How can I better develop my premonitions?

[LauraZ]

Every once and a while I will have a thought pop into my head, usually something that is going to cause harm to myself, then sure enough it happens.
For example, I was sitting at a stop light one day, thought to myself "Man, wouldn't it suck if this person behind me hit my car?" I looked in my rear view mirror, she was at a complete stop. Not even 10 seconds later she hit my car.
Another instance was when I was laying in bed with my son, I thought to myself "wouldn't it suck if he stabbed me in the eye with his sippy cup lid?" sure enough, less than 5 seconds later, he did. Same case a little over a year later "wouldn't it suck if he rolled over to give me a hug and bashed me in the nose with his sippy cup" he did. My list goes on and on, it almost always starts with a thought of "wouldn't it suck if..."
I usually do not have enough time to react to those thoughts before they happen, but is there a way to kind of develop that so maybe in the future I can potentially avoid being bashed in the face with a sippy cup or stubbing my toe in the middle of the night? Even find a way to differentiate between the real ones and the random thoughts(like thinking to myself, wouldn't it suck if my Dad died in a fiery airplane crash, then he turns out to be perfectly okay)?

 

[STEPHEN]

Confirmation Bias and availability heuristic. Everyone tries to predict small things like that, but when they actually do happen, you selectively choose to remember the times when you were right, forgetting the times when you were wrong (confirmation bias). You also experience availability heuristic, which is the tendency for all human beings to overestimate the frequency at which rare events occur. This usually occurs with confirmation bias. This joined effects makes it seem like the 3 or 4 times you do get something right happens "all the time."

When in traffic, I am always predicting when and where an accident could occur to me. When handling my friend's baby, I'm always trying to predict ways not to get poked, jabbed, or kicked.

 

[AgentKirsty]

practice. and a three step process.
go to http://www.alphapd.webs.com/
mind helping me with something? This is involving premonitions.
Mind e-mailing me at [email protected]. You don't have to help me if you don't want to, but it will help someone endangered a lot.
-Kirsty

 

[Eri]

Those aren't premonitions, that's the confirmation effect at work. You think random stuff like that all the time - everyone does - and then you forget about it unless it actually happens, and stuff like that just tends to happen once in a while. Your brain is built to look for patterns, but that results in a lot of 'false positives'.