Anomalous Cognition: An Umbrella Review of the Meta-Analytic Evidence

Think of this as the ultimate mega-study of psychic perception research — a review of reviews. The authors pulled together 11 major meta-analyses spanning 1989 to 2021, covering a whopping 928 individual studies and over 80 years of experiments on so-called anomalous cognition (basically, ways people might pick up information without using their normal senses). The headline finding? Nearly every effect they examined came out statistically significant — 15 out of 16 reported effects cleared the bar, which is pretty remarkable on its face. The one exception was a type of precognition (knowing the future) tested using slow, deliberate guessing in forced-choice setups, where subjects essentially pick from a fixed set of options. The size of the effects varied wildly depending on the setup. Forced-choice clairvoyance experiments — where people guess which hidden target they're looking at — showed a tiny effect of 0.005, while remote viewing experiments using open-ended, free-response methods produced an effect nearly 80 times larger at 0.39. The single strongest pattern in the data was that experimental setup matters enormously. When participants were in altered states of consciousness (like meditation or the ganzfeld, a sensory deprivation technique) and could describe what they perceived freely, effects were largest. When they were in a normal waking state picking from fixed options, effects shrank to almost nothing. The correlation between these conditions and effect size was a striking 0.81. Here is an interesting wrinkle worth noting: between 54% and 81% of individual studies within each meta-analysis were themselves not statistically significant. The authors argue this actually counts in their favor — if researchers were cherry-picking or tweaking results, you would expect more individual studies to look impressive, not fewer. That said, both authors have skin in the game, having contributed to several of the meta-analyses under review, so their independence as judges of this evidence deserves some scrutiny.