Precognition as an Adaptation to Childhood Abuse and Neglect: A Correlational Study

Abstract

Child abuse and neglect is consistently correlated with increased belief in extra-sensory perception (ESP) and other psychic phenomena. In abuse research, often these beliefs are attributed to cognitive errors, distortions, or even mental illness. While it well-established that those with traumatic childhoods have an increased incidence of being diagnosed with a mental disorder in adulthood, viewing belief in psi as evidence of pathology may discount some of the very real adaptive changes that occur as children learn to keep safe in an uncontrollable environment. The dissociative tendencies of an abused or neglected child may be less a dis-association but rather a type of alter-association with experiences that are not apparent in the physical realm. It may be this ability to alter-associate that encourages psi experiencing.

Precognition, or the ability to sense the future, is one such extra-sensory perception that, if accessed, would directly impact a child’s safety. This study explored the following question: how does having a traumatic childhood correlate with actual precognitive abilities in adulthood? Using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire in conjunction with online ESP tasks from the Institute of Noetic Science’s IONS Discovery Lab, participants who experienced a range of trauma levels in childhood tested their ESP skill. The severely abused group performed significantly better on one precognitive task using a protocol of remote viewing, but other tasks showed little efficacy at ESP or correlation with severity of trauma.