Extrasensory Perception Explained

The concept that reality is not restricted to things one can see and touch has long figured in most religions and philosophies down the ages. One of the recurring evidence of this ‘truth’ is provided in the existence and operation of extra-sensory perception which has constituted the subject of a great deal of experimentation in psychology and parapsychology.

What is Extra-sensory Perception?

At its simplest, extra-sensory perception includes all those phenomena by which an individual can acquire information or consciousness about an object, person, location or physical event through means other than the five known human senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. In popular usage, ESP is described as a gut-feeling, a sixth sense or even intuition. The meaning of ESP can also be extended to include acquisition of information by means other than the basic limiting assumptions of science, such as that organisms can only receive information from the past to the present. It is in the context of this meaning, that ESP includes concepts such a precognition whereby an individual can foretell a future event even before it has happened in the present.

History of ESP

The first prominent use of the term ESP was by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairaudience, and clairvoyance and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition. Rhine was one of the founders of the discipline of parapsychology as a way of researching psychic phenomena but outside the context of fraud and charlatanism that had creeped into popular nineteenth century events such as séances and hauntings.

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In early British research into ESP, one of the first statistical studies, using card-guessing, was conducted by Ina Jephson, in the 1920s. She reported mixed findings across two studies. In the 1960s, in line with the development of cognitive psychology and humanistic psychology, parapsychologists became increasingly interested in the cognitive components of ESP, the subjective experience involved in making ESP responses, and the role of ESP in psychological life. Free-response measures, such as used by Carington in the 1930s, were developed with attempts to raise the sensitivity of participants to their cognitions. These procedures included relaxation, meditation, REM-sleep, and most significantly the Ganzfeld technique which created the effect of a mild sensory deprivation so as to facilitate ESP such as telepathy. These studies proved to be even more successful than Rhine's forced-choice paradigm, with meta-analyses evidencing reliable effects, and many confirmatory replication studies.

Forms of ESP

In case of extra-sensory perception, a person receives information through means other than those explainable by current science. This includes any knowledge or consciousness of an event outside of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, or smelling it. In a majority of cases such perception is reported in visual terms which is known as clairvoyance which literally means “clear seeing”. In case where the extra-sensory perception is acquired by auditory impressions, it is known as clairaudience. There is yet another kind of extrasensory perception, clairsentience, where certain people can known of past, present, or future events through "sensing" or feeling them. In the same series, clairalience and clairgustance are minor forms of ESP in which a person acquires information through psychic smell and taste respectively, in the absence of physical stimuli.

Another class of ESP depends upon trans-temporal operation and this includes phenomena such as telepathy or the ability to read another person's thoughts, precognition or the ability to see the future, retrocognition or the ability to see into the distant past, Mediumship or the ability to channel dead spirits as well as Psychometry or the ability to read information about a person or place by touching a physical object. Yet another closely related phenomenon, but not technically part of ESP, is telekinesis which refers to the ability to alter the physical world with mind power alone.

Who has ESP?

ESP believers around the world have different ideas of how these abilities manifest themselves. Some experts believe everybody possesses these abilities, and that all, voluntarily or involuntarily experience moments of ESP all the time. According to others, ESP is a very special gift and only few are blessed with this psychic power like shamans or mediums and even they can only access this power when they put themselves into a special mental state. By and large, paranormal believers take a middle position and think that everybody has the potential for ESP, but that some people are more in tune with their paranormal abilities than others.

Explanations for ESP

Not only is mankind divided on the existence of ESP, but even believers disagree on how ESP actually works. According to one theory, like ordinary human 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 science hasn’t been able to detect and identify as yet. However this explanation only accounts for telepathy, not clairvoyance or precognition. Presumably, if ESP travels as electromagnetic energy, then it has to be sent by someone since it has to travel from mind to mind. This theory of ESP doesn't succeed in explaining how information would move through time or from an object to a mind.

In recent times ESP is understood more as a result of something beyond the known physical world. According to this stance, it is viewed as a "spillover" from another reality. In addition to the physical universe that humans are consciously aware of, everything can also be understood as existing in another dimension that has completely different laws governing time and space which in turn allows some individuals to know about other people's thoughts, distant events or things that haven't happened yet in the physical reality.

ESP and skepticism

Despite a greater openness towards parapsychological experiments in contemporary science, rationalists still find it difficult to accept the truth of ESP. The primary argument against ESP phenomena is that they are fundamentally at odds with the known laws of physics and of the universe, as supported by countless scientific experiments. As much as they might want to believe it, skeptics say, ESP is just too extraordinary to accept without equally compelling evidence. Another significant source of doubt is the largely anecdotal and subjective evidence provided by supporters of ESP which cannot be accurately replicated under controlled conditions. Then there is the statistical argument - according to this there are more than 6 billion people on Earth, constantly thinking and all experiencing dozens of significant events every day. Even though to the average person, a dream or feeling coming true, in precise detail, seems too amazing to be simple coincidence, statistically, on any particular day, some of the things some people envision will line up closely with some of the things those people happen to experience.

Apart from this, skeptics and psychologists have identified a number of processes like cold reading, selection bias, unconscious perception, self-fulfilling prophecies and even distorted/selective memory to explain why and how individuals now and then seem to be able to give accurate information pertaining to things, people and events about which they could not possibly have known through normal physical senses.

The very nature of ESP phenomena implies that debate and discussion about its validity and processes are inevitable. It is a mark of not only the complexity of extra-sensory perceptions but indeed of the very meaning of reality and the universe which is yet to be understood fully by mankind.