Premonitions

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While I am rather rational person, I have the occasional premonition. These, as most premonitions are,  tend to be predictions of something potentially bad. My first vivid premonition was when I was an undergraduate. I was in the dorm bathroom and I suddenly had an intuition that I would need to quickly finish my “business.” I had no sooner left the stall when the fire alarm went off.

Since then I have had numerous premonitions, most of them have proven very useful indeed. However, in some cases, they merely warn me of something bad to come without enabling me to avoid it. For example, when I finished my search committee meeting after turning in my summer grades yesterday, I should have felt like I was done. However, I had a clear feeling that something bad was yet to follow and mentioned this to my colleagues as the meeting ended. Sure enough, this morning I received an email from a candidate and learned that HR had made an error with his application. So, I spent a good chunk of the day sorting that out.

Being a philosopher, I am (of course) rather skeptical of premonitions. Even my own. After all, I know that memory is rather selective. People will tend to remember the few premonitions that are followed by a significant event and forget the hundreds that amount to nothing. However, in my own case I am careful to note when I have such an intuition and wait to see if it is followed by a suitable event. While I have not done a statistically rigorous study, my premonitions seem fairly reliable. Naturally, I do have them and nothing follows, but more often than not something does.

This leads to the question of what is going on. One obvious option is that I am simply fooling myself-I think I am keeping a reasonable track of hits and misses, yet I am still remembering the hits and letting the misses slide.

Another option is that a premonition tends to be rather vague and thus can be “confirmed” by anything negative (or positive for that sort of premonition). Since bad things commonly happen, the odds are that most such intuitions would thus be followed by such an event.

A third option is that the premonitions are actually real. Since I am not inclined to believe in a supernatural cause, I suspect that these premonitions are actually intuitions. That is, I suspect that my mind (or brain) is processing all sorts of information and probabilities and yielding a specific sort of feeling. In many cases I suppose that I am working with information I am not consciously aware of, yet acquired by the usual mundane means.

I do find these premonitions rather useful and they seem to work about as well as weather predictions (that is, not great but not always wrong). Sadly, I never get anything really useful, like lottery numbers.