After the 9/11 attacks, the name Nostradamus flooded global conversations. The 16th-century French astrologer is believed by some to have predicted the tragedy with his line about a “fire approaching a great new city.” Similarly, Bulgarian mystic Baba Vanga is said to have foreseen major world events like the Chernobyl disaster, World War II, Princess Diana’s death, and the 2004 tsunami.

In Japan, manga artist Ryo Tatsuki drew attention after she reportedly dreamed of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami years before it happened. While there is no scientific proof that these figures predicted such events, premonitions, the sense of knowing something before it happens, are not unheard of in everyday life.

What is precognition?

That gut feeling about a person or a place, or the sense that something bad is about to happen, is known in science as precognition, the ability to sense or know about an event before it occurs. Cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge became interested in studying it after her own childhood experience: the day her father boarded a flight that later crashed, she had an unshakable feeling she would never see him again.

Mossbridge explains that humans view time as moving in a straight line, always forward. But some scientists question this belief. “We don’t understand how time works. Even physicists are admitting they really don’t know how it works,” she told Popular Mechanics.

Time may not be as it seems

Parapsychologist Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, believes human consciousness may extend beyond our everyday sense of time. “In quantum mechanics, time may not even be part of our physical reality… It just behaves in a much stranger way than how it is seen through the lens of the human experience,” he said.

Mossbridge and Radin tested this idea by wiring participants to EEG machines while showing them random images. They found that brain activity spiked before negative images appeared, suggesting that people, at some level, anticipated what was coming.

A “memory” from the future

Radin links precognition to quantum entanglement, where particles share information instantly, no matter how far apart they are. He suggests our brains could be “entangled” with their own future states, giving us a kind of memory of events that haven’t happened yet.

“Some people hypothesize that precognition is your brain entangled with itself in the future… you’d be feeling something like a memory that is going to happen in the future,” Radin said. This, he adds, could explain not only precognition, but also déjà vu and sudden gut feelings.

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