Can Someone Really Perceive Things And Events That Can Happen In Future?

No, no human can reliably see or predict the future. What we call prediction is almost always pattern recognition, calculated forecasting, or after-the-fact coincidence. Mainstream science has found no replicable evidence for genuine precognition, and famously vague prophets like Nostradamus only seem accurate when their cryptic verses are interpreted retroactively.

Wouldn’t it be great to predict the future? People visit fortune tellers to learn about their fate, but how much of that is true?

Do fortune tellers know what will happen, or do they say things that commonly transpire in a lifetime for everyone?

It would be thrilling to see someone foresee everything that will occur, but has it ever happened? Let’s find out!

Can Someone Predict Future Events?

The prediction of the future is not a magical power, nor is it wisdom bestowed on mere mortals. It is simply a coincidence or the result of someone accurately analyzing various aspects of a situation, stimulus, and expectation.

There have been great people before us who knew the future; their wisdom, knowledge, and experience assisted them in speaking about possibilities that could exist. It was as though these people knew what was going to happen, but no one around them knew how they did it.

So how does someone know what is going to happen in the future?

All of this is based on our perception of the world, namely what we have seen in similar situations and what the outcome was. They do not necessarily have to be big events that we’re going to know about, like the next president, the great wars ahead, or our future life; they could also be about minor things in life.

This happens because we expect certain outcomes from situations in our lives, which is how our brain functions and generates responses to situations.

We all imagine what could the future be like, but it’s not something we can know for sure; that is just our imagination (Photo Credit : arleksey/Shutterstock)

Presentiment: Intuition About The Future

Presentiment means having an intuition about the future. As the definition suggests, it is an “intuition”, a feeling or instinct about what could happen. It is not something that we know for sure,  but something that we feel could be a possible outcome, not at all like what Dr. Strange saw in Avengers: Infinity War, where he witnessed the actual future through his abilities.

A book called “The Premonition Code,” co-authored by neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge and author Theresa Cheung, argues that humans may have subtle instinctive reactions to events that haven't happened yet, and that we are capable of glimpsing the future to a certain capacity. It's worth flagging that this claim sits at the fringe of mainstream science: a 2012 meta-analysis Mossbridge co-authored reported small statistical effects, but the most famous precognition study, Daryl Bem's 2011 paper in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, has consistently failed to replicate, and most psychologists treat parapsychological precognition as unproven.

Is It A Prediction Or Just Calculated Forecasting?

There is a difference between someone being able to predict the future and someone just perceiving future possibilities based on calculated decisions and considerations. Soldiers may perceive what the enemy’s next step could be by thinking from the enemy’s perspective, according to what he did before and the steps he took for an attack, but this is not the same as predicting the future. It is just knowing what the other person can and will likely do.

Moving on to the wider, more large-scale predictions and perceptions, like those about weather, climate, wars, plagues, revolutions, deaths, and victory; all of these could be made with two reasonable explanations.

One, either the person “coincidentally” or “by chance” guessed what could happen; or two, he/she made some strong calculations and used methods like Trend Analysis. Trend analysis, a type of comparative study, is the process of observing present patterns in order to anticipate future ones (see, for example, the case study on Trend Analysis at John Deere).

So, yes, prediction is not exactly done daily; in fact, it is quite rare that someone accurately predicts the future.

Accurate Predictions Of The Future

Even in real life, there have been a lot of predictions that have happened coincidentally, like ‘The Simpsons‘ predicting that Donald Trump would be The President of the United States, or when one of the show’s episodes described a smartwatch being used way back in 1995.

We could also take a look at Nostradamus, a 16th-century French apothecary, astrologer, and reputed seer (not a physicist, as he is sometimes mislabeled), who wrote an entire book of cryptic verses he believed described the future, called “Les Prophéties”.

In his book, Nostradamus wrote over 900 short poems about what could happen in the future. He has predicted a lot of things, in some ways, although he did not use the names of who or what he was talking about centuries ago.

These are just a few instances of people being able to perceive the future. If you dive deep into this topic, it’s a vast pool of knowledge and revelations.

All of this makes you wonder, is someone capable of knowing the future, or are some people just incredibly conscious and strategic about things?

How Does ‘The Simpsons’ Seem To Predict The Future?

If The Simpsons can call a Trump presidency, surely something uncanny is going on? Not quite. The show’s own writers are the first to wave the mystery away. Showrunner Al Jean has described the apparent hits as “an educated guess”, and says the real story is selective memory: “It’s cherry-picking. There are 35 years of material. How many of the things that we said came true versus how many of the many things we said did not come true?” Former writer Bill Oakley is even blunter, calling the matches “mainly just coincidence because the episodes are so old that history repeats itself.”

The math is on their side. Across more than 35 years and over 700 episodes packed with throwaway gags and topical jokes, the show has thrown a colossal number of darts at the wall, and a few are bound to land on a bullseye. Some “predictions” were simply easy calls; Jean has pointed out that forecasting corruption at FIFA, for example, was hardly a leap. Others were never predictions at all. A surprising share of viral Simpsons “prophecies” are outright fakes: still frames doctored after an event to drop in a headline or image the episode never actually contained. When you only ever see the handful of jokes that happened to come true, while the thousands that did not quietly vanish, a sharp piece of satire starts to look like a crystal ball.

Incorrect Predictions

Sometimes, people make bold predictions that are entirely wrong. Coincidental statements or precise calculations can assist one in predicting the future.

The prediction might not take place in precisely the same way and could also be wrong.

For example: In 1999, Time magazine claimed that women enjoy leaving the house, so virtual shopping might fail.

It was also predicted that the world would end in 2012, but evidently, that prediction was inaccurate too.

Not every prediction is true, and many have turned out wrong, even after logical explanations and calculations.

Why Do I Feel Like I Can Predict Things Before They Happen?

Plenty of people get the eerie sense that they “knew” the phone was about to ring, or guessed exactly what a friend was about to say a heartbeat before they said it. If that sounds familiar, you are not tapping into the future. You are running into three very ordinary features of the human brain.

The first is that your brain is a prediction machine. It does not sit and wait for the world to happen to it; it constantly models what is likely to come next, from the arc of a thrown ball to the end of the sentence someone is speaking. Most of the time these forecasts are quietly correct, which is exactly why a small, accurate hunch feels uncanny rather than routine.

The second is memory bias. We vividly remember the handful of times a premonition came true and conveniently forget the far larger number that fizzled out. A related quirk, the frequency illusion (also called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, a term coined by Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky), means that once an idea is on your mind you start to notice it everywhere, which can feel a lot like having “called it”. It is the same confirmation bias that lets a lucky guess masquerade as a sixth sense.

The third is déjà vu, the unsettling feeling that you have lived a moment before. Neuroscientist Akira O’Connor and colleagues have used brain imaging to argue that déjà vu is not a memory error at all, but a sign of your brain’s fact-checking machinery at work: the frontal regions detect a false signal of familiarity rising from the memory system and flag the mismatch. In other words, that flash of “I knew this would happen” is your brain catching a glitch, not glimpsing the future.

Can We Perceive The Future?

It might be possible for us to perceive the future after carefully studying logical patterns and the history of an event (which could also be incorrect).

However, in the scope of a normal life, our perception of the future relates to smaller aspects of life. Humans can perceive day-to-day possibilities with some informed wisdom, but they cannot claim to know about future events centuries from now.

Perhaps Artificial Intelligence will allow us glimpses into what the future holds; until then, we can be satisfied with making minor guesses, like which teams will win certain matches or what gifts we will receive on our birthday!