'Time-Traveling Porn' Experiment Has Been Succesfully Replicated

I don't know if you guys remember when Stephen Colbert had Daryl Bem on his show to discuss his precognition experiment back in 2011. Here is Bem on the Colbert Report to refresh your memory.

Well, Bem caused a bit of a stir in the halls of science. Since then, the old guard have been working hard to debunk. What a surprise. They've been flaunting unsuccessful replications but of course they aren't going to flaunt successful ones. That just wouldn't be in the best interests of the dominant paradigm.

So to balance things out a bit, here is a list of several positive Bem replications.

Batthyany, A. (2010). Retrocausal Habituation and Induction of Boredom: A Successful Replication of Bem (2010; Studies 5 and 7). Social Science Research Network, Working Paper Series.


Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2011). Using retrocausal practice effects to predict online roulette spins. A talk presented at the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, Washington D.C., U.S.A., October, 2011.


Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2011). Using retrocausal practice effects to predict random binary events in an applied setting. A talk presented at Towards a Science of Consciousness, Stockholm, Sweden, May, 2011.

[more recently: Franklin, M., and Schooler, J. (2012). Using retrocausal practice effects to predict random binary events in an applied setting. Toward a Science of Consciousness, Tucson X].


Tressoldi, P. E., Masserdotti, F., & Marana C. (2012). Feeling the future: an exact replication of the Retroactive Facilitation of Recall II and Retroactive Priming experiments with Italian participants, Universita di Padova, Italy


Subbotsky, E. (2012). Sensing the future: The Non-standard observer effect on an ESP task. Lancaster University, UK


Bijl, A. & Bierman, D. (2013). Retroactive training of rational v.s. intuitive thinkers. Proceedings of the 56th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association.


Parker, A., & Sjödén, B. (2010). Do some of us habituate to future emotional events? Journal of Parapsychology, 74, 99–115.


Savva, L., Child, R. & Smith, M. D. (2004). The Precognitive Habituation Effect: An Adaptation Using Spider Stimuli. The Parapsychological Association Convention 2004, pp. 223 – 229.

Dr. Bem was great in that interview with Colbert. My favorite part was his closing remarks on how they are looking to quantum physics to explain this:

"Anyone whose lived through the twentieth century as a physicist is accustomed to seeing phenomena that are just as weird as the phenomena I'm showing. But people are just more interested in porn - it doesn't required as much mathematics."

reply to post by BlueMule


Could you explain his original precognition experiment a bit? Other than that, thanks for the link and also the other relevant studies. I'm not sure if it is related, but I think it is -

Quantum physics as it relates to neurology and psychology talks a bit about this - time travel as in some memories actually being links to previous mind-states and some plans being links to future mind-states. I hardly think this is an embarrassment to the entire field -

On the contrary, this experiment represents where the field of psychology is going. I've already done armchair neurological research into how quantum fields could be generated in neurons. The mechanisms for this kind of thing are already laid out in places like Orchestrated Objective Reduction -

Wikipeida: Orch-OR

As evidence grows for this kind of psychology, it continues to be rejected by mainstream scientists as not only the experiments showing the reproducible results grow, but the theories and the explanations of the mechanisms grow -

Yet, someone who sees an experiment done denies there are theories explaining it, and someone reading theories denies there are reproducible experiments? This lack of communication is clearly a sign of "mainstream" scientists getting in the way of progress.

I did a little research, and I didn't see if there were others who had duplicated these results. What I did see was a whole lot of straight up rejection that such a notion could be possible.

I wonder if this precognition would exists with other highly emotional situations. In my experience with such things, this is what happens.

I really don't get the purported scientific method/finding,

that subjects were about to predict images when they are erotic

Thats like saying they're more likely to envision porn on their screen than... Excel spreadsheet (duh!)

reply to post by BlueMule


This thread has the best subject title...time travelling porn, awesome.

What it boils down to is simple:

Show a person a computer screen, they ANTICIPATE porn.

No time travel necessary.

reply to post by darkbake


This might give you something to chew on!

"In 2010, Cornell University's Daryl Bem concluded a rigorous eight year study on the subject of precognition, which involved 1000 Cornell undergrads over nine experimental runs and resulted in unprecedented, almost incomprehensibly positive results. Through a unique “backwards” approach to psychological phenomena, Bem’s experiment affirms the likelihood of "retroactive" psi effects—or in this case, the ability of a person’s physiology to “predict” an upcoming event regardless of the individual’s conscious awareness of its impending occurrence.

As if that wasn’t wild and exciting enough, Bem’s findings seems to be re-affirming theories within quantum physics. In total, an overwhelming eight of Bem’s nine experiments confirmed his hypothesis that psi is a real phenomena—and, according to Bem, the odds of getting such a combined result due to chance or statistical flukes are about 1 in 74 billion."

mentalfloss.com...

"In my work, I have always pursued problems or puzzles that strike me as interesting and have not worried about how it might affect my career. I have a maverick approach to many psychological topics, and I consider myself fortunate that Cornell has always given me the freedom to do that." - Daryl Bem