Precognition

Precognition is a form of extra-sensory perception. Believers in precognition say it allows a "percipient" to perceive information about future places or events before they happen (as opposed to merely predicting them based on deductive reasoning and current knowledge). A related term, presentiment is used to refer to information about future events which may not present itself in conscious form but rather in the form of emotions or feelings at the autonomic level. These terms are considered by some to be special cases of the more general term clairvoyance.

There is disagreement within parapsychology as to the existence of precognition and the validity or interpretation of precognition related experiments.

History
Throughout history people have claimed to have precognitive abilities, and the "gift of prophecy" is a common feature of most religions. Just as prevalent are anecdotal accounts of precognitions from the general public, such as someone "knowing" who is on the other end of a ringing telephone before they answer it, or having a dream of unusual clarity with elements of content that later turn out to be events that actually occur. The French term, déjà vu, meaning "already seen" was coined by French psychic researcher, Emile Boirac to describe the often eerie sensation, and its companion term, "future memory", was coined by American Near-death experience researcher PMH Atwater in her 1996 book by the same title. While anecdotal accounts do not provide scientific proof of precognition, such common experiences motivate continued research.

Experimental research of precognition began at least as early as the work of J. B. Rhine, and eventually came to be his preferred mode of conducting his tests. This was a variation of his famous card-guessing experiments in which the participant was asked to record his guess of the entire order of a card deck before the deck was shuffled. Precognitive experiments have since been studied in a variety of formats by various parapsychologists, for example by the remote viewing researchers, and at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR).