ESP is the acquisition of information through means other than physical senses, including telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. Parapsychology studies ESP, but critics argue that experiments are inconclusive due to lack of consensus on how it works. Belief in psi may affect test results.
Extrasensory perception (ESP) refers to any phenomenon in which information is acquired through means other than the recognized physical senses. So it is a broad category. While ESP has never been scientifically proven and has numerous critics and skeptics, many laboratory test results have strongly favored its existence, and many people claim to have personal experience with it. ESP includes phenomena such as telepathy, out-of-body experiences, clairvoyance or remote viewing, precognition or future vision, aura reading, and other instances of insight and knowledge gained without the use of the physical senses.
The field of study dealing with ESP, known as parapsychology, was developed by JB and Louisa Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s. The Kidneys popularized the term, along with psi, the hypothetical agent through which the mind experiences ESP. They also introduced the use of Zener cards, designed by psychologist Karl Zener, to test it in the laboratory. Zener cards consist of a deck of 25 cards with five different symbols, and perception is tested by recording the accuracy of the test subject’s guesses about the symbols on the cards he cannot see.
While many laboratory experiments suggest that ESP is a real phenomenon, none are definitive, and many others have been unsuccessful. Critics complain that the experiments favoring it were conducted with improper methodology. ESP is, by its nature, difficult to test, as there is little consensus on how it works or what exactly would prove its existence. Few people are truly disinterested when it comes to this topic.
Interestingly, some lab tests of ESP have found that those who believe in psi are more likely to score higher than probability when guessing Zener card symbols, while those who do not believe in psi often score lower than probability . Another interesting result showed people in a relaxed state of mind, such as hypnosis, making accurate guesses about Zener cards twice as often as chance would indicate, while those who are not hypnotized tended to score based on chance.
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