 00:25:04,960 Several seconds in advance, you'd be much more concentrated. 235 00:25:05,200 --> 00:25:07,620 You'd be much more able to deal with it. 236 00:25:08,140 --> 00:25:15,400 If you were skiing downhill and you went round a corner and there was suddenly an obstacle in the way, you'd have to react extremely fast. 237 00:25:15,400 --> 00:25:26,040 And this pre-sentiment effect could prepare you to do that by preparing your emotions for this emotionally arousing situation you're about to enter into. 238 00:25:27,600 --> 00:25:34,000 So I think that this pre-sentiment is a real phenomenon. 239 00:25:34,580 --> 00:25:39,220 It's been shown in laboratory experiments, I think, conclusively. 240 00:25:39,220 --> 00:25:47,540 But what I'm interested in is how it affects real life and how we might come across this in real life. 241 00:25:48,800 --> 00:25:55,480 And one situation in which I think it occurs is through waking before alarms. 242 00:25:57,040 --> 00:26:02,220 Most people have had the experience of waking soon before an alarm clock goes off. 243 00:26:03,140 --> 00:26:05,480 And I've had it myself. 244 00:26:05,480 --> 00:26:12,060 I set an alarm for a particular time and I wake a minute or two before the alarm goes off. 245 00:26:13,820 --> 00:26:15,960 Now, I've done surveys on this. 246 00:26:16,100 --> 00:26:21,460 I did an internet-based survey with hundreds of people. 247 00:26:23,960 --> 00:26:28,780 And the first question I asked is, have you ever woken soon before an alarm went off? 248 00:26:29,160 --> 00:26:29,440 Yes. 249 00:26:29,560 --> 00:26:29,820 No. 250 00:26:30,660 --> 00:26:32,480 Yes was 97%. 251 00:26:32,480 --> 00:26:43,940 Now, you could argue this is just a biological clock and this is a routine response and it's just at routine times because of habit and so on. 252 00:26:45,540 --> 00:26:51,800 But actually, I know from my own experience that when I'm travelling, I've got to get up early to catch an early flight. 253 00:26:52,260 --> 00:26:53,340 I've got jet lag. 254 00:26:53,740 --> 00:26:55,740 Nothing's routine about that situation. 255 00:26:56,040 --> 00:26:57,760 And yet the same thing still happens. 256 00:26:57,760 --> 00:27:06,840 So, the next question I asked is, if yes, has this happened only at routine times or also at non-routine times? 257 00:27:07,780 --> 00:27:12,760 And 80% of people said that this had happened at non-routine times. 258 00:27:13,900 --> 00:27:19,480 So, I think this is a very, very common phenomenon. 259 00:27:19,480 --> 00:27:23,360 Now, most people don't think about it at all. 260 00:27:24,020 --> 00:27:32,040 They just assume that this is some kind of biological clock, a time sense that enables us to know what the time is. 261 00:27:33,100 --> 00:27:35,180 But I don't think it's as simple as that. 262 00:27:35,700 --> 00:27:39,420 First of all, most people's time sense isn't very good. 263 00:27:39,420 --> 00:27:48,180 I've done experiments where I interrupt people at different times of the day and ask them to say what time it is without any warning. 264 00:27:48,760 --> 00:27:54,480 And even though during the day we have chances to look at watches and phones and computers and clocks on the wall, 265 00:27:55,400 --> 00:27:58,540 and we're constantly being told the time or hear it on the radio, 266 00:27:59,840 --> 00:28:01,820 most people are wildly inaccurate. 267 00:28:02,300 --> 00:28:07,120 I mean, they can be wrong by 15 minutes, half an hour or more during the day. 268 00:28:07,120 --> 00:28:12,020 Unfortunately, I have a more accurate time sense than most because I don't wear a watch. 269 00:28:12,660 --> 00:28:13,840 I have a pocket watch. 270 00:28:15,100 --> 00:28:20,280 And for some years I didn't even have a pocket watch or any other means of telling the time. 271 00:28:20,360 --> 00:28:24,740 And I got quite good at estimating the time, better than most people. 272 00:28:25,160 --> 00:28:32,060 But even so, it wasn't with that kind of pinpoint accuracy that seems to occur with alarm clocks. 273 00:28:32,060 --> 00:28:42,860 So, the other reason I think that this is not just a time sense is there's nothing in our evolutionary history that would prepare us for this. 274 00:28:43,400 --> 00:28:48,480 Most humans have only had clocks or watches since the 20th century. 275 00:28:49,160 --> 00:28:54,760 And even before that, the number of people with clocks was fairly small. 276 00:28:54,760 --> 00:29:01,340 There were church clocks, of course, in public places since the Middle Ages, but they weren't particularly accurate. 277 00:29:02,220 --> 00:29:07,660 And most people didn't have to have a very good time sense. 278 00:29:07,840 --> 00:29:12,600 If you were a farmer, you woke up with a cock crow and you worked with the daylight, 279 00:29:12,940 --> 00:29:17,400 and your hours changed through the year because of daylight and natural suns. 280 00:29:17,400 --> 00:29:30,240 But the invention of railways and the need for railway timetables led to the standardization of time throughout Britain and other countries. 281 00:29:30,660 --> 00:29:33,380 Before that, there wasn't a really standardized time. 282 00:29:33,800 --> 00:29:39,480 Now it's standardized through radio signals and electronic signals. 283 00:29:39,480 --> 00:29:46,340 Almost everyone has a clock or a watch because our life is extremely ordered in terms of time. 284 00:29:46,480 --> 00:29:52,240 Airline schedules, train schedules, punctuality of meeting at meetings and so on. 285 00:29:53,020 --> 00:29:54,480 But this is all very recent. 286 00:29:56,260 --> 00:30:05,000 And I don't think there's anything in our evolutionary history that would prepare us to have this kind of extremely sensitive time sense when we're asleep. 287 00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:14,680 However, one thing that would have evolved over time is the ability to wake before some disaster occurs. 288 00:30:15,140 --> 00:30:18,040 Animals are at their most vulnerable when they're asleep. 289 00:30:18,880 --> 00:30:27,800 And say there's some attack about to happen or some predator about to attack or some disaster about to happen when you're asleep, 290 00:30:27,800 --> 00:30:37,900 The ability to have a pre-sentiment of that disaster and wake up a bit before the disaster would be extremely advantageous in evolutionary terms. 291 00:30:38,440 --> 00:30:39,420 It would help survival. 292 00:30:40,240 --> 00:30:46,240 And in fact, when you think about it, the word alarm, as in alarm clock or alarm on a phone, 293 00:30:46,840 --> 00:30:50,780 comes from the Italian word al-arme, two arms. 294 00:30:51,920 --> 00:30:56,560 It's an emergency response that is being invoked. 295 00:30:56,560 --> 00:31:06,140 And so I think that alarm clocks are actually triggering off an actual alarm response, a pre-sentiment response. 296 00:31:06,700 --> 00:31:10,380 And I think that's why so many people are waking before alarms. 297 00:31:11,920 --> 00:31:14,780 Now, this is a testable possibility. 298 00:31:15,360 --> 00:31:21,440 I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that some people say that they don't actually need to set the alarm. 299 00:31:21,820 --> 00:31:23,000 They'll wake up anyway. 300 00:31:23,000 --> 00:31:26,080 They can decide to wake up at, say, 6, 10 a.m. 301 00:31:26,560 --> 00:31:32,120 And they'll wake up at 6, 9 or so, before the alarm would have gone off if they had an alarm. 302 00:31:32,720 --> 00:31:37,720 I think in that case what they're doing is having a pre-sentiment of the time when they wake up. 303 00:31:38,180 --> 00:31:40,000 I think they're actually looking... 304 00:31:40,640 --> 00:31:43,780 When they look at the time they wake up, that gives that... 305 00:31:43,780 --> 00:31:47,380 It's a pre-sentiment of that time that wakes them up. 306 00:31:47,380 --> 00:31:56,100 I would predict that if you withdrew all clocks and watches so they couldn't look at the time when they woke up, their accuracy would decline. 307 00:31:56,300 --> 00:31:57,760 And this is a testable prediction. 308 00:31:57,760 --> 00:32:12,900 But the best way to test whether or not waking before alarms is a pre-sentiment effect or whether it's a biological clock effect is to look at unexpected alarms. 309 00:32:12,900 --> 00:32:30,220 And I've been doing surveys of people asking whether they've woken before unexpected alarms like the phone going off or like a fire alarm or like some other alarm that's going to wake them up. 310 00:32:30,220 --> 00:32:32,560 And many people have. 311 00:32:32,560 --> 00:32:39,500 Between 66 and 80% of my respondents say that they have woken before unexpected alarms. 312 00:32:40,500 --> 00:32:52,480 And one of the most interesting stories among the stories I've collected came from a fireman in the United States who said that he and his colleagues slept at the fire station waiting for alarms. 313 00:32:52,480 --> 00:33:00,440 And he got to the point where he would just wake a minute or two before an alarm went off. 314 00:33:00,440 --> 00:33:07,920 And he'd already sat up from his bed where he was sleeping and got his boots on when the alarm went off. 315 00:33:08,260 --> 00:33:10,540 And those were quite unpredictable alarms. 316 00:33:11,560 --> 00:33:16,180 So this could give rise to an experiment, a test for pre-sentiment. 317 00:33:16,180 --> 00:33:30,840 But the most obvious experiment is waking before an unexpected alarm goes off in the night, which is programmed by the experimenter on some kind of randomizing basis. 318 00:33:31,800 --> 00:33:36,580 You won't be surprised to know that I found very few volunteers for this. 319 00:33:36,980 --> 00:33:39,820 I did have one volunteer, a German graduate student. 320 00:33:39,820 --> 00:33:48,860 And I arranged for random phone calls to wake him in the night that he didn't know when they would be in advance. 321 00:33:50,640 --> 00:33:53,920 And after two or three nights, he said that this was proving very difficult. 322 00:33:54,160 --> 00:33:58,100 His girlfriend had now made him sleep on a sofa in a separate room. 323 00:33:58,800 --> 00:34:06,420 And after another two or three nights, he said this was just interfering too much with his lifestyle and he just couldn't do it anymore. 324 00:34:06,420 --> 00:34:10,340 That was not an ideal test situation. 325 00:34:11,040 --> 00:34:21,680 It may be possible to persuade people to do this, but I think one might also be able to do this during the day if there's some sudden alarm goes off on a phone. 326 00:34:22,320 --> 00:34:34,000 And many people wear Fitbits and other monitoring devices, which would enable the response to be tracked without people being in labs with fancy apparatus. 327 00:34:34,000 --> 00:34:43,300 So I think that waking before alarms can actually be tested experimentally, and I think it would be a very revealing experiment. 328 00:34:45,160 --> 00:34:52,520 I think it would suggest that we have this ability, that it's something that we've inherited through our evolutionary past. 329 00:34:52,520 --> 00:34:58,420 And it's something that could actually be trained. 330 00:34:58,820 --> 00:35:05,980 If, for example, in driving simulators or flight simulators, when people are being trained as racing car drivers or as pilots, 331 00:35:06,640 --> 00:35:10,420 they're trained to become more aware of these feelings. 332 00:35:10,800 --> 00:35:18,520 They could even have a red light that flashes on that's activated by a physiological response that's being monitored in their own body. 333 00:35:18,520 --> 00:35:26,360 So they're more attentive when a potential accident or danger arises. 334 00:35:28,360 --> 00:35:34,840 Well, that's one way in which pre-sentiment could be tested and may affect normal life. 335 00:35:35,640 --> 00:35:44,260 Another area where it becomes a possibility of actually making money is in day trading. 336 00:35:44,260 --> 00:35:54,180 In day trading on the stock market, people are punting on whether or not a stock is on a graph going like this, 337 00:35:54,240 --> 00:36:05,480 and the actual value from moment to moment, second to second, the value of stocks, shares, bonds, etc., is fluctuating depending on what's happening in stock markets. 338 00:36:06,040 --> 00:36:08,060 And this is all online data. 339 00:36:08,060 --> 00:36:18,500 And day traders are making guesses about whether a stock will go up or down in value over the next few seconds. 340 00:36:18,920 --> 00:36:26,940 They can't possibly know, on the basis of studying the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal or company financial reports, 341 00:36:27,500 --> 00:36:31,360 what fluctuations are going to happen on a second-by-second basis. 342 00:36:31,360 --> 00:36:40,760 They might be able to predict through rational means over months or years, which is what traditional stock brokers and investors do. 343 00:36:41,580 --> 00:36:44,840 But day trading is something very, very much more short-term. 344 00:36:44,840 --> 00:36:52,280 I was invited by one of the leading day trading companies in London to visit their trading floor 345 00:36:52,280 --> 00:36:57,500 because the head of the firm had been to a talk of mine and was interested in my work. 346 00:36:58,380 --> 00:37:01,660 I gave a talk, in fact, to the whole day trading team. 347 00:37:02,320 --> 00:37:06,200 And in return, I asked them to explain to me exactly what's going on. 348 00:37:06,200 --> 00:37:13,460 And there were these people, some of them with eight different screens, all tracking different aspects of the market, 349 00:37:13,660 --> 00:37:20,100 German bond futures, tin on the Kuala Lumpur, tin exchange, and so on. 350 00:37:20,160 --> 00:37:23,180 All around the world, there were these graphs going like this. 351 00:37:23,300 --> 00:37:29,440 And then there were TV screens up all along the roof with live feeds of news from all over the world. 352 00:37:29,440 --> 00:37:34,920 And so I asked for a demo, and he said, OK, here we are. 353 00:37:34,980 --> 00:37:39,980 Let's take German government bond futures, and here's this graph going up. 354 00:37:40,120 --> 00:37:46,960 He said, let's put 1,000 euros on this and put it in the mountain. 355 00:37:47,400 --> 00:37:51,100 He said, do you think it's going to go up or down, and where might it go? 356 00:37:51,180 --> 00:37:53,060 And so I said, well, I think it'll go up to there. 357 00:37:53,480 --> 00:37:55,600 And then the graph went, and it went up. 358 00:37:55,780 --> 00:37:57,680 He said, you've just made 5,000 euros. 359 00:37:57,680 --> 00:38:04,460 So, of course, you can also lose 5,000 euros just as fast. 360 00:38:05,480 --> 00:38:09,380 Now, people who are doing this are doing it very successfully. 361 00:38:09,640 --> 00:38:11,800 And when I asked, how do you pay the staff? 362 00:38:11,900 --> 00:38:19,660 He said, our trainees get 10% of the profits, and our most experienced traders get 80% of the profits. 363 00:38:20,620 --> 00:38:22,500 And I said, well, what if they don't make profits? 364 00:38:23,100 --> 00:38:24,820 He said, then they don't get anything. 365 00:38:24,820 --> 00:38:40,580 So there's an incredibly powerful natural selection working on these trading floors and among amateur day traders working at home on their computers because they could easily make a large loss. 366 00:38:40,580 --> 00:38:46,700 And in a company like that, if they lose more than they win, they have no money. 367 00:38:47,340 --> 00:38:48,580 They're out of a job. 368 00:38:49,200 --> 00:39:00,620 So the successful ones are the ones who are able to do this successfully over months and years of, on average, making money, and some of them making millions. 369 00:39:00,620 --> 00:39:05,020 Now, what's really going on? 370 00:39:05,340 --> 00:39:10,800 I actually asked whether they thought it was pre-sentiment, and they'd never heard of pre-sentiment. 371 00:39:11,840 --> 00:39:14,880 They just thought that the people who were good at it were good at it. 372 00:39:15,560 --> 00:39:18,200 And I talked to the person who was best at it. 373 00:39:18,840 --> 00:39:22,100 He was a Greek Cypriot who'd been in London for quite a long time. 374 00:39:22,100 --> 00:39:26,260 And I asked him what happened. 375 00:39:26,420 --> 00:39:33,800 And he said, well, he said, I just somehow know when there's a news feed about to break some story that's relevant. 376 00:39:34,100 --> 00:39:35,800 I just happened to be watching that screen. 377 00:39:36,080 --> 00:39:40,440 And when I'm working, he said, I just feel drawn to the one where there's going to be movement. 378 00:39:40,660 --> 00:39:43,020 And I just seem to know which way it's going to go. 379 00:39:43,020 --> 00:39:50,760 So all of this looks to me very like pre-sentiment, a highly trained and highly refined form of pre-sentiment. 380 00:39:51,700 --> 00:40:04,440 And I think that it's in stock markets, on day trading on stock markets, that we probably find the most skillful people with this ability who've developed it, as I say, by a very strong form of natural selection. 381 00:40:06,140 --> 00:40:08,620 Now, it would be possible to test this. 382 00:40:08,620 --> 00:40:21,460 And my idea, which could make a lot of money for somebody, you won't be able to patent it, because I'm now disclosing it and putting it in the public domain for free, because I really want someone to do it, 383 00:40:21,980 --> 00:40:30,200 is to have a day trading training app where you have live feeds from the actual markets. 384 00:40:30,480 --> 00:40:32,960 And you guess whether it's going to go up or down. 385 00:40:33,100 --> 00:40:34,900 And you do all the things day traders do. 386 00:40:35,200 --> 00:40:37,260 But you do it with fake money. 387 00:40:37,440 --> 00:40:38,540 I mean, imaginary money. 388 00:40:39,140 --> 00:40:48,960 Everyone who starts doing on this trading app would, say, be given half a million pounds, imaginary half a million pounds, and then see how they get on. 389 00:40:49,860 --> 00:40:53,600 Now, I've already talked to day trading companies in the City of London. 390 00:40:53,760 --> 00:40:55,000 They think this is a great idea. 391 00:40:55,780 --> 00:41:04,680 If people are consistently making millions of imaginary money, it shows they have what's necessary to do this successfully. 392 00:41:04,680 --> 00:41:12,060 And one of them even suggested that there could be a world competition for people with these day trading apps. 393 00:41:12,980 --> 00:41:19,800 And the ones who won it would get free internships at their company in the City of London. 394 00:41:19,800 --> 00:41:27,900 It would save them losing lots of money by taking on trainees, most of whom lose money during their first year. 395 00:41:28,000 --> 00:41:31,140 They only keep one out of ten trainees every year. 396 00:41:31,140 --> 00:41:37,940 And many of them lose money, and many of them lose money, and the company loses their money because they have to cover the losses for trainees. 397 00:41:39,140 --> 00:41:45,220 This way, they could take on people who've actually trained themselves or who have a natural ability to do this. 398 00:41:45,220 --> 00:41:55,180 So, a day trading app, I think, would work really well. 399 00:41:55,320 --> 00:41:57,440 It would be quite easy to develop the app. 400 00:41:57,980 --> 00:42:11,800 Personally, for research purposes, I'd be interested to know whether there's any difference in performance when it's a live feed of an actual stock market share or stock or bond or commodity, 401 00:42:11,800 --> 00:42:17,360 compared with a historical record from, say, last year or five years ago. 402 00:42:18,300 --> 00:42:23,960 There wouldn't be any kind of buzz around that in the whole atmosphere because it's a purely historic thing. 403 00:42:24,060 --> 00:42:25,220 No one else would be doing it. 404 00:42:25,700 --> 00:42:31,400 Or a simulated graph which is based on random changes. 405 00:42:31,400 --> 00:42:36,960 Would it work better with live streams, historical ones, or random changes? 406 00:42:37,520 --> 00:42:41,740 It's possible, as a pre-sentiment effect, it would work equally with all three. 407 00:42:42,120 --> 00:42:53,080 But there might be some extra boost from the live streams because so many minds are engaged and there's some kind of electric buzz around that in real time. 408 00:42:53,080 --> 00:43:03,960 I dare say that people could make training apps and charge people a lot of money for training on them 409 00:43:03,960 --> 00:43:08,040 because anyone who really did trade in this skill really could make millions. 410 00:43:09,060 --> 00:43:11,500 You might think, well, what about betting? 411 00:43:11,920 --> 00:43:13,260 What about online gambling? 412 00:43:13,980 --> 00:43:15,860 Why don't people make millions there? 413 00:43:15,860 --> 00:43:23,240 And, in fact, this is one of the arguments skeptics often raise against the reality of phenomena like pre-sentiment. 414 00:43:23,400 --> 00:43:27,220 They say, well, if this is such a great thing, why don't people make millions? 415 00:43:27,840 --> 00:43:30,240 Well, the answer is, on the stock market they do. 416 00:43:30,820 --> 00:43:33,880 But with online betting or with casinos, they don't. 417 00:43:34,140 --> 00:43:41,160 Because the casinos and the online betting people have algorithms to spot people who are consistently winning. 418 00:43:41,160 --> 00:43:49,040 And they then either ban them from their site or reduce the stake they're allowed to bet to one pound or something very, very small. 419 00:43:50,500 --> 00:43:53,820 And then the people then re-register under a different name. 420 00:43:53,900 --> 00:43:59,360 And the algorithms try and catch them and ban them before they cause the company to lose any money. 421 00:43:59,860 --> 00:44:01,940 With stock markets, there's no restraint. 422 00:44:02,100 --> 00:44:08,520 With betting companies, they're stacking the odds against people with this ability deliberately. 423 00:44:08,520 --> 00:44:10,240 Otherwise, they'd go out of business. 424 00:44:11,160 --> 00:44:15,200 These are areas of research that are very little explored. 425 00:44:16,460 --> 00:44:22,820 And, basically, there are three kinds of experiments that I think what I've talked about could suggest. 426 00:44:23,240 --> 00:44:31,160 First is an app to track, to predict earthquakes based on animal behavior. 427 00:44:31,160 --> 00:44:37,220 It would be possible to develop an app which anyone, anywhere in the world could use. 428 00:44:37,360 --> 00:44:40,400 Obviously, people in earthquake-prone areas would be more interested. 429 00:44:40,400 --> 00:44:46,400 If they see unusual animal behavior, they just put it in the app with one or two details, make it very simple. 430 00:44:46,400 --> 00:45:05,460 Then, using something like Google Maps, if there were suddenly lots of reports from near Lahore, Pakistan, or near Thessaloniki in Greece, or somewhere else in the world, the map could sort of glow red, as it were, and more intense, depending on the number of reports. 431 00:45:05,460 --> 00:45:15,700 And these could actually be used as the basis of an animal-based earthquake warning system, using existing technologies, an app on existing smartphones. 432 00:45:15,700 --> 00:45:28,140 Secondly, there could be tests to see whether people respond before alarms, as I mentioned, either when they're asleep or when they're awake. 433 00:45:28,140 --> 00:45:37,400 And these could employ apps that depend on Fitbits or other monitoring systems that many people are wearing anyway. 434 00:45:38,280 --> 00:45:48,800 And thirdly, there could be a training app for day trading, which could enable people to make millions of pounds, dollars, or any other currency. 435 00:45:48,800 --> 00:45:53,760 So, there's a way forward scientifically. 436 00:45:54,560 --> 00:45:57,460 But then, of course, there's the question, how does this work? 437 00:45:57,600 --> 00:46:00,000 And the answer to that is, nobody knows. 438 00:46:01,700 --> 00:46:14,860 One possibility, which some people who are into quantum theory talk about, is that in quantum theory it's possible to interpret some changes as causation working backwards in time, retrocausation. 439 00:46:14,860 --> 00:46:21,880 And, of course, as soon as you talk about retrocausation, you get into the realm of science fiction. 440 00:46:22,400 --> 00:46:28,680 There are many science fiction stories that imagine what could happen if you could reverse the order of causation. 441 00:46:29,160 --> 00:46:33,200 You could intervene in the past and change the course of history, and so on. 442 00:46:34,700 --> 00:46:40,660 Personally, I think there's sort of moderate interest, but not really that much interest, 443 00:46:40,660 --> 00:46:44,540 because I don't think we can reduce consciousness to quantum phenomena. 444 00:46:44,680 --> 00:46:53,520 That's an ultimate reduction to reduce a highly complex system to something that's the smallest possible units of change in physics. 445 00:46:53,880 --> 00:46:56,600 So, quantum is the smallest possible unit of change. 446 00:46:56,740 --> 00:46:58,620 It's an ultimate reductionism. 447 00:46:58,620 --> 00:47:11,640 Another possibility, which I myself am interested in and think more plausible, is that the present is not a finely defined slice. 448 00:47:12,180 --> 00:47:17,620 Our minds are not working in the present in terms of a microsecond or a nanosecond. 449 00:47:17,620 --> 00:47:24,120 The fact that a cinema works when you see a series of what are essentially still frames, 450 00:47:24,660 --> 00:47:30,000 and when you see them projected in the cinema, it looks like continuous motion, 451 00:47:30,380 --> 00:47:34,100 is because our presence are extended in time. 452 00:47:34,260 --> 00:47:36,700 They're not instantaneous slice. 453 00:47:36,820 --> 00:47:37,640 There's a spread. 454 00:47:37,640 --> 00:47:46,600 And the spread in measuring people's physiological responses to sounds and their conscious responses 455 00:47:46,600 --> 00:47:53,460 shows that there can be up to 500 milliseconds, half a second, before you notice something. 456 00:47:54,240 --> 00:48:00,460 The present seems to be spread out in many perceptual phenomena at least 500 milliseconds. 457 00:48:00,900 --> 00:48:06,560 But what if the present for certain events is spread out over hours or days? 458 00:48:06,560 --> 00:48:10,880 Everything in nature is made of wave-like patterns. 459 00:48:11,540 --> 00:48:15,720 A day and a night is a kind of oscillating rhythm of light and dark. 460 00:48:16,300 --> 00:48:17,360 It's a kind of wave. 461 00:48:18,000 --> 00:48:21,280 And no wave can occur at an instant. 462 00:48:21,480 --> 00:48:28,280 A wave takes time to wave, and the wavelength could be milliseconds or days or even years. 463 00:48:28,280 --> 00:48:34,520 And the present, therefore, may be spread out over a particular wave. 464 00:48:34,520 --> 00:48:41,240 And if it's spread out, there's no reason to believe that all the spread out would be in the past, 465 00:48:41,400 --> 00:48:44,380 that there'd be a wave spread out, and then you get to the present. 466 00:48:44,620 --> 00:48:47,080 There's an instant cut-off at this point. 467 00:48:48,980 --> 00:48:52,360 If the wave's here to the present, if the wave's spread out through the present, 468 00:48:52,460 --> 00:48:55,720 then the future would be part of the wave as well as the past. 469 00:48:55,720 --> 00:49:01,940 And so what appears to come from the future, as in pre-sentiment or a pre-cognitive dream, 470 00:49:02,380 --> 00:49:04,740 may be part of a kind of extended present. 471 00:49:06,060 --> 00:49:10,700 Well, that's just a speculation, and you may think it's just playing with words. 472 00:49:12,140 --> 00:49:17,060 But personally, I'm not that bothered about what explanation we prefer. 473 00:49:17,060 --> 00:49:21,760 I think the most important thing is to find out whether these phenomena actually happen, 474 00:49:22,460 --> 00:49:25,440 which most people believe they do because they've experienced them, 475 00:49:26,120 --> 00:49:29,260 but which dogmatic sceptics say they can't 476 00:49:29,260 --> 00:49:34,280 because they go against their conception of nature through mechanistic science. 477 00:49:34,960 --> 00:49:38,500 So I think it's much more important to carry out the empirical research 478 00:49:38,500 --> 00:49:42,120 and find out what's happening, and also how we can apply it. 479 00:49:42,120 --> 00:49:47,300 And then, if it's clear to everyone that these things are real, 480 00:49:47,620 --> 00:49:52,260 a lot of theoreticians are going to want to try and find explanations. 481 00:49:52,860 --> 00:49:56,900 But I think it's better to find the explanations afterwards when we've got more facts 482 00:49:56,900 --> 00:50:02,600 than delay examining the facts because we don't have an explanation in advance. 483 00:50:03,440 --> 00:50:05,180 So this is an open question, 484 00:50:05,180 --> 00:50:10,600 and here are ways in which the question can be answered experimentally 485 00:50:10,600 --> 00:50:12,640 through animals and earthquake prediction, 486 00:50:13,380 --> 00:50:18,260 through arousal before alarms or other arousing stimuli, 487 00:50:18,820 --> 00:50:22,560 and through stock market day trading apps 488 00:50:22,560 --> 00:50:26,520 that, if successful, would enable people to make lots of money, 489 00:50:26,820 --> 00:50:30,660 which for many people would be the ultimate proof of something's reality. 490 00:50:30,660 --> 00:50:31,440 Thank you. 491 00:50:31,440 --> 00:50:31,600 Thank you. 492 00:50:32,100 --> 00:50:34,160 Thank you. 493 00:50:36,440 --> 00:50:37,020 Thank you. 494 00:50:37,280 --> 00:50:37,780 Thank you. 495 00:50:37,920 --> 00:50:38,280 Thank you. 496 00:50:38,760 --> 00:50:38,860 Thank you. 497 00:50:39,560 --> 00:50:39,620 Thank you. 498 00:50:39,720 --> 00:50:39,940 Thank you. 499 00:50:40,180 --> 00:50:40,500 Thank you. 500 00:50:41,860 --> 00:50:42,340 Thank you. 501 00:50:44,340 --> 00:50:44,880 Thank you. 502 00:50:45,480 --> 00:50:45,700 Thank you. 503 00:50:45,880 --> 00:50:46,200 Thank you. 504 00:50:47,020 --> 00:50:47,160 Thank you. 505 00:50:47,440 --> 00:50:47,940 Thank you. 506 00:50:47,980 --> 00:50:48,280 Thank you. 507 00:50:48,580 --> 00:50:48,620 Thank you. 508 00:50:49,940 --> 00:50:50,580 Thank you. 509 00:50:50,700 --> 00:50:50,760 Thank you. 510 00:50:50,960 --> 00:50:51,200 Thank you. 511 00:50:51,400 --> 00:50:51,460 Thank you, 512 00:50:51,580 --> 00:50:51,740 Thank you.