We’ve all seen the scenes in science fiction movies where someone tenses up and all of a sudden gets a vision of some future event. But confirming the experience of precognition really exists has yet to be done…until now.

A research paper is scheduled to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that features the results of recent experiments showing a person’s actions may be affected by events that have yet to occur. The paper was written by Daryl Bem, a Cornell University psychologist. It documents the results of experiments on the topic of precognition done with 1,000 university students.

Students were shown the word “ugly” and then shown a photo of a sunset. Previous studies such as this showed subjects were slower to describe the sunset positively after reading the negative word first. If they were instead shown the word “beautiful” and then the sunset picture, they were more likely to react positively. This is called priming because it predisposes the mind to think in the way the first word makes them feel.

Next, Bem showed students the photo first, then asked for their response, and then showed them the word. For example, the student sees a picture of a sunset, is asks how it looks, and then shown the word “ugly” or the word “beautiful.” In this case, some students appeared to anticipate the priming word and reacted accordingly, even before they were shown it, meaning they presumably had a precognition of the word.

Bem admitted that the results were only about one percent over a chance occurrence, but insisted this still means the results will hold up under further studies. Already, two other scientists have attempted to duplicate Bem’s results, but were unable to do so.

However, Bem countered by saying that since their experiment was conducted online instead of in person, it was not possible to know if the subjects had actually paid attention to the tests. More follow-up experiments are planned.

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