We Are Always Living in the Past — at Least Our Brain Does
By: Pavle Marinkovic
Tags: Research, Psychology, Life, Time, Neuroscience

Bonus track: our body’s ability to react to an event before it happens

We’ve been talking about how it takes time for things to process in our brains and how we really function in life with a slight retardation from actual events. But there’s also another interesting effect that’s been studied: our body’s ability to look into the near future and react to it.

Now hold on a minute, this is not clairvoyance nor is a sudden future teller sort of thing.

It’s an unconscious perception of our body of future experiences.

The study goes as follows (Radin, 2004):

Participants are seated in front of a computer screen. Their non-dominant hand is hooked with electrodes to measure differences in skin conductance due to sweat gland activity. These responses are involuntary so they’re beyond our conscious control. The participant presses a button with their dominant hand and the computer waits 5 seconds before showing a photo randomly from a large pool of photos for 3 seconds. Participants either saw a calm photo (landscapes, nature, or people scenes) or an emotional one (erotic, violent, or an accident scene). But when they pressed the button, the computer selected one at random. Neither the subject nor the experimenter knew which photo would appear thus, a double-blind experiment. Then the screen goes blank for 10 seconds for the subject to cool down and the skin conductance to return to a base level. The computer instructs the subject to press a button whenever he/she is ready and a new trial begins.

Screenshot of the procedure from Dean Radin’s study (2004)

What happened was actually fascinating.

On the one hand, participants had a spike in their skin activity before the emotional photo appeared. On the other hand, during the calm photo exposure, their skin activity remained almost unchanged.

Screenshot of the results from Dean Radin’s study (2004)

Keep in mind that skin activity takes time to change. It reacts 2 to 3 seconds after the presentation of a stimulus, not at the moment of appearance.

So what you see from the graph is that once the participant has pressed the button (time 0s) to actually seeing the photo (time 5s), the skin has already began reacting. This is happening without the participant knowing that the photo will be an emotional one. The body is reacting ahead of time!

Weird isn’t it?

Well, this is just one of many experiments that have studied the presentment effect. Others have shown:

Pupils dilating before a threatening event (vs no dilation with neutral stimuli).

Hit rates above chance for subject’s responses before the stimulus has been presented:

“For example, in one experiment, participants saw a list of words and were then given a test in which they tried to retype as many of the words as they could remember. Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words from the list and gave the participants practice exercises on them. When their earlier memory test results were checked, it was found that they had remembered more of the words they were to practice later than words they were not going to practice. In other words, the practice exercises had reached back in time to help them on the earlier test.” (The Cornell Chronicle, 2010)

A meta-analysis on a series of experiments showing that there’s a consistent effect of anticipating future events whether this is conscious or unconsciously driven by the participants

There’s definitely something going on. Our body might be able to have a glimpse into the future and react to it before it arrives.