Many of us have dreamed something that eventually came true, had a correct hunch about an event miles away or predicted an out-of-the-blue phone call from an old friend. The experience is incredibly strange — positively spooky — but it happens all the time. Maybe ESP can explain these phenomena.
But what is ESP? A sizable chunk of the world’s population attributes these strange events to extrasensory perception (ESP), a special sense beyond vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste. People sometimes refer to it as a sort of sixth sense. Unlike ordinary senses, ESP has virtually unlimited range, and people experience it mainly as thoughts rather than bodily sensations.
The other view holds that there’s nothing supernatural about these events at all. These things do happen, the skeptics say, but they’re perfectly in keeping with conventional science. Let’s take a look at both sides of the argument to find out what might be behind the ESP phenomenon. We’ll also find out how false psychics can fake ESP, and we’ll see how this sort of trickery factors into the ongoing parapsychology debate.
Contents
- Types of ESP
- How Does ESP Work?
- The Case for ESP
- Applying the Scientific Method
- The Case Against ESP
- ESP Research
- The ESP Debate
Psychics claim to have telepathic powers that allow them to predict the future.
Scott Gries/ Image Direct/Getty Images
Extrasensory perception is a collective term for various hypothetical mental abilities that might be able to explain certain supernatural phenomenon. These purported abilities (along with other paranormal phenomena) are also referred to as psi.
The major types of ESP are:
- Telepathy: the ability to read another person’s thoughts (aka mind reading)
- Clairvoyance: the ability to “see” events or objects happening somewhere else
- Precognition: the ability to see the future
- Retrocognition: the ability to see into the distant past
- Mediumship: the ability to channel dead spirits
- Psychometry: the ability to read information about a person or place by touching a physical object
A closely related psi phenomenon, not technically part of ESP, is telekinesis, the ability to alter the physical world with mind power alone.
All of these abilities comes from the idea that human beings can perceive things beyond the scope of known bodily senses. This concept has existed since the beginning of human civilization, under many different names, but the modern conception didn’t develop until the first half of the 20th century.
Duke University professor J.B. Rhine — one of the first respected scientists to conduct paranormal research in a university laboratory — coined the term “ESP” in 1934.
How Does ESP Work?
ESP believers around the world have different ideas of how these abilities manifest themselves.
- Some people who believe psi exist purport that everybody possesses these abilities, and we involuntarily experience moments of ESP all the time.
- Others say only a handful of psychics, shamans or mediums have this special power, and that they can only access this power when they put themselves into a special mental state.
- Most believers think that everybody has the potential for ESP, but that some people are more in tune with various aspects of their paranormal abilities than others.
Believers also disagree on how ESP actually works. One theory says that, like our ordinary senses, ESP is energy moving from one point to another point. Typically, proponents of this theory say ESP energy takes the form of electromagnetic waves — just like light, radio and X-ray energy — that we haven’t been able to validate with scientific evidence.
Counterarguments From Skeptics
This theory was fairly popular in the early 20th century, but it’s out of favor today due to several inherent problems.
For one thing, the explanation only accounts for telepathy, not clairvoyance or precognition. Presumably, if the information transfer occurs as electromagnetic energy, it has to be sent by someone; it has to travel from mind to mind. It doesn’t explain how information would move through time or from an object to a mind.
Secondly, the theory doesn’t jibe with what we know about ourselves and the universe. In most reported cases of telepathy, ESP works totally independent of distance. That is, the power of the “signal” is the same whether the transmitting mind and the receiving mind are in the same room or on opposite sides of the earth.
No other form of energy behaves this way, skeptics point out, so it doesn’t make sense that “psi waves” would either. Furthermore, it seems strange that we haven’t found any unexplained sense organs in the body that might pick up on this energy, nor any evidence of the energy waves themselves.
The Spillover Theory
In light of these problems, the prevailing theory among believers today is that ESP is a result of something beyond the known physical world. For instance, many people view it as a “spillover” from another reality or consciousness.
According to this theory, in addition to the physical universe we are consciously aware of, we all exist in another dimension that has completely different governing laws. Time and space work very differently in the other reality, allowing us to know about other people’s thoughts, distant events or things that haven’t happened yet in the physical reality.
Normally, our awareness of this plane of existence is completely unconscious, but every once in a while, the conscious mind picks up on this information.
Needless to say, this theory is also completely outside our scientific understanding of the world. But according to the theory’s proponents, it’s not supposed to fit into that conception. Like the concepts of God or an afterlife, the hypothetical reality of this anomalous process would not rely on the physical laws of our universe. It would depend on the existence of a soul of some sort.
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