{"id":7554,"date":"2012-10-24T11:32:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-24T15:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=7554"},"modified":"2012-10-28T17:11:46","modified_gmt":"2012-10-28T21:11:46","slug":"study-suggests-the-subconscious-may-anticipate-future-events","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2012\/10\/study-suggests-the-subconscious-may-anticipate-future-events\/","title":{"rendered":"Study suggests the subconscious may anticipate future events"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the Northwestern University press release via EurekAlert!:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Wouldn&#8217;t it be amazing if our bodies prepared us for future events that could be very important to us<\/strong>, even if there&#8217;s no clue about what those events will be?<\/p>\n<p>Presentiment without any external clues may, in fact, exist, according to new Northwestern University research that analyzes the results of 26 studies published between 1978 and 2010.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers already know that <strong>our subconscious minds sometimes know more than our conscious minds<\/strong>. Physiological measures of subconscious arousal, for instance, tend to show up before conscious awareness that a deck of cards is stacked against us.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What hasn&#8217;t been clear is whether humans have the ability to predict future important events even without any clues as to what might happen,&#8221; said Julia Mossbridge, lead author of the study and research associate in the Visual Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern.<\/p>\n<p><strong>A person playing a video game at work while wearing headphones, for example, can&#8217;t hear when his or her boss is coming around the corner<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But our analysis suggests that <strong>if you were tuned into your body, you might be able to detect these anticipatory changes between two and 10 seconds beforehand and close your video game<\/strong>,&#8221; Mossbridge said. &#8220;You might even have a chance to open that spreadsheet you were supposed to be working on. And if you were lucky, you could do all this before your boss entered the room.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This phenomenon is sometimes called &#8220;presentiment,&#8221; as in &#8220;sensing the future,&#8221; but Mossbridge said she and other researchers are not sure whether people are really sensing the future.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I like to call the phenomenon &#8216;anomalous anticipatory activity,'&#8221; she said. &#8220;<strong>The phenomenon is anomalous, some scientists argue, because we can&#8217;t explain it using present-day understanding about how biology works<\/strong>; though explanations related to recent quantum biological findings could potentially make sense. It&#8217;s anticipatory because it seems to predict future physiological changes in response to an important event without any known clues, and it&#8217;s an activity because it consists of changes in the cardiopulmonary, skin and nervous systems.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the Northwestern University press release via EurekAlert!: Wouldn&#8217;t it be amazing if our bodies prepared us for future events that could be very important to us, even if there&#8217;s&#8230; <a class=\"read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2012\/10\/study-suggests-the-subconscious-may-anticipate-future-events\/\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[18,84,119,12,260],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7554"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7766,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554\/revisions\/7766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}