[hnbad]

The reason the scientific evidence is flimsy is that this can almost entirely be attributed to selection bias: it feels important when you make predictions that are correct, it doesn't feel noteworthy when you make ones that are wrong - you'll probably even forget about them by the time they turn out to have been wrong.

Plus our brains are pretty good at predicting what will happen based on things we've seen before and most people have intrusive thoughts (though these are usually based on actions rather than just things happening, e.g. throwing a baby out of a window or jumping in front of an oncoming train). Our memories are also extremely malleable so if a prediction didn't match exactly our brains will happily adjust the details to find a match or we'll ignore details that don't match because they don't seem as important as the ones that do.

It's spooky but the real wonder here is that our brains work somewhat reliably most of the time to begin with. Even our vision is a complete mess - ranging from the physical blind spots in our eyes to various forms of "blindness" (e.g. change blindness) and the work our brains have to do in order to compensate for saccades (i.e. why you don't see motion blur every time your eyes move).