This is fun – and slightly mind popping if true. A handful of psychologists, notably Michael Frank at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and Daryl Bem, at Cornell are conducting experiments into peoples’ ability to foretell the future or, more precisely, whether it’s possible for the future to influence the present.

In one experiment Bem asked people to briefly look at a list of words and remember them. They were then given an edited selection of the same list of words, which they were also asked to memorise. Weirdly, people were more likely to remember the edited selection of words during the initial test. In other words, later events appeared to influence earlier behaviour. Several studies have tried to repeat these results, one study succeeded but six others failed.

Source: New Scientist, 14.1.12 pages 39-41.