START OF PART II

Subject 23

It was late at night in the haunted psychology building. Kimberley Stratton, pariah of the department, was doing the haunting, roaming the halls in sweatpants, sweatshirt and fuzzy slippers. The middle of the night was the only time should could get any work done. Banished as she was to the basement of Metcalf, daytime was filled with the cries of babies. The Infant Research Laboratory was next to hers -- actually, surrounding hers on three sides -- and normal business hours meant a constant stream of newborns and their mothers for whatever cognitive studies were currently being conducted. Kimberley didn't know what experiments were taking place around her; she knew only that the babies weren't happy, actively verbalized it and disrupted her work.

Given the daytime din, her own experimental trials had to be conducted in the evening. That left only the night for all her other work: data analysis, responding to email, writing, preparing class plans, grading papers, etc. Truth is, she actually preferred the night. If not for the one afternoon class she taught, she would happily live in permanent darkness. The night was clean, simple and quiet. During the day she had no friends here anyway, being the bastard foster child of the Psychology Department. In the evening, her only allies were three dedicated and well-meaning grad students -- Linda, George and Sue -- her Research Assistants who were still a little too young and naive to fully grasp their pariahhood. At night, her companions were Carmichael, Skinner, Hull, Hecht and the aptly named Edwin G. Boring. Torturers of rats they were, in the name of understanding the human psyche. Their glowering and humorless faces stared down at her from black-and-white photographs in the halls and stairwell, adding their disapproval to that of the living faculty.

Nominally, Kimberley was welcomed at Brown University for the "diversity" she brought to the curriculum. Realistically, though, she was the token crackpot in a hallowed hall of experimental psychologists who felt that her work would be better conducted in the Religious Studies Department. The class she taught, Introduction to the Science of Parapsychology, was wildly popular among undergraduates, but Kim had no delusions. She was at Brown for two years only. Her title was "Visiting Assistant Professor." That was academic-speak for, "You ain't got no future here, lady!"

It didn't matter. Even two years at an Ivy League college added public respectability to her research. She also had something that many in the department didn't have: funding. Her current study was supported by a very wealthy, very anonymous donor who seemed to both respect her work and have patience for the long-term. He was also evidently very powerful, because it was his muscle that got her this humble place in a prestigious institution. In spite of their lip service to open-mindedness, the Psychology Department did not accept her willingly. She was crammed down their throats under threat of loss of funding in some other area.

She met her patron only once, at his nondescript office in Las Vegas. It was located in a somewhat tacky two-story professional building behind a strip mall -- more like the office of an accountant or landlord than a multi-millionaire. The donor didn't reveal a lot about himself or his motivations, but his questions indicated that he had read all of her articles and completely understood them. For almost an hour, they discussed statistical methodologies and sampling bias. She had rarely had such a rich discussion of her work with anyone outside academia, but then the interview abruptly ended. Without warning, the donor's expression change from animation to disinterest, and he dismissed her with a small motion of his hand.

"Thank you for coming, Dr. Stratton," he said.

As she stumbled out of the office in a daze, she wondered if she had said something wrong. But nothing was wrong. She got her funding. She got her tile-walled, echo-chamber bunker amidst the wailing babies in the basement of Metcalf. The donor made only one request: that she submit a report to him every month on the progress of her research. The report had to be formatted in a certain way, and it had to be faxed, not emailed, before noon Las Vegas time on the first business day of the month. The secretary gave her detailed instructions on what was expected before she left the office, and that was her only indication at the time that her funding request had been approved.

Now Kimberley was haunting the ancient halls of the Metcalf Chemistry Building, now the psychology lab, wandering from floor to floor at two in the morning. It was cold outside in Providence in January, but it was cozy inside. Kim often strolled the convoluted corridors of Metcalf and the adjoining red-brick buildings, just to get some exercise and think about the issues of the day. One of these issues was her next report to her patron. She had submitted five monthly reports already but with nothing much to say. Credible experimental research is a slow, plodding business, involving dull statistics and endless repetition with very little swashbuckling or daring-do. She wondered if her patron was even reading her reports. The only indication that her faxes were received was one time she was late, didn't make the noon deadline, and the secretary called to ask where the report was.

Report number six was due in a few days, and for once she had something interesting to say. The only question was whether it was too soon to say it. The report wasn't a scientific document, but she still she felt the instinctive need to confirm and re-confirm that what she was seeing was real. All she had now was a dataset: a series of numbers and a graph for a single experimental session lasting about 45 minutes. The subject of the experiment was unknown to her -- and deliberately so. This was a double-blind study, and it was important at this point that the person doing the analysis have no information about the subjects apart from the data itself.

Being a "fringe" field, parapsychology had to adhere to solid experimental design even more than, say, a study on infant development. The skeptics would grasp at anything, no matter how tenuous, to discredit this kind of research, so every aspect of this study had to be excruciating proper and correct. The experiments themselves were conducted by the three R.A.'s, under strict orders that Kimberley be told nothing about the subjects until the First Stage analysis was complete. She was deliberately out of the building at the time, borrowing an office in Hunter during the evening trials. Data collection took six weeks and involved 120 currently anonymous subjects. The subjects, in all likelihood, were undergraduates, the main fodder of psych studies everywhere. They were lured into becoming guinea pigs by a combination of Human Subject course credit (required for some Intro to Psychology courses) and a cash payment of $12.

The subjects filled out questionnaires about themselves prior to the experiment -- both mundane stuff like name and age and questions about paranormal beliefs and self-reported psychic ability. (e.g. "Do you believe in ghosts?" and "Have you ever sensed that a friend or family member far away was involved an accident and it turned out to be true?") The questionnaires, however, were immediately sealed in envelopes, and each subject thereafter was referenced only by a number. Only after the initial analysis of the experimental data would the questionnaires be unsealed and integrated with the data.

So at this point, Kimberley knew nothing about the subjects apart from their experimental results. Overall, the data seems to support previous studies, which was extraordinary in itself. One dataset, however, was off the charts! Subject 23. The alpha numbers were higher than Kim had ever seen, and the theta wasn't just one or two seconds but ten to fifteen. Kim wanted to rush out meet this gifted individual right away, ask him or her more questions and see if they would be willing to participate in further studies. That was the original plan: to cull the 120 subjects down to the 10 or so with some proven ability. Contacting anyone now, however, was against the rules of the experiment. It would give the skeptics just what they needed to discredit the results, so she would have to wait.

The experiment itself wasn't terribly sexy. Correction: some of it was sexy, intentionally, but the experimental design was pretty simple. The experiment measured "presentiment," or the ability to anticipate ones own emotions before they happened. For example, if someone witnesses a terrible car accident, they will react with emotional distress -- or in physiological terms "arousal". Presentiment is the seemingly bizarre phenomenon where some people react emotionally to the accident before it actually occurs. The effect, when it happened, was usually tiny, but it was measurable, clinically reproducible and statistically significant.

"How can this be?" she said to her class, rhetorically. "How can someone react to an arousing stimulus before it is presented, before it is even selected by the machine? The answer is they can't. It's impossible. This seems to violate every conventional concept of time and causality, and yet the data is undeniable. This is a subtle effect: only one or two seconds before the event, sometimes only milliseconds, but the implications are huge. We're talking about the first scientifically verifiable, statistically robust, fully reproducible evidence of precognition in humans."

The experiment worked like this: After completing a consent form and the questionnaire, a subject was seated in front of a computer screen and was hooked up to an apparatus similar to a lie detector. Sensors attached to the fingers and wrists recorded galvanic skin conductance, while a thimble over one finger collected pulse rate and blood flow. The aim, however, was not to detect lies but simply to measure the subject's autonomic arousal -- or the strength of his emotional reaction to a stimulus. If a subject saw something disturbing, surprising or sexually provocative, his whole body would react in predictably "aroused" ways. Likewise, when he saw something benign, bland and non-threatening, his body would respond in predictably "calm" ways. Subjects might be aware of their feelings, but the physiological processes were unconscious and essentially beyond the subject's control.

Once the subject was wired up, a series of images was displayed on the screen, with a long period of white space between. The images came from a large pool of stored images that had already been rated by a separate set of subjects as either "arousing" or "calm". The arousing images showed bloody car crashes, riots, an execution by firing squad, a woman crying in grief over the body of her child, couples having sex... straight sex, weird sex, sado-masochistic sex. The images all came from the internet, so there was no lack of disturbing and arousing photos to choose from. The calm images showed forests, lakes, flowers, non-aggressive furniture, etc. The selection of images was made on the fly by a noise-based random number generator. Care was taken to assure true randomness, and the selection wasn't actually made until a few milliseconds before presentation.

The experiment incorporated a lot of subtle variables concerning timing and presentation, in part to address the skeptics' objections to earlier experiments, but the subject's job was just to sit there and watch. He was required to press a button to initiate each trial, but nothing more was asked of him. He would view 30-40 photos on the screen as his arousal levels were recorded, then he was unhooked from the apparatus. He would then be given his twelve dollars and would walk out of the lab.

The results so far were consistent with earlier experiments: The majority of subjects showed nothing special: When the arousing photos were shown, they became aroused; when the calm scenes were shown, they showed a calm response. Predictably, the arousal response in most subjects started a fraction of a second after the display of the arousing photos. This group of "normal" responders were of no great interest in themselves, but they did provide a baseline for understanding the other set of subjects: the "atypicals".

The atypicals were the ones who responded to the arousing photos before they were presented on the screen and even before the random number generator had selected the photo. In a primitive, emotional way, these people were predicting the future, probably without being aware of it. There were no outward signs at the time of the experiment; they just sat passively in front of a screen. It was only after you analysed the data that you saw what was happening.

"Wait a minute!" said one of her previously dozing students during a question period in class. "Are you saying these people can see the future? They know what's going to happen before it happens?"

"I don't know what they see or know," said Kim. "All I know is their bodies are responding before the stimulus is presented. The simplicity of this experiment is that we're not relying on self-reports at all, only the galvanic skin response."

"But that doesn't make any logical sense," said the student. "If someone can see the future, can't they avoid it? It's like going back in time and killing your grandmother. If the future can be changed, then it isn't the same future anymore, and it can't be predicted."

"I know, I know" said Kim, in awe of it herself. "All those conundrums are there. What does it say about human free will if the future can be predicted at all? Is free will an illusion? I don't have the answers. All we know is what the data tells us. It's a basic principle of science: You can't dismiss good data just because it doesn't match your preconceptions."

She went on: "The main problem is that critics say we don't have good data. The conclusions don't make sense, they say, so the data must be flawed. That's why we have to run the experiment again and again, in various permutations, to address all the concerns the critics raise. You wouldn't require this for an ordinary experiment yielding rational results, but as Sagan says, 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.' Personally, I believe that we already have that extraordinary proof, but you have to be willing to look at the data.

"As to actually changing the future, that's a theoretical problem, but I don't see it as a practical issue at the moment. What we are seeing in these experiments is maybe a vague feeling of dread one or two seconds before a traumatic event. If you are driving a car and have that feeling, you might be able to avoid an accident or might not. One or two seconds isn't a lot of lead time, especially if you don't know exactly what is going to happen. Based on the existing data, we have no evidence that anyone can change the future in any big way."

Back in her basement office in Metcalf, after her nocturnal stroll through the halls, Professor Stratton began to doubt that last statement. With half the analysis completed, Subjects 7, 46 and 54 showed some solid prescience, but only one to two seconds of it. Subject 23, however, was a game changer. If he or she was reacting to a stimulus 10-15 seconds before the event, that was a substantial hunk of time -- enough opportunity to significantly alter the future before it happened. In theory, this person could see accidents or acts of violence far enough in advance to realistically avoid them. In a sense, this person could be "bulletproof," dodging bullets before they were even fired.

But Kimberley decided, finally, that she would not report Subject 23 to her patron this month. Maybe next. The data was too preliminary, she told herself, but that was just a excuse. She should have been excited about discovering a remarkable psychic right here at Brown. Subject 23 could be the find of a lifetime, that one special subject who finally proves this elusive phenomenon to the world. Unfortunately, Kimberley knew enough about her own arousal levels to recognize that "excitement" wasn't exactly what she was feeling.

It was more like a feeling of dread.

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