Even the CIA has publicly released data on the psychic phenomenon.

On an early October night in 1989, a four-year-old girl was shocked awake by a phone call and a scream. She tiptoed barefoot on the clammy vinyl tile of the hallway. “He died in a car accident!” her mother’s voice cracked before it shattered. The girl’s shining dark eyes could only stare. From the moment she threw her arms around her father before he boarded his flight for that fateful business trip, she knew she would never see him alive again.

This is just one of the myriad and often eerie accounts of precognition that have been shared with cognitive neuroscientist Julia Mossbridge, Ph.D. But it was her own experience with these strange, psychic “gut feelings” that led her to study them in the first place.

As far back as the age of seven, Mossbridge has had precognitive dreams, she says. She and her parents were skeptical of them until she began recording the details in a dream journal. While she admits she’s misremembered some of her dream visions, she’s also been able to foretell events from the future that she would have had no other way of knowing.

She says these memories from the future could mean the notion of time might not be as linear as we imagine.

“It’s not hard to understand precognition,” says Mossbridge, Senior Distinguished Fellow in Human Potential at the Center for the Future Mind and founder of the Mossbridge Institute. “It’s just hard to believe for people who haven’t experienced it. We don’t understand how time works. Even physicists are admitting they really don’t know how it works. We are stuck on this idea that, if you’re truly scientific, you are going to think about time linearly, but is it really linear? A lot of the resistance to ideas about precognition and psychic phenomena is about fear—the fear of the unknown or the fear that things aren’t the way they appear to be.”

Far from the carnival fortune-tellers whose clairvoyance comes from glancing at their customers’ social media accounts in a haze of incense, psychologists and neuroscientists have been trying to figure out what exactly is behind precognition, which is considered a type of extrasensory perception, or ESP. This unshakable feeling that something will transpire in the future is ancient among shamans and mystics, yet it remains unexplained.

Precognition suggests that our consciousness might actually reach beyond the linear perception of time, according to parapsychologist Dean Radin, Ph.D., the chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and associated distinguished professor of integral and transpersonal psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has been probing consciousness for decades, and is the author of several books on the topic, including Entangled Minds, the award-winning Supernormal, and Real Magic.

Radin and Mossbridge are IONS colleagues who have previously collaborated. Both want to show the validity of precognition through statistics gathered from experiments and support the view of non-linear time.

“Time is not how we experience it on an everyday level,” says Radin. “In quantum mechanics, time may not even be part of our physical reality. It’s not that time doesn’t exist. It just behaves in a much stranger way than how it is seen through the lens of the human experience. It suggests there’s something probably associated with our consciousness that is different from our everyday experience of time. It’s able to jump outside ordinary experience and receive information from the past or future.”

“A LOT OF THE RESISTANCE TO IDEAS ABOUT PRECOGNITION AND PSYCHIC PHENOMENA IS ABOUT FEAR—THE FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN OR THE FEAR THAT THINGS AREN’T THE WAY THEY APPEAR TO BE.”

While working at the University of Nevada in the mid-1990s, Radin created an experiment to prove it. His hypothesis was that if awareness transcended time, responses to an upcoming stimulus would appear before the stimulus itself. Subjects were wired to an EEG machine and then told to press a button on a computer screen to be shown a random image. This image would either be positive, such as a sunrise, or negative, like a car crash.

The EEG would gauge brain activity within the five seconds between the prompt and the image. Predictions of seeing a positive image elicited little to no emotion, while a spike in brain activity meant the subject had a feeling they were going to be shown a negative image. This experiment has since been replicated ad nauseam and echoed the original results, which were statistically significant.

Since then, this type of pre-sentiment study has been successfully replicated about three dozen times. In 1995, the CIA even declassified its own precognition research after statisticians were hired to review the work and declare it statistically reliable.

When statistics keep speaking to the existence of a phenomenon, that should be enough proof, Mossbridge says, but she recalls a physicist doubting her experiment results because he believed in linear time. Mossbridge’s research has shown that most people are capable of some level of precognition. She thinks that more would actually be aware of this ability—which is often looked at by society as delusional—if it was considered more mainstream.

Still, other cultures view precognition differently. Radin has studied Tibetan oracles who anticipated the future, for instance. He realized that clairvoyance, more scientifically known as “remote viewing,” is the ability to see not only through time, but also space. Thousands of years ago, eons before there would be news updates and weather forecasts, shamans who were able to perceive the future through time and space would be able to predict whether it would rain or where their enemies were advancing from. Some cultures use psychoactive substances such as morning glories or ayahuasca to awaken the second sight or “third eye.”

Precognition could be explained as a form of quantum entanglement, Radin says. Particles that are entangled are supposed to share the same information and behave the same way, even from far away, which is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Radin thinks this theory might explain why we can remember things that have not happened yet.

“Some people hypothesize that precognition is your brain entangled with itself in the future, because entanglement is not only things separated in space, but also separated in time,” he explains. “If it can be entangled with itself in the future, in the present you’d be feeling something like a memory that is going to happen in the future.”

If time is not so linear and consciousness can enter an invisible portal to the future, it might explain the feeling of déja vû. Regardless, the phenomenon of precognition is backed by statistics—it’s just a matter of proving what the mechanism could be, Mossbridge says.