“We often talk about intuition coming from the body—following our gut instincts and trusting our hearts,” says Barnaby D. Dunn, of the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, U.K., first author of the new paper published in Psychological Science.

During the study, participants had both their heart rates and sweat on their fingertips measured to help them learn to make the most appropriate choices during a card game. Most players gradually found a way to win at the card game and they reported having relied on intuition, based on their bodies’ reactions, rather than reason.

Although the quality of the advice that people’s bodies gave them varied, interestingly, the participants who were the most accurate were the ones who were more aware of their heartbeat. So for some individuals, being able to ‘listen to their heart’ helped them make wise choices, whereas for others it led to costly mistakes.

Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal.

What’s more, skeptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can’t find any significant flaws.

The paper, due to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology before the end of the year, is the culmination of eight years’ work by Daryl Bem of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

It describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather than before it.

Exploring time-reversed versions of established psychological phenomena was “a stroke of genius,” says the skeptical Joachim Krueger of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has blogged about the work on the Psychology Today website.

J.D. Leipold, Army News Service: Some Soldiers seem to have a sixth sense at being able to spot improvised explosive devices, researchers found, while others were unable to see the deadly weapons hidden in brush or buried in the middle of a road.

How and why only certain Soldiers could see IEDs was something the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization decided needed to be studied. So for the last 18 months a joint group of researchers has been striving to identify what particular skills, abilities and characteristics are needed to detect IEDs.

The study’s director, Jennifer Murphy, Ph.D., said JIEDDO leadership was hearing stories from the field every now and then that there would be a Soldier who just happened to be exceptional in his ability to identify IEDs, so she and the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences came into the picture.

“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way we could identify people who have this skill before they deploy because it would save so many lives,” she said, “because right now the way it is, we have to wait for the tour to unfold to see who is good and who’s not.”

She said being able to identify who these sixth-sense Soldiers are in advance would allow the Army to strategically place them in various locations throughout a convoy. It would save time and lives since most IED casualties occur at the beginning and at the end of a Soldier’s tour – at the beginning because Soldiers are learning about their surroundings; at the end because Soldiers start to focus on returning home.

Murphy and her team first started to question the reasons why some Soldiers were particularly good at finding IEDs – what was it that made them good and why?

“If you talk to a Soldier about what he thinks makes him good, he’ll say, ‘I’ve got a spidey sense, a sixth sense and I can just feel something is wrong, I don’t know what it is, but something is out of place, not quite right,’” she said. “Obviously we can’t measure ‘spidey sense,’ but I can tell you that we can determine to a large degree how eyes and certain cognitive functions work together.”

The research team began studying the human factors such as measuring the light that enters the eyes to the information being passed to the brain, added in personality factors, through a variety of tests as well as the personal experiences a Soldier has in the field and what they might have had in earlier life. Things like, did the individual hunt or fish; were they familiar with their terrain? Those are all components of what could possibly make somebody good at finding IEDs, Murphy said.

Next the researchers identified core components, broke them down into basic processes, figured out ways to measure them, then began assessing IED detection ability. They assessed 800 warfighters, including Soldiers, Marines and Airmen who were each given a battery of 15 or 16 tests. Through statistical analysis, the researchers were able to filter out the most important predictors of performing well in finding IEDs.

Tests the warfighters went through included a training-lane criterion measure which provided a performance-based measure of visual IED detection skill. It comprised three factors: physical environment, targets and emplacement locations. Another was DARWARS Ambush, a virtual-reality game-based system that measured the ability to visually detect IEDs on a simulated route-clearance mission.

Vigilance performance was also studied using a computer-based assessment. Also included were Peer- rating tests that Murphy said are used by Fortune 500 companies to determine who should go where in a company structure.

Paper-and-pencil tests measured knowledge, skills and abilities that could be related to IED detection. They covered detection of hidden objects, abstract reasoning skills, knowledge of the IED threat and also personal and military background.

“We’re not just looking for an ability in someone, we’re looking for differences between people because that’s how we identify the ones who are going to be best at this task,” said Murphy. “Most Soldiers have vision that has been corrected, but there are some people who can see above and beyond that. I’m not going to know what ‘above and beyond’ is unless I know how everyone else performs.”

Murphy added that aside from having strong vision, there are skills the researchers were looking at which are inherent in Soldiers who can spot IEDs — certain cognitive capacity characteristics, working memory spatial representations Soldiers keep in their brains. These are things the researchers can measure, but they can’t train.

“Some of the things we’re looking at are skills that actually can be trained,” Murphy said. “Things like the ability to pay attention for a long period of time. We can train vigilance, that’s something research has show we can actually do to improve performance.”

What the team found is that Soldiers who are sensitive to various subtleties often are the same folks who go down the same route every day – such as in a convoy — are able to see and sense that something is missing or is new that was or wasn’t there the day before.

“These are people who notice extraordinary subtle changes in the environment,” Murphy explained. “They can recognize the tread marks of their vehicles and they can see where another vehicle has gone over and down the road that’s not theirs.

“The one thing that you’ll find is that the good route-clearance guys understand this and they’ll set themselves up so they can notice changes,” she said. “In their minds, they’ll proactively clear the area. It’s called desanitization, which is where they are able to get rid of all the trash, all the garbage, all the foliage, virtually everything along the side of the road and in the process they minimize IED hiding places. They’re able to segregate items from the background.”

Presently the research team is compiling its data and will file the results and recommendations to JIEDDO headquarters in the next month.

“What will happen if this all gets implemented is that the folks who have the most potential to be successful at IED detection will get extensively trained, then strategically placed so they can do the most good,” Murphy said.

“Now that we’ve identified the critical skills, such as vigilance, the question will be how do we train so that everybody improves in the detection process,” she said. “That will maximize our capability to detect and that will be a great weapon that insurgents can’t stop.”

Neuroscientist Diane Hennacy Powell, a former Harvard Medical School professor, attempts to logically answer long-standing questions about the possibilities of psychic phenomena, and the relationship between our brain and consciousness, in her book, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena. Extra-sensory abilities can be explained, she says, by applying the theories of Einstein and quantum physics. She also provides empirical data developed over the past few decades from several well-designed and rigorously supervised experiments that reinforce the existence of such phenomena.

Largely ignored by scientific field experts because of a lack of a viable theory to explain the mechanisms, and because the data associated with it defies the traditional model of consciousness, psychic phenomena have developed a stigma and researchers tend to ignore the possibility of existence. However, Dr. Powell concludes that modern physics consistently explains how these abilities can exist and how they work. She points out that Dean Radin’s book, Entangled Minds, contains detailed information about the abundant studies that have shown highly statistically significant evidence for ESP. In fact, she says, there is more evidence for ESP than there is for the use of aspirin to prevent strokes or heart attacks.

Dr. Powell quotes the work of Einstein and Hawking and their theories suggesting the malleability of time, existing totally and simultaneously, and as such, the future already exists. In this regard, time is not limited – it is only limited by how our brains narrowly define our physical reality as a series of recurrent moments.

Predictions aren’t always accurate, Powell explains, because they do not consistently come from a person actually tapping into another time and space, but rather are confused with the constructs of one’s imagination. The question remains as to how one can differentiate between imaginings and actual probable events.

In an interview, Dr. Powell explained what sparked her interest in studying psychic phenomena:

Like most mainstream scientists who develop an interest in psychic abilities, my initial inspiration was an extraordinary experience of them. As a teenager I met a man who could psychically read to me any book that I randomly chose from a bookshelf that contained several hundred books that were not his. While standing across the room with the back of the book facing him, he said word for word what I was reading at the precise time I read it. And he demonstrated this with several books. Coming from a scientific family in which there were scientific answers for everything, I was completely mystified. Even if he had memorized all of the books on the bookshelf and could figure out what page I was on from looking at the binding, I couldn’t explain how he could read at the same pace as I.

I had another experience while on faculty at Harvard Medical School. I had been asked to see a patient who wanted to leave against medical advice. She told me that she was psychic and therefore knew that her tests were going to come back normal. After a brief time, she asked if she could tell me what she was psychically receiving about me. She told me what my husband’s occupation was, that we were in the midst of deciding which of two cities to move to, that we would move to San Diego, how many brothers I had, how many children I would have and their sex, as well as several other very specific things. Everything that she said about my past and current circumstances were correct and over the next few years her predictions proved to be correct as well.

Dr. Powell offers many examples of psychic demonstrations throughout history. One of the more well-known instances, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had a precognitive dream about his assassination 10 days before it happened. He finally told his wife and a few friends of his dream shortly before the fateful event.

Individuals who are able to more fully utilize psychic skills can do so due to several factors, one of them genetics. Dr. Powell says psychic abilities run in families, possibly because of the existence of a gene. Head traumas also bring them about, because the structure and function of the brain has changed, and those individuals are unable to experience normal functioning of the analytical part of the brain. Also, autistic individuals tend to have more developed perceptual skills.

Psychic abilities are more enhanced, she states, when the sensory organs are muted, such as during sleep or near-death experiences, but she ultimately believes anyone can be psychic.

Dr. Powell’s book: The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena

Interview: Time.com: The Science Behind Psychic Phenomena

Interview: Parapsychology Information Portal

Gerald Hodgkinson, the lead author of the report that appears in the British Journal of Psychology, says it isn’t just a random response. Recent research over the past few years has led the scientists to conclude that intuition is a result of the way the brain processes information when faced with serious time pressures, information overload, situations where they lack all the information to make an informed decision, and potentially hazardous situations where an individual does not have the luxury to be able to deliberate and collect all the facts.

They define intuition as a combination of pattern recognition — where an individual takes a mental shortcut in a given situation, relying upon interpreting a given outcome based upon a mental template compiled from past experiences — and external clues. This process then triggers an emotional response or physical sensation that allows an individual to recognize the most appropriate course of action.