the.com/precognition
Knowing the future before it happens, allegedly — memory running the wrong direction.
means The supposed ability to know about an event before it actually occurs, especially through extrasensory means rather than inference.
from Built from the Latin prefix 'prae-' (before) and 'cognitio' (a getting to know, a learning), from 'cognoscere' (to come to know). The same 'cognitio' root gives English 'cognition' and 'recognize.' The word entered English use mainly through 19th and 20th-century psychical research, where investigators needed a tidy technical term for 'knowing ahead of time' to sit alongside its sibling 'precognitive dreams' and the broader vocabulary of parapsychology.
- etymology
- Latin for knowing before
- science status
- Never replicated under controlled conditions
- déjà vu link
- Often mistaken for proof, it is not
- sci-fi staple
- Minority Report built a plot on it