The US National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1985 that there is no scientific evidence for psychic abilities. Most scientists argue that any apparent support is due to chance, falsification, or poor experimental design. A 2008 study found no neural responses to psychic abilities. The famous Zener cards have rarely shown results better than chance. Psi research departments have been shut down, leaving only two remaining.
The potential existence or non-existence of psychic abilities, also known as psi, has been scientifically studied for about 150 years (since 1858), according to the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1985, the organization released a statement which concluded that there is “no scientific justification from research conducted over a 130-year period for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.” According to one survey, only 2 percent of scientists at the National Academy of Sciences believed in psi phenomena or psychic abilities.
According to parapsychologists, these scientists are closed-minded and some psi phenomena including ESP (extrasensory perception) and psychokinesis have experimental support. Most scientists argue that any apparent experimental support for the existence of psychic abilities is at or within the margin of what would be expected by chance (this allegation is particularly frequent when the sample size is low), constitutes a deliberate falsification (either by the experimenters and subjects), or is due to poor experimental design which subtly skews the results towards the affirmation of the existence of psi.
A 2008 neuroimaging study by Kosslyn and Multon tested several psychic abilities including clairvoyance, remote viewing, and precognition and found no discernible neural responses when a “receiver” viewed an image psychically sent by a “sender” versus a random image. This effect persisted even when conditions purported to amplify psychic abilities were used, such as the use of twins, siblings, or spouses. Scientists have called these experiments “the strongest evidence ever obtained against the existence of paranormal mental phenomena.”
One of the first and most popular tests for the presence of psi phenomena are the famous Zener cards, five cards with symbols on them: a circle, a cross, wavy lines, a square and a star. The experimenter goes through the deck of cards, observes the result and (hiding the card) asks the subject to name the symbol on the other side. After many thousands of these experiments, participants have rarely performed better than chance, and when new experimental controls, such as shuffling cards using a machine, have been introduced, conducting a larger number of trials and separating the participant and experimenter by a distance greater, the effect almost disappeared. Karl Zenner demonstrated a poor understanding of statistics and the scientific method, for example interpreting worst-case outcomes as indicating the presence of psi phenomena (“psi-missing”) and attributing convergence to random performance over time (which is to be expected if psi is not real) as due to boredom of running the tests in the first place.
Since a brief resurgence in activity in the 1970s, nearly all university departments that practice psi research have been shut down. Today, only two remain, the Department of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia and the Veritas Laboratory at the University of New Mexico.
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