2. ISLIS Conference, Aug. 22-Aug. 27, Japan
A FMRI Brain imaging Study of Presentiment .
Dick J. Bierman & Steven H. Scholte
Universities of Amsterdam & Utrecht (NL)
I would like to start with a little background about myself. More specifically how I became involved with the world of research into the paranormal. So we have to go backward in time.
ISLIS Conference, Aug. 22-Aug. 27, Japan

3. What went on before? Presentiment experiment
Presentiment is reported as the apparent psycho-physiological effect of a future emotional ‘cause’.
The there came presentiment.
Presentiment changed my life so to speak. Let us repeat shortly what that is.
Presentiment is reported …..
And it is reported in such way (we will see that in moment) that the conclusion is inevitable that this is a robust and strong effect.
But as explained before I was extremely sceptical. Let’s have a look at the claims

4. Procedure Subject sits relaxed with electrodes attached
Gets about 40 exposures of randomized neutral and calm stimuli
Skin conductance is averaged separately for emotional and neutral stimuli
Before, during and after stimulus
Baseline fixed at ~ -7.5 seconds

5. Procedure Presentiment ‘trial’
Blank screen
baseline 5 Or
Calm
Random!!
Subject
Hits
Button
First the procedure.
Actually this is quite simple. One hooks subject to a skin conductance measuring device and puts the subject in front of a screen.
The subject has to press button and then 3 events occur while simultaneously the physiology is monitored.
First a blank screen appears. Then a picture is shown. This can be an emotional or a calm picture and then the screen goes blank again. After cooling down period this will repeatt itself (of course with different pictures who are randomly chosen from a large picturepool).
As you can see the baseline just before the picture goes up a little bit and that is completely normal because the subject is in anticipation of a picture and gets a little bit aroused.
Let’s have a look at what the mean physiologiacl trace looks like for a single subject.
Skin Conductance
Time

6. For example the following sequence could arise
We analyze this by averaging over the condition

7. Results First Subject (Radin-1)
stimulus
Before
During
After
Emotional
Presentiment?
Calm
Here are two traces of one of the first subjects ever tested with this procedure.
One trace is the average over all calm exposures. Note that the trace has three time components before the stimulus, during the stimulus and after the stimulus. The latency of the skin conductance response is between 2 and 3 second so you see a large response peak for the emotional and hardly any response for the calms.
Now what could be called presentiment is that just before the stimulus the subjects gets also a bit more aroused if the FUTURE stimulus is emotional. Note that with a proper randomization procedure the subject has no way to know what the future stimulus can be.
If we take many subjects and we average we get the signals in the following sheet/

8. Results all Subjects (Radin-1)
Emotional
Presentiment!
Here it is obvious that the traces are already separating BEFORE the stimulus. This is what I mean by a large and robust effect. You don’t need statistics to see the differece!
So as I said I couldn’t believe this: these data they were just too good.
Calm

9. Replications

10. Replications Amsterdam University Edinburgh University
Lab. For Fundamental Research, Palo Alto
Cornell University (in progress)
Budapest
POST HOC in already published data:
Antonio Damasio (Iowa university)
Alfons Hamm (Uni.Greifswald)

11. Results re-analysis Hamm’s data
Erotic
Here are three traces because the emotional pictures are split for animals and erotic pictures. The yellow trace is for the animal pictures and the results given here are all data (phobics group plus control group). There seems to be nopresentiment for the animals however there is a clear and marginally significant difference between the calms and the erotic means already before the stimulus.
So this was encouraging.
Calm
presentiment
stimulus

12. So What Next? Can we differentiate between different emotions?
Can we locate the source of this phenomenon?
The conclusion must be that presentiment effects are not restricted to the experiments that parapsychologists are doing but are also to be found in mainstream data.
For mainstream researcher a difficult dilemma arises.
Either they acknowledge the existence of this anomaly and can correct for it which will improve their effectsizes by 10-30% OR they will deny it and thereby have less power in their experiments.
What I hope is that they too will be intrigued like I was 30 years ago and start investigate this effect but……...

13. Brain scanner, Amsterdam
Summer 2001

14. Event Related Design 10 subjects 48 pictures (events)
~ 32 neutral, ~ 8 erotic, ~ 8 violent
4.2 seconds exposure time
16.8 seconds for one trial (= 8 volumescans)
1 vol: 22 slices, slice resolution: 64 * 64

15. Analysis procedure (1)
Dependent var: BOLD signal per voxel (Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent)
Pre-processing:
Slice time correction
Linear trend removal
8 mm spatial smooting
No further smoothing in time domain

16. Analysis Procedure SPATIAL: TEMPORAL (restricted to ROI):
Fit data to a General Linear Model
Predictors : neutral, erotic, and violent stim.
Result: Regions of Interest with significant fit.
TEMPORAL (restricted to ROI):
Event related averaging of BOLD per condition
t-test of average BOLD signals in ROI

17. Brain regions which have a significant fit with emotional stims and neutral stim as predictor
Contrast between emotional and neutral conditon.

18. Screen Dump
of analysis software Output
Input: Single individual’s brain signals

19. Erotic Presentiment effect at time: -4 seconds.
Event related averaging
erotic
stimulus
Erotic Presentiment effect at time: -4 seconds.
Td = 2.89 df= 39 p < 0.01
Brain-map with ROI’s
neutral
Plot for BOLDsignal for the whole experiment

20. ROI:
-51, -78, 1
violent
erotic

21. ROI:
-1,-80, 37
violent

22. Pooling of data Mapping in Talairachspace
Loss of signal due to individual differences
So:separate male and female

23. all female All female: Erotic & Violent presentiment
(t ~ 1.75, df=158, p<0.05 o.t.)

24. all male All male: Erotic presentiment
(t ~ 2.1, df=226, p<0.01 o.t.)

25. Considered ‘Normal’ explanations
Artefacts Introduced by software
Hemodynamic curve
Smoothing
Chance fluke or over analysis
Incorrect Randomization
Subject Strategies

26. Subject Strategies
A subject strategy reflects itself in the anticipation being a systematic function of the history of stimuli so far presented.

27. Subject anticipatory Strategies
Subject strategy: Ai = f(P1…P i-1)
Based upon Gamblers Fallacy
In spite of the fallacy: produces normal effect
Goes to 0 if N goes to infinity
Simulation using ACTUAL random sequence
A increases after each neutral (sigmoid function)
A is reset after emotional stimulus

28. Results SS simulation
Over-all Subjects the explained effectsize is 2% after N=48 trials

29. Reasons to reject SS explanation
Explained effect is too small
Does not explain spatial qualitative differences between emotions and gender
NO neutral anticipation observed!!!!!

30. Conclusion This study should be seen as exploratory
But justifies further research (as usual)
And theoretical speculation:
Could Consciousness be a Feynman-Wheeler’s multiparticle coherent absorber and therefore allow for advances waves?
Replication study will focus on the coherence of brain states