There may be scientific evidence for ESP, says researcher holding up a flash card with a couple of wavy lines

A Cornell psychology professor has written a piece (based on experiments with his students) that suggests that the future influences the past with regard to human thought - a concept known as "retrocausation." In some of the experiments, students were able to guess at future events at levels of accuracy beyond what would be expected by chance. In others, events that took place in the future appeared to influence those in the past, such as one in which rehearsing a list of words enhanced recall of those words, with the twist that the rehearsal took place after the test of recall.

But he's not alone.  Hundreds of articles reporting significant results on psi experiments have already been published in dozens of academic journals. What's the big deal?"  To begin with, this is not just any psychologist; he is one of the most prominent psychologists in the world.  In fact, he was probably mentioned in your Psych 101 textbook, and may have even co-authored it!  Granted, these psi effects are generally small.  But let's remember that it shouldn't even be possible to peer into the future at all (even a little), given what we generally understand about how the world works. Time is only supposed to go one way. Perception is supposed to be limited to the past or the present and only to those phenomena immediately and locally accessible by our five senses. When exceptions to these rules are observed, particularly under controlled laboratory conditions, they deserve a closer look.

Take running the four-minute mile. If scientists had studied even thousands of people in the 1950s, they might have concluded that running a four-minute mile was not humanly possible. Over time, however, it was found that a few people could actually do it -- an extremely 'small effect' to be sure, but these anomalies proved that it was, in fact, possible. Not only do we now know that running a four-minute mile is possible, it is the standard for professional middle-distance runners (for those of you paying attention, that was the example with the running man).

I 'predict' that science will soon develop a renewed interest in psi effects!

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