Mind games
Clairvoyant? Your brain might just be tricking you into thinking you are
Have you ever felt as though you predicted the doorbell was about to ring? Imagine these moments of clairvoyance occur simply because of a glitch in your mind’s time logs.
It may have felt as if the thought came first, but when two events (ringing of doorbell, thought about doorbell) occur close together, we can mistake their order. This leads to the sense that we accurately predicted the future when all we did is notice the past.
In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we found mixing up the timing of thoughts and events may be more than a mental hiccup.
We supposed if some people are prone to mixing up the order of their thoughts and perceptions, they could develop a host of odd beliefs. They might come to believe they are clairvoyant or psychic. They might confabulate explanations for why they have these special abilities, inferring they are important, or are tapping into magical forces.
Such beliefs are hallmarks of psychosis, seen in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but they are not uncommon in less-extreme forms in the general population.
Using a scale that measures these kinds of beliefs, we asked participants in our recent study questions such as: “Do you believe in the power of witchcraft, voodoo or the occult?” “Do you ever feel as if you could read other people’s minds?” and “Do you ever feel you are a very special or unusual person?”
To measure the kind of timing errors that might lead people to mistakenly think they predicted an event they had already observed, we had participants play a game in which they were asked to predict which of five white squares was about to turn red.
Participants could either indicate they didn’t have time to finish making a prediction before the red square was revealed or claim that they did complete their prediction before this event and predicted either correctly or incorrectly which square would change colour.
The square that turned red from trial to trial was selected randomly. Therefore, we knew — although the participants were unaware — that it was impossible to correctly predict the red square with better than 1-in5 odds. But if participants were confusing the time of their prediction with the time the red square appeared, they might think they had completed an honest prediction before their time ran out despite being subconsciously influenced by the colour change — that they had made more accurate predictions than statistically possible.
As we hypothesized, the participants who were more likely to report an implausibly high number of accurate predictions were also more likely to endorse delusion-like ideas in broader contexts.
Our work suggests that mistiming thought and perception may be one important driver of distorted thinking and it offers hope someday we might be able to better identify who is most at risk for psychotic illnesses.
Mixing up the timing of thoughts and events may be more than a mental hiccup.