"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." _ Albert Einstein
It was a chilly morning that day. It was also Eid. I had been up the whole night in anticipation, not of Eid itself (as exciting as that is for a 7 year old) but because I was going to witness my first sheep slaughtering. My mom had insisted that I will not be allowed to watch, but I didn’t care. Being the stubborn me, I knew that when the time came I will figure out a way. Sure enough, at 5:30 am I was out there watching the two sheep being prepped. After a back and forth with my mom she must have realized what a waste of time and effort it would be to convince me to go inside (Hint: huge waste). Well, this was one of those times (there are many) where I admit that my mom was right. The sight of the sheep being slaughtered was one of the most horrific I have ever witnessed until this day. But it was something else that stuck in my mind: how the sheep had been unsettled the whole night and getting louder and louder leading up to the slaughter. Did they know what was awaiting them? At the age of seven the answer was very trivial to me, sure they did.
As I grew up I started to see the problems with this explanation. To mention one, the sheep would have had to be either: 1- highly intelligent and capable of observing our behavior on the day to conclude that our activities were leading up to their slaughter. Or, and I always thought this was the slightly less outlandish possibility, 2- they had the ability to glance into their grim and unfortunate future… somehow. Apart from that I had no real explanation to what I saw (or very likely what I thought I saw). As usual, life went on and I never attended a slaughter ever again. But the unsolved mystery still bothered me. After all, no one likes to be proven crazy by his own hands. As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one.
In 1967, Robert Morris PhD, noticed a similar phenomenon with his lab rats. He observed that the rats which were destined to be killed that day were noticeably more aggressive in their behavior. He pondered the same things I did (or I pondered the same things he did for chronological considerations, no pun intended). In her Book, “The ESP Enigma”, Diane Hennacy Powell M.D., a former professor of medicine at Harvard University and a practicing psychiatrist, told the details of the paper which Robert Morris presented in 1967 at the winter meeting of the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (now known as the Rhine foundation). Having decided to investigate his suspicion that his rats may have been precognizant of their grim future, Dr. Morris designed a very elegant experiment. To test his hypothesis he used a chamber in which the floor was divided into squares (known as an open field in psychology experiments). He released one rat at a time into the chamber and observed how many squares it ventured into. After that, the rats were given to another experimenter who determined randomly whether the rat was to be killed or spared (probably through a mechanism such as coin flipping). Neither the data collector nor the executioner had prior knowledge as to which rats were to be killed. In other words, this was a double blind study. When the data, collected from 9 repetitions, were examined, Dr. Morris found that the rats that were killed were significantly less explorative than those that were spared (statistically significant here). The results were astonishing. The only explanation, given the tightly controlled experimental design, was that the rats had some way of knowing that they were soon to be sacrificed. The mechanism however remains unknown.
Since hearing of this experiment I have tried to obtain the original paper which Dr. Powell described. Unfortunately, I could not find an electronic copy of the paper, which is not surprising given it was published in 1967. Nonetheless, being a scientist, I cannot take someone else’s word for it without seeing the data myself. Though Dr. Morris’ (late professor at University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Powell’s reputation speaks for itself, I will continue my attempts to obtain a copy of that paper. Having said that, I have been able to get my hands on some recent, but slightly different, experiments by other researchers that show the same conclusions.
These results are not very surprising to me, for reasons that will become clear in subsequent blog-posts. However, the caveat here is that even if the results in these experiments were true, one has to remember that, as in any animal model, what is of mice is not necessarily that of men. When it comes to precognition and thought transfer through time in humans, more relevant and robust data is needed. Do we have such data? Stay tuned to find out.
