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Extrasensory Perception (ESP) is perception through psi, the general name for any type of psychic phenomena. ESP includes remote viewing (clairvoyance) ("seeing" distant scenes or objects), telepathy (sensing another person's thoughts or transmitting thoughts to another person) and precognition (sensing the future). The term was coined by J. B. Rhine as "extra-sensory perception" in 1934.

History

The origins of psychic claims go back centuries. Herodotus writes about the Oracle at Delphi predicting the defeat of the king of Lydia. The predictions of Nostradamus from the 16th century have also been cited as evidence of precognition.

The Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in London in 1882, began the formal scientific study of psychic phenomena, and by 1887 eight members of the British Royal Society served on its council. Soon after, many spiritualists are said to have left the SPR due to the skepticism within the SPR about some prominent mediums. However, the SPR continued its research, publishing its findings in its Proceedings. Other societies were soon set up in most countries in Europe, and the American SPR was founded in 1885.

Early SPR research involved such things testing the abilities of mediums and other psychics, as well as experiments involving card guessing and dice throwing. William McDougall, a social psychologist, brought the study of psychic phenomena into the science laboratory, but was not until the development of statistical tools by R. A. Fisher and others in the 1920s that parapsychology entered the laboratory when J. B. Rhine established the first experimental parapsychology unit at Duke University, North Carolina, in 1927 (later to become the independent Rhine Research Center).

Rhine attempted to provide parapsychology with a systematic program of sound laboratory experimentation. This was done primarily because the fieldwork done by the SPR and other parapsychological organizations, while seeming conclusive to those who studied the matter closely, had failed to bring parapsychology into the mainstream. Rhine set out to prove psychic phenomena under the same conditions accepted by mainstream physical science.

Rhine also helped found the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937 and the Parapsychological Association (PA) in 1957.

The PA became affiliated in 1969 when with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This affiliation along with an increased interest in psychic and occult phenomena in the 1970s cultural revolution led to a marked increase in parapsychological research. Other organizations were formed such as the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine (1970), the Institute of Parascience (1971), the Academy of Religion and Psychical Research, the Institute for Noetic Sciences (1973), and the International Kirlian Research Association (1975). Each of these bodies performed experiments to some extent. Parapsychological work was also conducted at the Stanford Research Institute, California around this time.

Research

Dean I. Radin who has written:

"After being engaged in the scientific investigation of such phenomena for 25 years, I've become convinced that some psychic experiences are genuine. Of course the topic is exploited for entertainment purposes, and there are always unscrupulous individuals who falsely claim psychic abilities, so I understand why many scientists avoid this topic. Nevertheless, because the laboratory evidence shows that some psychic effects can be repeatedly observed under controlled conditions, these phenomena require an expansion to prevailing scientific models of who and what we are. I've also learned that those who are most hostile to this topic know little or nothing about it, and that the hostility is usually motivated by fundamentalist beliefs of the scientistic or religious kind."

Radin says compelling positive results have been achieved in a variety of parapsychological fields. Experiments such as the ganzfeld have tested for ESP using pictures and videos. Many of these experiments have had positive results, with subjects scoring significantly above chance. Other studies have returned results which are not significantly above chance. They are usually above chance, but often do not reach the level when they are considered "significant", which is defined as a 95% confidence interval (one experiment in 20 would get that score by chance alone). When results of positive, negative, and inconclusive studies are combined in meta-analyses, they return highly significant results in favor of the existence of ESP. These studies usually return results of 33% to 37%, when by chance alone they should return 25%.

Proponents claim that controlled parapsychological laboratory research, often using meta-analyses of many experiments performed by different researchers, has yielded the following:

• Clairvoyance and telepathy experiments: several categories of experiments ranging from ESP card tests, to dream and ganzfeld telepathy studies, to remote viewing and PEAR precognitive remote perception studies, all normalized for chance hit rate of 50%, the categories range from about 54% to 67% hit rate, averaging about 60%.

• Dice throwing: 51.2% hit rate (chance rate: 50%) over 148 experiments from 1935 to 1987, involving thousands of participants and millions of throws.
• Random Number Generator (RNG) studies: 51% hit rate (chance rate: 50%) over 832 studies from 1959 to 1987 (1989 analysis).

• The on-going PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) program, started at Princeton University in 1979, analyzed millions of random bits. They found a small deviation from the 50% chance expectation, of the order of 0.01%. While this effect is tiny, it is statistically significant: with 7 standard deviations, the probability that the origin of the effect is a statistical oddity (odds against chance) is around 10^-12.

• Distant mental influence on human electrodermal activity: 53% (chance rate: 50%), over 400 sessions as of 1997.

• Feeling of being stared at: 63% (chance rate: 50%) over studies from 1913 to 1996.

• Some experiments have tested the ability to foretell future events, both consciously, and unconsciously by using electrodes to measure galvanic skin responses to future stimuli, and have obtained positive results.

The odds against chance alone accounting for many of these statistical outcomes are extremely high, often ranging from one in thousands to one in trillions, i.e. statistically large effects.

Other experiments aimed at detecting psi, especially those performed by experimenters or subjects who disbelieve in psi, have scored significantly below chance. This is called psi-missing, and is considered further evidence for the existence of psi, since any deviation from chance may be significant.

Even some skeptics, such as Ray Hyman, say that some parapsychological studies may have merit:

"I have argued that the case for the existence of anomalous cognition is still shaky, at best. On the other hand, I want to state that I believe that the SAIC [Science Applications International Corporation] experiments as well as the contemporary ganzfeld experiments display methodological and statistical sophistication well above previous parapsychological research. Despite better controls and careful use of statistical inference, the investigators seem to be getting significant results that do not appear to derive from the more obvious flaws of previous research."

Proponents of parapsychology generally argue that those who hold critical views are not familiar with the published literature of the field, such as that found in the Journal of Parapsychology, the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, or in the proceedings of the annual convention of the Parapsychological Association. Skeptics are accused of having relied on analyses made by other members of the skeptical community, who are themselves accused of assuming that all parapsychological experiments suffer from flaws, and therefore no parapsychological result can be considered conclusive. Active psi researchers claim to welcome criticisms which are not psychologically or ideologically biased and which are based on knowledge of the peer-reviewed, published literature in the field.

Parapsychology as a premature science

A common idea running through the literature on the paranormal is that disciplines like parapsychology are simply ahead of their time. Comparisons are often made with other recognised premature theories, like the heliocentric theory and Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift.

Parapsychologists have stated that the anomalies they claim to have discovered will eventually generate pressure within orthodox science - and lead to a paradigm shift in scientific knowledge (as, for example, when Newtonian mechanics came under the umbrella of Einsteinian mechanics). Thomas S. Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, who popularised the term 'paradigm' in this context, has been referenced to support such an idea.

Parapsychologists claim that their findings to date are significant and are generating pressure for change, but they argue that the real importance of this pressure is being ignored within mainstream science because of scientific dogmatism.

Skeptical responses

Main article

Noted psychical researchers or parapsychologists

• Hans Bender
• Giuseppe Calligaris
• William Crookes
• Max Dessoir
• Charles Honorton
• Stanley Krippner
• Oliver Lodge
• Thelma Moss
• Julian Ochorowicz
• John Palmer
• Charles Panati
• Harry Price
• Dean I. Radin
• Joseph B. Rhine
• Charles Robert Richet
• D. Scott Rogo
• William G. Roll
• Carl Sargent
• Helmut Schmidt (parapsychologist)
• Gary Schwartz
• Ian Stevenson
• Ingo Swann
• Charles Tart
• Jessica Utts

Noted skeptics of parapsychology

• James E. Alcock
• Banachek
• Susan Blackmore
• Derren Brown
• Milbourne Christopher
• Paul Daniels, UK magician
• Persi Diaconis, US statistician and magician
• Martin Gardner
• Ray Hyman
• James Randi
• Marcello Truzzi (deceased)
• Richard Wiseman
• Harry Houdini (Ehrich Weiss)

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