RESEARCH by a North-East psychologist has revealed that one in four people may have a gift for predicting uncertainties such as the weather.

Tests carried out by Professor Richard Heath, of Sunderland University's Business School, also showed that this ability could possibly even extend to the financial markets.

During his research, volunteers were shown computer-generated temperature figures for the previous eight days and were asked to predict the following four days.

One set of numbers was part of a "chaotic" series similar to real weather patterns, while the other set was random.

Random sequences are by nature unpredictable, whereas chaotic sequences follow specific rules. However, they are still very hard to predict in practice.

Despite this, one in four volunteers predicted the right temperatures for the next two days. The results amazed Prof Heath who could offer no definite conclusions as to how this happened.

He said: "The results were quite unbelievable. We still have some work to do to understand what is going on in these peoples' heads, but the results are very promising.

"We are not talking about people being psychic, but if someone was to say that people can't predict the future, I would say, I think they can."

By building in checks, Prof Heath excluded the possibility of people seeing any obvious patterns in the numbers. In other words, they were not able to cheat by assuming that "the weather tomorrow is likely to be the same as the weather today".

Prof Heath is now planning studies to find out whether the skill is related to personality type or to aspects of intelligence.