Beware the Ides of March

Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,
Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak; Caesar is turn’d to hear.

Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.
Caesar: What man is that?
Brutus: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
Caesar: Set him before me; let me see his face.
Cassius: Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.
Caesar: What say’st thou to me now? speak once again.
Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.
Caesar: He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.

________________________________________________Death of Julius Caesar by Vincenzo Camuccini, 1805

In Shakespeare, in the Bible, in Greek myths, in movies and modern literature, people have premonitions of major events before they happen. Once the mechanistic world-view of the 19th century became a predominant paradigm in the West, most “rational” people came to presume that these were just stories, and that selective attention made us feel that they happen more often than mere chance.

But in recent years, the phenomenon has been studied by Daryl Bem, Dean Radin, Julia Mossbridge, and Rupert Sheldrake, among others.

In the clearest human experiments, people’s perspiration and heart rate are monitored as they are shown a random sequence of pictures on a screen. A few seconds before a particularly upsetting or titillating picture appears, a physiological response is recorded. (In the experiments, pictures with neutral emotional content are used as a control.)

In this video, Sheldrake reviews a range of precognitive phenomena.

• People who have epileptic seizures can train dogs to alert them half an hour or more in advance. The dogs seem to be much more accurate than the patients themselves in predicting seizures.

• In wartime, birds seem to know when a bombing strike is about to occur, and fly away.

• Animals behave strangely before an earthquake, a tsunami, or an avalanche. Sheldrake proposes that cell phone apps could be used to aggregate human reports of unusual animal behavior and locate areas where a disaster is likely to strike, prompting evacuation.

• Sheldrake interviews day traders, the most successful of which have premonitions of the way markets will behave on a minute-by-minute basis.