Feeling the future

I found an interesting article slated to be printed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology dealing with the science of psi. The article caused some uproar in the scientific community, because many experts in the field of psychology deny the existence of psi and extra sensory perception. Professor Daryl Bem, of Cornell University, New York, said the results of nine experiments he had carried out on students over the past decade suggested humans could accurately predict random events.
In one test, 100 students were presented with a computer screen showing two curtains. They were told an image, which could be erotic, lay behind one curtain and they should guess which.
While the three per cent difference was small, Prof Bem said students consistently outperformed the average when predicting the location of erotic images.

Prof Bem found students predicted correctly 53 per cent of the time when the picture was erotic, while regular images only elicited a 50 per cent success rate, in line with average chance.

The paper can be found here, and a Telegraph article about the study is located here