Discussion Filter: You may be PSYCHIC. Please help me define this term!

July 23, 2009 8:52 AM

I have experiences that (I assume) mostly seem to be me picking up on people's body language and then intuiting things others might miss....but sometimes I get accurate pictures in my head from folks when they speak to me (places, etc.) and there have been times when I've had very accurate premonitions. These premonitions have been verified/documented, so it isn't like I'm making it up after the fact. Does this happen to you, too? What is it??

Throwaway email is [e-mail]. Go ahead and write me. I don't have the guts to post with my metafilter name, either!

Most of the time I think I am just sensitive to the social clues others miss, nothing extraordinary there. But the truth is that this extra "knowing" has effected me since childhood and shaped much of my life. I am now 40 years old. If it is more than skill, how do I cope?

And yes. I've had some weird social interactions as a result of this thing over the years. I'm hoping to continue this discussion openly, should it prove popular. Or privately via my throwaway email. Private is good. Point is, I'd love feedback from a wide variety of people, and the MetaFilter community seems especially thoughtful, intelligent, and grounded.

Thanks in advance for your comments!

posted by anonymous to society & culture (20 comments total)

Sounds like a form of Extra-Sensory Perception.
posted by mattbucher at 8:58 AM on July 23

How do you cope? How have you been coping for the last 40 years? If it's real, take it in stride and benefit from whatever you're able to see (I'd say this would make you an excellent businessperson or charlatan). If you're not really psychic and just able to interpret body language well, the same advice holds true.

Weird social interactions doesn't really lead me to believe that your life is suffering because of this ability, so I'm not exactly sure what you need help coping with.
posted by scarykarrey at 9:00 AM on July 23

Yeah, I'm sort of confused. You could just be empathic and a good perceiver and guesser, who has fallen for the very common mental "trick" where you remember your successes and forget the times that it didn't work out, or a prediction didn't come true.

However, if you really do have precognitive abilities or ESP, then you should apply for the $1,000,000 Paranormal Challenge. There are a couple hoops you have to jump through (reported on by mainstream media, maybe have a testimony by a scientific professional?), but I'd be willing to help pro bono if that's what you decide to do.
posted by muddgirl at 9:05 AM on July 23 [4 favorites]

What is it??

Good intuition coupled with a healthy dose of confirmation bias.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:12 AM on July 23 [10 favorites]

Good intuition coupled with a healthy dose of confirmation bias.

Yes. If you were to start writing down every time you had a premonition/idea and rate your certainty, you would start to notice the many times you are wrong. As it is, when something is right you are likely to look back and say "I knew it!" instead of "I had a vague feeling about it". You are also likely to forget those vague feelings which aren't reinforced by your being proven correct about them.
posted by kathrineg at 9:16 AM on July 23 [1 favorite]

You should play poker. That type of skill would take you a long way. $$
posted by Plug1 at 10:10 AM on July 23

If it is more than skill, how do I cope?

First and foremost, by removing all the affected drama by the narrative frames you place around it.
posted by Drastic at 10:11 AM on July 23 [6 favorites]

Don't forget that your subconscious is always doing some behind the scenes multitasking stuff with every little bit of sensory information.

My office is surrounded by a 15 foot wall, with a five foot gap near the ceiling. One day I was knee-deep in some accounting and got a picture in my head of one of my employees trying to find some labels for the price gun, and I was certain I heard her shout over the wall at me, so I shouted back that the labels were in the bottom drawer.

She came around the wall wide-eyed and asked me how I knew what she was looking for. I didn't know, but I must have heard something that tipped me off.

Think back on all those times your mom told you to stop doing something from all the way across the house.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 10:16 AM on July 23

This happens to me sometimes. More frequent is when I have a dream that seems to foreshadow something that happens the next day (running into an ex, an old friend calling me). That's what freaks me out a lot. I deal by rationalizing, or telling myself I'm obviously psychic.
posted by oinopaponton at 10:48 AM on July 23

About 4 years ago, one of my very best friends, on a second date with a man she was very interested in, kissed him for the first time-- fully clothed, sitting side by side on a couch, no petting or significant prior physical contact-- and was struck with the conviction that, as the result of an accident, he had only one testicle.

She tried to dismiss it from her mind but couldn't, so a few minutes later she she told him, prefaced by something like 'I don't want you to think I'm crazy, but when we kissed...'.

He was completely freaked out. It was his deepest, darkest secret. He was one of those very rare individuals whose testicles are not attached to the scrotal sack and can therefore turn freely within it. One night as a teenager, he woke up with a severe pain in his groin, but by the time he went to the hospital in the morning it was too late: one testicle had gotten so twisted up inside the scrotum that the blood supply had been completely cut off for hours; it had been killed and had to be removed. He ultimately got a prosthetic replacement.

She really wanted a relationship with him, but after that, he was too afraid of her for anything to come of it.

She would be much happier if she knew nothing like that was ever going to happen to her again.

Every time she has some strange fear about something, she worries it might have come into her mind through the same door the thought about the testicle did. And that was by no means an isolated incident; I have had two similar experiences with her myself. Her husband, a physicist, accepts that she is some kind of witch with perfect aplomb.

I am trying to convince her that she cannot continue to run away from this; that she will only be able to have peace when she can distinguish ordinary fears from extraordinary ones. So far, I've had little success.
posted by jamjam at 10:54 AM on July 23 [2 favorites]

I have experiences that (I assume) mostly seem to be me picking up on people's body language and then intuiting things others might miss....

I'll be the contrarian crank who says it: you could be totally wrong about this. Everytime I've met someone who just knows what I'm REALLY thinking, what's really going on, etc. they've been very, very wrong, and have gone through life and social situations creating all sorts of drama and headaches for everyone else because of their "special insight".
posted by availablelight at 11:20 AM on July 23 [2 favorites]

Does this happen to you, too?

Only a few times, but such weirdly specific ESP experiences that it makes less sense to me to dismiss them completely than to just shrug and accept them as an unexplained facet of being human. Also, I haven't experienced these moments as reliable, repeatable skills, so these few experiences have little effect -- either positive or negative -- on the rest of my life (I can't predict lottery numbers, read minds, or even tell in advance whether the chocolate or vanilla ice cream is going to be better for dessert). The same has been true for a couple of other family members and friends of mine -- small, strange predictions here and there, but nothing more useful than most of our familiar, day-to-day, pedestrian means of gathering information, like asking someone a question or observing something carefully.

What is it??

No idea!

If it is more than skill, how do I cope?

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it too much either way, unless your ESP experiences are something you can actually induce. Like I said, I clearly can't do so at will, and neither can anyone else I've ever met, and it's worth noting that I'm talking about very infrequent occasions, myself -- maybe five of these experiences over the course of three decades (which puts the ratio of "looking at something" to "sensing something" at like seven hundred bajillion to .1). Mainly, I "cope" by just not talking about these moments too much, because I find that if you talk about them in front of people, they tend to want to pull you into their worldview, which is a pain in the ass to deal with, whether that worldview involves crystal chakra divination chi exotic orientalism gaia with an uptick at the end of all their spoken statements, or a strident shrieking of "NOES U R CONFRIMATION BIASED".

On preview: I do kind of agree with availablelight, above; while I can attest to these kinds of ESP-ish phenomena being very real, I've found that a lot of people who discuss them (and here, I'm taking you at your word that your experiences, too, are real) tend to use them as a way of somehow setting themselves apart by way of a label, designed largely to focus attention on themselves. If I were you, I would just quietly roll with it; in your spare time, you might try seeing if you can induce these extra-sensory moments (for SCIENCE), but if you can't, then it's probably easiest (as I suspect you know, having posted anonymously) to just not bring it up at all.
posted by Greg Nog at 11:43 AM on July 23

I have experiences that (I assume) mostly seem to be me picking up on people's body language and then intuiting things others might miss.... how do I cope?

By never, ever mentioning these feeling to the people you get them about, unless you do it as a question. If you get the feeling that a friend is nervous, don't say, "I can tell you're nervous." Say, "Are you nervous?" Personally, I wouldn't even say that. I'd say, "Is anything wrong?"

Why? Because you risk putting your friends in a bind where there's no way they can argue with you. You are the master of reading people, so you must be right. If they say, "I'm not nervous at all," then they must be lying or unaware of their feelings.

No one wants to be in that bind. So please don't tell other people what they are thinking or feeling. Whether you're right or not, it's impolite.

I have experiences that (I assume) mostly seem to be me picking up on people's body language and then intuiting things others might miss

You THINK you do. And maybe you do, but there's no way you can know for sure, because you can't check your intuitions against the contents of someone else's mind. You have no access to someone else's mind.

Based on some strong feeling you get, you come up with a theory about someone's state of mind or intentions. It doesn't feel like a theory; it feels like you've tuned into something real and powerful. But that's how theories tend to feel. The mind hates going without an explanation, so when it comes up with one, it tends to cling to it as if it's truth.

We didn't evolve to know the truth. We evolved to make quick decisions, based on our gut feelings, so that we could escape wild animals and so forth. So "having a powerful truth-like" feeling does not necessarily mean your feeling is based in truth.

This is why the tools of science are so important (if you care about what's actually true). It's not that they're perfect. It's that they have a better chance of discovering truths about the world than gut feelings, which evolved to help us make rapid decisions based on imperfect information.

It's almost impossible to make a rapid decision based on an "it's just a theory" feeling, so we evolved to feel as if our theories are gospel. It's a good thing we evolved this way, or we'd get eaten by tigers while pondering our navels.

Since you experience gut feelings as truth -- since they SEEM like truth to you -- you naturally look for ways to strengthen them. The stronger they are, the better you will feel. Ambiguity is not a good feeling. If you feel like your gut is DEFINITELY right, like you've seen twenty-five ways that it's right, then that's one less fact to worry about. You can classify it as TRUE and move on. You can use the information to make decisions.

We evolved to make decisions -- not to make decisions based on truth.

This isn't what (good) scientists do. If a scientist comes up with a theory, he immediately tries to falsify it. He says, "What evidence can I find that disproves my theory or casts it into doubt?" Only after rigorously trying to falsify -- and failing -- can he accept that his theory might be true.

That's a VERY useful technique in the sciences, but it's not a natural way for humans to think. It's natural for humans to come up with a theory and only look for evidence to support it.

It's also natural for people to explain away (or ignore) evidence that doesn't support it. Such evidence leads to ambiguity. The theory then becomes just one more thing in life you're unsure of, and that's not a good feeling. It's not a plank you can stand on.

What I'm talking about is what people call Confirmation Bias. But I worry that when folks hear that term, they think of it as a choice. "Oh, stop having confirmation bias!"

It's not like that. You can't just stop if you want to, and you're unlikely to realize you have confirmation bias while you're having it. It's a built-in, unconscious "feature" of the human brain. You can train yourself to do less of it via some rigorous techniques, but you'll always do it somewhat, because you're a human being.

What you can do -- if you care about the actual truth -- is go ahead and forgive yourself for having confirmation bias while remembering that, useful as your gut feeling can be, they don't necessarily map onto truth.

Try practicing some falsification. What things about your friend DON'T indicate that he's nervous. And try to think in terms of behavior rather than theories of the mind: "so and so is figgity. I wonder what that means" instead of "so and so is nervous. I wonder why."

If you have, in the past, spoken aloud about your gut feelings and have had them confirmed by friends, that STILL doesn't make them necessarily true. If I tell Paul I think he's nervous, he may agree with me just because he himself is looking for a theory to latch onto (about his own behavior).

If you seem confident enough about your feelings, people will respond to your confidence by agreeing with you -- even if you're wrong. There have been studies that suggest people accept confidently-asserted "facts."


there have been times when I've had very accurate premonitions.

Have you ever had that eerie experience of saying a sentence and then immediately hearing someone on TV say it? It's the darndest thing, and it feels magical.

It's not.

How can I be so confident it's not? Because I'm applying Occam's Razor. If you've never heard of OR before, it just means that if there are multiple explanations for something, and they could all be true, you should go with the simplest possible one.

For instance: you pick up your wallet from the living-room table, put it in your pocket and go to work. When you get to work, you reach in your pocket and your wallet isn't there. You panic, but when you get home later, you see it lying on the living-room table.

Here are two possible explanations:

1) Someone at work stole your wallet, went to your house, broke in, put it on your table and left.

2) You just think you took your wallet with you to work, but human memory is often faulty. Actually, you left it at home.

Let me be really clear that either explanation COULD be true. But I hope it makes sense to you to choose the latter one. You shouldn't waste time on the former one unless someone provides evidence for it.

(Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.)

Getting back to the TV coincidence, let's say you have the TV on for two hours a day. During that time, let's say you utter 100 sentences.

What are the odds that, over days and weeks, you'd NEVER hear one of those sentences echoed on TV, just by sheer chance? THAT would be amazing!

How many times do you talk while the TV is on and WITHOUT hearing an echo? Most of the time. On those rare occasions when an echo happens, it feels like magic. Well, we're built to notice similarities, and that's a striking one where we didn't expect one, so it's going to generate a profound feeling. But it's a coincidence.

Two explanations:

1) You have a magic power.

2) It's a coincidence -- the kind that can be predicted statistically.

I'm not trying to belittle your feelings. I think feelings are the most important things on Earth. Your feelings ARE profound, and you can and should revel in profound feelings.

We get profound feelings from art and music. A story can make us cry. Profound as that is, it doesn't map onto material truth. There was no actual Dorothy and so she didn't get back to Kansas. But that doesn't belittle her or my feelings about her.
posted by grumblebee at 11:51 AM on July 23 [4 favorites]

I don't believe in psychic ability or ESP. As others have mentioned, it may be really good intuition or the ability to read people and situations. Or it may simply be confirmation bias.

However, you may be a highly sensitive person. For the most part, you're probably picking up a lot of cues and information being generated around you, much of which may not be within your direct sight or other awareness. You're probably good--for reasons which may or not be apparent--at storing these details away in a corner of your brain where they get sorted, analyzed, and filed at a subconscious level. Then one day a particular detail may be triggered and become significant on a conscious level and you feel like you already "knew" about it. You probably did already know, based on the kind of previous exposure described above, but you lacked enough context at first to make sense of it so it just stayed tucked away in your head somewhere.

I've dealt with this most of life, largely because of the kind of environment I grew up in. This "knowing" but not knowing how or why you know can be problematic, especially for other people (who often assume nefarious methods or motives behind it), so I generally just keep it to myself and try not to get too distracted by it. I alternately find myself sometimes grateful for this peculiar little "advance warning" system, or sometimes regretful that I didn't pay more attention to it.
posted by fuse theorem at 1:14 PM on July 23 [1 favorite]

Hypervigilance? I have been accused of reading people's minds since I was young. "Accused" too strong a word and the definition is for the full-blown variety while I'm talking about something more latent.

No really astounding incidents but I've spooked a few people. I'm pretty sure it's just a residual effect of having an alcoholic mother and dealing with her inconsistent behavior. I think I'm just more attuned of the little signals that people put out. It developed so naturally, due to the environment I was raised in, I'm not even consciously aware of it.
posted by Carbolic at 1:38 PM on July 23 [1 favorite]

Confirmation bias.
posted by OmieWise at 1:45 PM on July 23

Since most people are usually distracted or preoccupied with themselves, there's a great deal of plain old sensory data out there that is generally being ignored and which reveals a great deal to anyone who bothers to pay attention to it.
posted by Obscure Reference at 2:31 PM on July 23

jamjam wrote:

"Every time she has some strange fear about something, she worries it might have come into her mind through the same door the th"ought about the testicle did. And that was by no means an isolated incident; I have had two similar experiences with her myself. Her husband, a physicist, accepts that she is some kind of witch with perfect aplomb."

HaHa! This is totally my life!!

Recently, my husband (1+ years) and I finally had our first disagreement. I can't even remember what it was about, but the resolution came when he spontaneously offered, "I just assume all the time that you read my mind. I guess this isn't really fair!"

My husband speaks 4 languages fluently, I speak 1.5 of those. I don't know if I am sensitive, or intuitive, a psychic-type mind reader, or what - but my marriage is one of the few times in my life this "skill" has ever been consistently handy. It is helpful in business, too, once I learned to use it properly. (I use it to help service clients more effectively, it gives me a sneaky edge in sales situations, also.)

On the sad side, I've socially offended some people unnecessarily over the years because I've blurted out stuff they wanted to keep private. I tend to think I am just a good detective - nothing more. Why? Because that is the easier solution!

This all said... I've also had some spooky experiences like jamjam's friend with the testicle story (OK! I did want to work that word back into the discussion...sorry;)

Recently, in a convo w/ a new acquaintance, she was answering another friend about where she lived....her answer was very general... near the beach in this town, etc... I picked up an image from her mind and said, "oh! you live at such-n-such in that blue building on the corner!" She smiled wryly, agreed, and then said, "So you're a little psychic, huh?"

I remember way back when I was 12 yrs old I got an image in my head regarding my science teacher's house. Couldn't shake it. And not knowing how uncool this might be at 12 years old, I finally asked her one day after class if her house looked like "X." I described the front yard, the position of the driveway - everything. She admitted I was correct (and this was years before the internet or google earth) anyway, she never liked me as much afterwards. Kept my shit to myself after that! (for the most part, see paragraph just above;)

I dunno. Commenters who say you should go into poker or play the lotto - Well, I can't control when that little spark does or does not reach me. They are probably out of line. What I CAN do is use it wisely (or suppress - I try!) when that would be helpful and if it happens at all.

Def it took some experimentation to discern when I was full of shit, or when I should play my "hunch." I think this is the Confirmation Bias thing some commenters are referencing?

I like the commenter who mentioned Hyper Vigilance. What is your background? Like that commenter, I grew up in an abusive household, and often attributed my "skill" to that situation. Was very useful.

But it still doesn't explain the visuals I sometimes get when people are speaking to me. I'm not sure how someone could confer their address or actual building/home to me via clues and body language.

It's a mystery, for sure.
posted by jbenben at 3:03 PM on July 23

I can tell when my husband is not telling the truth. That's about it for me.

I think this is a great ability.
posted by anniecat at 3:26 PM on July 23

This is a difficult discussion to have on metafilter. Maybe gypseefire's question will bear fruit.
posted by pointilist at 10:02 PM on July 23