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It doesn't explain how information would move through time or from an object to a mind. Presumably, if the information travels as electromagnetic energy, it has to be sent by someone - it has to travel from mind to mind. For one thing, the explanation only accounts for telepathy, not clairvoyance or precognition.
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This theory was fairly popular in the early 20th century, but it's out of favor today due to several inherent problems. 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 detect scientifically. One theory says that, like our ordinary senses, ESP is energy moving from one point to another point.
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Most believers think that everybody has the potential for ESP, but that some people are more in tune with their paranormal abilities than others.īelievers also disagree on how ESP actually works. Others say only a handful of psychics, shamans or mediums have the special power, and that they can only access this power when they put themselves into a special mental state. Some people believe everybody possesses these abilities, and we involuntarily experience moments of ESP all the time. Rhine, one of the first respected scientists to conduct paranormal research in a university laboratory.ĮSP believers around the world have different ideas of how these abilities manifest themselves. The term ESP itself was coined in 1934, by Duke University professor J.B. This concept has been around 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. All of these abilities are based on the idea that human beings can perceive things beyond the scope of known bodily senses.
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Psychometry: the ability to read information about a person or place by touching a physical objectĪ closely related psi phenomenon, not technically part of ESP, is telekinesis, the ability to alter the physical world with mind power alone.Mediumship: the ability to channel dead spirits.Retrocognition: the ability to see into the distant past.Precognition: the ability to see the future.Clairvoyance: the ability to "see" events or objects happening somewhere else.Telepathy: the ability to read another person's thoughts.Those who ignore the evidence and insist that ESP is a real, natural phenomenon fail to meet one of the key aspects of scientific behavior: assimilating the evidence. Cards used in experiments investigating whether ESP exists.ĮSP itself is neither scientific nor unscientific - but it can be studied scientifically or unscientifically, and scientific studies find no support for the hypothesis that ESP exists. 2 Since science hasn’t uncovered any evidence that ESP even exists, no scientific investigations of its potential mechanisms have been undertaken.
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However, researchers have found that receivers aren’t particularly accurate in these experiments no evidence of mind reading or any other sort of ESP has been found. If the receiver were to correctly identify the symbol more often than could be explained by chance, it would suggest that ESP does indeed exist. To eliminate any tips from body language, the sender is often shielded from view. In the most typical of these experiments, one person, the sender, goes through a deck of cards, each depicting one of five symbols (like a star or cross), while another person, the receiver, tries to determine what symbol the sender is looking at. Their experiments have explored all kinds of ESP, but most have focused on mind reading. Using these tools, scientists have studied whether ESP exists. So what does science have to say about ESP? Though ESP might not seem like something scientists would examine, the results of ESP - knowledge of events in the world - are well within the realm of science, and so we can use the tools of science to study phenomena sometimes attributed to ESP. Science deals with observations of the natural world - from far off galaxies, to microorganisms, to human behavior - and can shed light on natural explanations for those observations. ESP is defined as an awareness of the world that occurs through some mechanism other than the known senses - mind reading, sensing when a far-off friend is in trouble, foreseeing the future, and other phenomena more commonly associated with illusion artists than with science. Ever answer a phone call, only to hear the person you were just thinking of on the other end? Ever had a dream about something that later actually happened? Ever felt like somebody read your mind? Some people may interpret these sorts of experiences as extrasensory perception, or ESP.
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