Retrocognition

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Retrocognition

Term used in psychical research and parapsychology to indicate a form of extrasensory perception in which the subject obtains knowledge of some event in the past by paranormal cognition. This amounts to a kind of backward precognition. F. W. H. Myers combined retrocognition with his theory of "psychorrhagic diathesis" to explain the phenomena of haunting. It was also suggested that apparitions of the dead and visions of the future, owing to a curious inversion of time, may be amenable to retrocognition.