The inner life
Precognition
Direct answer
Precognition is the claimed knowledge of a future event that could not have been inferred from anything known at the time. A premonition is its felt form: a foreboding without a reason.
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At a glance
- Also called
- premonition, foreknowledge, seeing the future, precognitive
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Extrasensory Perception, Confirmation Bias, Telepathy, Parapsychology
Precognition is the claimed knowledge of a future event that could not have been inferred from anything known at the time. A premonition is its felt form: a foreboding without a reason.
A plain educational schematic; it does not diagnose a condition or replace professional care.
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What is the difference between precognition and a premonition?
Precognition means knowing beforehand. Parapsychology uses it for information about the future that reaches a person by no ordinary route, neither by reasoning from present facts nor by chance. In everyday life it appears as the premonition, the strong sense that something is about to happen, and as the feeling afterwards of having known all along.
The difficulty is the record. Forebodings are common, mostly vague, and remembered only when something seems to answer them. When they are logged before the event, as a bureau in London did from 1967, very few can be matched to anything. Laboratory studies that seemed to show the effect in 2011 were repeated elsewhere without success.
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What sets Precognition apart
Precognition is the claim that runs against the order of cause and effect: the event has not happened, yet knowledge of it is said to exist. That is why physicists find it the hardest of the claims to credit, and why its tests take an odd form, in which the response is recorded first and the target is chosen by a random process afterwards. In daily life it is met as hindsight wearing the clothes of foresight.
- Meaning: Latin prae, before, and cognitio, knowing
- Felt form: the premonition, a foreboding with no stated reason
- Bureau: British Premonitions Bureau, London, opened 1967 by John Barker
- Laboratory claim: Daryl Bem, Feeling the Future, 2011: nine experiments
- Outcome: independent repetitions in 2012 found no effect
Often mistaken for something else: Deja vu is the feeling that the present moment has been lived before; precognition is the claim to have known a later event in advance. The first is a common quirk of memory.
The story behind Precognition
The word is recorded in English from the fifteenth century in the plain sense of foreknowledge, and psychical researchers took it up in the early twentieth. J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time (1927) made the idea popular. The psychiatrist John Barker opened the British Premonitions Bureau in 1967 after the Aberfan disaster. In 2011 Daryl Bem's paper Feeling the Future reported nine experiments; failed repetitions followed within a year.
Why Precognition matters
Precognition is the claim behind every premonition, and the place where memory most easily turns a vague unease into a foreseen event.
How to read Precognition
Researchers test it by asking for a response before a random target is chosen; in ordinary speech it covers any sense of having known in advance.
Precognition in practice: an example
A man feels uneasy before a journey and nothing happens. He forgets it. The one uneasy morning that is followed by a delay is the one he retells.
Where readings of Precognition go wrong
A foreboding is no ground for cancelling what matters or for warning someone of harm. If dread of the future is constant, a doctor can help.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
Precognition will not tell you that you are psychic, or that a premonition is true.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- premonition, foreknowledge, seeing the future, precognitive
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is the difference between precognition and a premonition?
Precognition is the research term for knowledge of a future event by no ordinary means. A premonition is the experience itself, a feeling that something is coming. Every premonition claims precognition; neither has been shown to occur.
Have any premonitions been verified?
Not in a way that rules out chance. When forebodings are filed before the event, as the British Premonitions Bureau did from 1967, only a small share match anything, and those matches are loose.
What did the 2011 precognition experiments find?
Daryl Bem reported nine experiments in which people seemed to respond to stimuli before seeing them. Other laboratories repeated the work and found no effect, and the episode fed a wider debate about methods in psychology.
