Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
Extrasensory perception (ESP) refers to a range of claimed mental abilities that extend beyond the five traditional senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Often described as the "sixth sense," ESP encompasses phenomena such as clairvoyance (gaining information about distant events), telepathy (reading thoughts), precognition (foreseeing the future), retrocognition (recalling past events), and psychokinesis (influencing objects with the mind). While many individuals, referred to as psychics or mediums, assert they possess these abilities, scientific support for ESP remains elusive. Numerous studies, including those utilizing Zener cards and brainwave tests, have failed to provide conclusive evidence of its existence, often yielding results no better than random chance.
Despite skepticism from the scientific community, there are pockets of belief that suggest all humans may have latent ESP abilities, although most do not recognize or develop them. Enthusiasts sometimes argue that ESP operates within a dimension beyond current scientific comprehension, relating it to concepts of spirituality and the afterlife. The ongoing debate about ESP highlights both the intrigue surrounding human potential and the challenges in verifying such extraordinary claims through conventional scientific methods.
Extrasensory Perception (ESP)
Extrasensory perception, commonly referred to as ESP, is a term used to describe various mental abilities, such as the ability to see into the future or the ability to hear someone’s thoughts. ESP is often dubbed the "sixth sense" because it is an ability in addition to sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Those who claim to have ESP are called psychics, mediums, or sensitives. Most scientists doubt the existence of ESP, yet law enforcement officials sometimes contact psychics to help them locate missing persons. Some believe that all individuals have some degree of ESP, but most choose to ignore and discount such abilities. Others believe that only a few select individuals have ESP.
Types of ESP
Parapsychologists, scientists who study psychic claims, have identified the following five main types of ESP:
- Clairvoyance: the ability to obtain information about a person or an event taking place somewhere else. For example, a mother who is at home "sees" her daughter fall while on a field trip and later learns that the child fell and scraped her knee.
- Telepathy: also referred to as mind reading; the ability to hear people’s thoughts. In experiments, one person focuses on an object and the second person tries to identify it.
- Precognition: the ability to see into the future. For example, a man driving on a highway has a vision of his car on the side of the road with a flat tire. Ten minutes later, he drives over a nail and gets a flat tire.
- Retrocognition: also called postcognition; the ability to see past events. For example, a psychic might claim to know what happened to a person who went missing years ago.
- Psychokinesis (PK): also called telekinesis; the ability to use the mind to move or influence an object. In experiments, a subject tries to use his or her mind to influence the outcome of thrown dice.
ESP Experiments
Despite decades of research, experimenters have been unable to scientifically prove the existence—or the non-existence—of ESP. The vast majority of studies have been inconclusive. Furthermore, those that have indicated the presence of ESP have only done so to a small degree—the percentage of ESP-related responses was only marginally higher than the percentage of correct responses generated through random guessing.
Early Research
In the early 1900s, researchers tested subjects for ESP using Zener cards, each of which had a printed symbol such as a plus sign, square, circle, wavy lines, or star. During these experiments, one person, "the sender," picked a card at random. The second person, "the receiver," tried to determine the symbol on the card. To ensure that the sender did not influence the receiver in any way, the two individuals were usually in different rooms. These experiments were largely failures—the percentage of correct responses was no better than random guessing.
In the 1930s and 1940s, J. B. Rhines, a respected researcher at Duke University who coined the term extrasensory perception, tested whether people could use their mind to affect the outcome of thrown dice. Rhines’s results were inconclusive, but his experiments convinced him that some of his subjects could actually do this. However, other researchers discovered errors in his procedures. Furthermore, they were unable to replicate his findings. Replication of findings is imperative before scientific research is accepted as true. If the findings of an experiment cannot be replicated, it usually indicates that the methodology was flawed. Because of this, Rhines’s experiments were dismissed by the scientific community.
Stargate
During the Cold War, the US government attempted to train an army of psychic spies in a program called Stargate. The program lasted about two decades until the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ended it during the 1990s. The CIA concluded that the psychics’ predictions were no better than random guesses and psychic powers do not exist.
Brainwave Tests
In 2008, a group of Harvard scientists announced that they had proven that ESP does not exist. The scientists used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to test subjects. They asked them to describe some photographs that they could see directly and measured their brainwaves. Then they asked their subjects to use ESP to describe some photographs that they could not see. These photographs were either shown to a friend or displayed on a computer screen in an out-of-sight area. Then the scientists measured their brainwaves a second time and compared with the first set of brainwaves. According to the scientists, if the subjects actually used ESP, the two sets of brainwaves would be different—but the two sets of brainwaves were the same.
Daryl Bem’s Experiments
Perhaps the most well-known ESP experiments were conducted by Daryl Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell University. Bem tested college students to see if they could correctly predict random events, such as where an image would appear on a computer screen. Bem conducted his experiments on more than 1,000 subjects over eight years. His findings indicated that some of his subjects could do this accurately and repeatedly. Bem claimed to have scientifically proven the existence of ESP. His findings made national headlines and in 2012 were published inThe Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Bem invited others to repeat his studies and critique his methodology. However, two groups of scientists repeated his experiment and were unable to replicate his findings—they found no evidence of ESP.
A Second Dimension
Many of those who believe in ESP contend that scientific experiments usually fail because something beyond the physical world causes individuals to have a sixth sense. They believe that in addition to the physical world in which we live, we also exist in another dimension in which time and space work very differently. They believe that ESP is akin to concepts of divinity and the afterlife—something outside of scientific understanding.
Believers also point out that visions by those with ESP are rare occurrences; individuals with ESP simply do not have a sixth sense to use at will. Because of this, it makes it nearly impossible to scientifically prove the existence of ESP.
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