Did you know I was going to write about premonitions today? If so, you’ll really enjoy today’s post. If not, well, maybe you just don’t have the Spirit.

Earlier this month I was in a pretty serious cycling accident involving a car. I ended up at the ER with facial fractures and am still working through some healing from the head trauma. The weird thing is–I literally had no thought ahead of time that this was coming, even though I often do have those types of mini-premonitions. I frequently have a thought like “I should go the other way” or “I’d better avoid going there right now” or “That car’s about to do something..” I did not have any of those things happen. I was literally blind-sided.

So what are premonitions? What’s really going on when these ideas pop into our head right before something happens? In the Church, we are told this is following the Spirit, or we are getting “promptings,” and testimony meetings are full of these types of “proofs” and stories that illustrate divine intervention in our lives. The Church’s explanation relies on God being a benevolent arbiter, involved in the minutae of our lives. I imagine we’ve all experienced these things in our lives. I frequently follow these types of thoughts and give them no more thought, but occasionally we can see that altering our course of action did in fact help us to avoid something unpleasant or harmful.

I remember when I realized that this was something happening to everyone, not just Mormons. I asked how non-Mormons could have this since they didn’t have the Gift of the Holy Ghost. I was told that all humans have the “Light of Christ” and that it’s basically the same thing, but somehow the Gift of the Holy Ghost is the Premium(TM) version of that, only available to those who’ve been baptized. Maybe you were just more attuned somehow, with a better receptor, or maybe you got additional features like voice commands, not just spidey-sense feelings.

I was surprised as an adult that some Mormons believed that the Holy Ghost only worked if you weren’t actively sinning in that moment, or like hanging out in a bar or something. This raised a whole ‘nother host of questions: what constitutes sinning? (usually sexual stuff or drinking coffee or alcohol, but not judging others of course) and what constitutes a bar? Jesus hung out with publicans and sinners, presumably in places that served alcohol. We ate in bars in my mission because there was no fast food, and it was the best place to get a quick bite. What if you are just there for the mozzarella sticks? Does the Holy Ghost hate Irish nachos? Some of my fellow BYU students also claimed that the Holy Ghost wouldn’t work after midnight or if you were in the opposite sex area of BYU housing. I didn’t remember all these caveats when I bought the Holy Ghost at age 8. I feel like at some point there should be a recall.

What’s happening in our minds from a psychological perspective in these moments of prescience? Is there a scientific explanation for premonitions? Actually, yes, there are several different psychological phenomena that happen simultaneously to create the illusion of a prophetic warning, and they occur whether one is Mormon, another religion, or no religion at all:

Subconscious Cues (the “hyper-vigilant” brain). Our subconscious mind often knows things we haven’t yet figured out. In a sense, we know things we don’t know we know. Our brains recognize patterns faster than we can articulate them to ourselves. The brain notices micro-expressions, subtle changes in environmental sounds, shifts in the weather, and mechanical vibrations, all at a level we don’t register. This sometimes will trigger a “bad feeling” or vague foreboding. If something bad happens, we remember that feeling and ascribe it to the event.

Law of Large Numbers. Highly improbable events are mathematically guaranteed to happen across a massive population, although pinpointing when, where and to whom is nearly impossible. In a world of 8 billion people, thousands of them will have anxious dreams or thoughts regarding things like plane crashes, bridges collapsing, car accidents, or sudden illnesses, and a number of those will coincide with these adverse events actually happening.

Selective Recall and Confirmation Bias. Our memory is a byproduct of more than just the events that happened. We have thousands and thousands of vague bad feelings that result in absolutely nothing. Our brains ignore those and delete the memory of the feeling. These “misses” are like white noise in the background. But any time one of those vague feelings is then associated with an event, the brain treats it like a “hit,” creating a vivid memory of the coincidence that allows you to categorize it as a premonition.

Postdictive Bias (Retroactive Memory Stitching). If you’ve seen the movie Defending Your Life, you’ll recall that the recently deceased people are brought before a panel of judges and shown scenes from their lives that either paint them in a favorable light or an unfavorable one. They then have to defend why they did what they did (or failed to do what they should have done). In reality, though, human memory does not work like a video recording. Our memories are reconstructions of the shocking or traumatic event. We don’t have perfect recall of what actually happened. Our brain immediately begins rewriting our memory using the feelings and thoughts that occurred around the event. The brain has to make sense of the shock. Sometimes it will pull forward a dream from the night before or a bad feeling you had earlier and assign it into the memory of the traumatic event.

Growing up in the Church, I always assumed that if I did not have a premonition and something bad happened, then it must have been something that was meant to happen. It was a necessary part of my life plan somehow. God wanted it to happen or it was otherwise somehow “meant to be,” so no warning was needed. That interpretation feels childish to me as an adult, but it served its purpose at the time. Everything that happened was either God’s will or my mistake for not listening to God’s promptings. Everything good comes from God; everything bad is ultimately my fault, even when it’s accidental or caused by other humans’ mistakes. Even if something bad happens to me, it’s for the greater good in the arc of my life if it’s something that came with no warning.

This is not a bad psychological perspective if you want to minimize feeling like a powerless victim, but it’s of course not objectively true.

  • Have you experienced what you considered to be premonitions?
  • Do you still view these things through a religious lens or do you see them as psychological phenomena?
  • Do you hear Mormons talking about premonitions much or do they think of these things as woo-woo?

Discuss.