Key terms in parapsychology

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The point of this glossary is to give simple and common sense definitions, while remaining scientifically accurate. It leaves out self-explanatory terms like "trial," "thought transference" and "subject." It also sticks to terms associated with scientific parapsychology, leaving out terms like "white magic," "theosophy" and "ufology." There are other glossaries on the web which either make no attempt to be scientific, define terms which are outside the field, or give technocratic definitions which are difficult to deal with.

Disclaimer: Terms are generally defined as if the phenomena are real. This may not be the case.

Altered State of Consciousness (ASC)

Any state of consciousness that is different from the normal states of waking or sleeping. ASCs include hypnosis, meditative experiences, mystical experiences, mental states induced by psychedelic drugs, near death experiences, and trances experienced by mediums. ASCs do not necessarily have paranormal features, but are thought to facilitate psi.

Announcing Dream

A dream which announces a person's reincarnation.

Anomalous Experience

See Psi

Anomalous Phenomena

Any observed phenomenon which does not seem to have an explanation in current science. See also psi.

Anpsi

Contraction of "animal psi." It has been hypothesized that animals exhibit psi. For example, the work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who studied dogs that appear to know when their owners are about to return home, in the absence of any sensory cues. Ongoing experiments on anpsi can be found here and here.

Animal Magnetism

A force or fluid which can be transmitted from one person to another, producing healing effects. The term was coined by F.A. Mesmer, who used mesmerism (later called hypnotism) to produce paranormal effects. Mesmerism is one of the types of phenomena which parapsychology was created to study.

Anoxia

Lack of oxygen. In parapsychology, the term is usually found when discussing near death experiences, in the context of whether or not these experiences can be partially explained by anoxia of the brain.

Apparition

A visual appearance of something which, by normal standards, cannot be said to be physically present. Apparitions are usually of a person but sometimes of an entire scene. They can be experienced while fully awake, and sometimes by multiple people from different perspectives. They also occur in hypnagogic states.

Apport

An object, such as a spoon, an old newspaper, water, flowers, or tar (to take examples from the literature), which appears in an unexplained way. Often it is said that they are brought by spirits. Apports are often associated with physical mediumship and poltergeists. When an object vanishes in a similarly scientifically unexplained manner, it is called an hasport.

Artefact

An artefact can occur in a scientific study when results show up which are due not to any real phenomenon, but to the way the data has been processed. Alternately, an artefact may come about because of chance or unknown aspects influencing the study, rather than because of the phenomenon the study was meant to explore.

ASC

See altered state of consciousness.

Automatism

Any reaction (or inhibition of action) that occurs automatically without conscious thought or reflection, as with trance mediumship, automatic writing, and dowsing. It is often believed that they are either the result of spirit control or (more often in academic parapsychological discourse) that they are controlled by the unconscious mind. See this.

Automatic writing

Automatisms which produce writing without the conscious knowledge of the writer (as normally conceived). Often thought to be a form of spirit communication, see mediumship.

Autoscopy

Looking back at one's own body during an OBE.

Basic Technique

This term is used in card-guessing tests of clairvoyance, in which the top card of the deck is placed to one side after each guess.

Billet Reading

Procedure in which a secret message is sealed in an envelope and then given to a psychic who attempts to reveal the message. Billet reading is often part of magical acts which acomplish the same effect without psi.

Bilocation

Being in two different places at the same time.

Electronic voice phenomena (EVP)

Voices or voice-like sounds which are usually heard embedded in background noise and can be recorded. They vary drastically in clarity. Some are quite clearly words, while others might not be recognized even by trained individuals. Some people believe they are the voices of spirits. No one has been able to create a device which will reliably produce EVP for more than one person, though some devices seem to work well for some people. Even within parapsychology, these phenomena are highly controversial, to the extent that many parapsychologists would say that EVP are not part of the field. Most parapsychologists would not want to be associated with EVP, both because it is difficult to pin down, and because the concepts needed to explain it (if it is real) are destructive of careers.

Extrasensory perception

Extrasensory perception is sensing things by means unknown to current science. It is a general blanket term for things like precognition and telepathy.

Hypnagogic imagery

Imagery, sometimes very lifelike, which occurs when the person experiencing it is in the hypnagogic state, meaning that they are dropping off to sleep.

Mediumship

Mediumship occurs when a person —the medium— facilitates communication between dimensions. Usually, this is between the earthly dimension and the dimension in which the human or animal spirit exists after death.

Mental mediumship:

Mental mediumship occurs when the medium remains conscious, but uses telepathy to communicate with other dimensions.

Physical mediumship:

In physical mediumship, the medium serves as a source of energy which allows beings from other dimensions to manifest.

Trance mediumship

Trance mediumship occurs when the medium goes in to an altered state of consciousness and allows another entity to use their body to communicate or act.

Meta-analysis

Most basically, meta-analysis is using statistics to put together the results of several studies. This technique can allow you to see interesting patterns which wouldn't show up if you looked at only individual studies.

Imagine that you see a picture very close-up. All you can see is, perhaps, a bit of color, or a strange shape. But if you broaden your perspective, you find you are looking at a recognizable scene. Meta-analysis is a statistical method for broadening your perspective till you can see the larger patterns.

Meta-analysis is controversial because if you go rooting around in your date long enough, you are likely to find something. As with all statistics, it must be used judiciously if valid scientific results are to be obtained. Meta-analysis is popular in many branches of science.

Near death experience

Experiences reported by people who have been pronounced clinically dead, been very close to death, or thought that they were about to die. Such experiences typically include an OBE, a life review, a tunnel experience, light or a "being of light," coming to a boundary beyond which return to physical life will be impossible, seeing deceased friends and relatives, experiencing a loving or divine presence, and making a choice (or being told or forced) to return. Occasionally NDEs can be frightening and distressing. NDEs often have profound effects on the person's later life. Although there have been many attempts to explain NDEs as hallucinations produced by the death process of the body and brain, none of these explanations are well supported scientifically, nor do they come close to being comprehensive accounts.

Out of Body Experience (OBE, OOBE)

An experience in which a person's centre of consciousness seems to be outside of the physical body. This experience may either seem to be fully conscious, dreamlike, or "more conscious" than normal. OBEs typically occur during NDEs, and they can also be induced by meditation techniques. Sometimes such experiences develop into astral projection.

Paranormal

A paranormal phenomenon is one which cannot be explained by current scientific understanding. This does not mean that it is supernatural, but only that science hasn't explained it yet.

Poltergeist

Poltergeists are psychokinetic effects such as movement of objects, apports, and loud raps, which tradition says are caused by ghosts. Many parapsychologists think that the effects are caused by human psychokinesis, while others lean toward the traditional explanation.

Precognition

Knowing things will happen before they do. Precognition encompasses a large range of experiences, such as dreams which later happen, near-death experiences in which the future is foretold, clairvoyance, and prediction of death. Contrast Presentiment.

Presentation bias

Presentation bias is when the way something is presented to a subject in a scientific experiment could influence the outcome of the study. For instance, if you are trying to see if a subject can psychically guess which card the person in the next room is looking at, and you wink at the subject every time you show him the right card, you will create presentation bias. Presentation bias can be very subtle, and is difficult to eliminate. For this reason, it is standard practice in parapsychology for the experimenter not to know what the right answer is.

Presentiment

Presentiment is the ability to sense things before they happen, on an unconscious level. The subject is shown calming or exciting pictures on a computer screen, and will start to react to the exciting pictures before they come on the screen. The subject will react more before seeing the exciting pictures than before seeing the calm ones. Presentiment is often measured using galvanic skin response (as in a lie detector test), to detect the unconscious precognitive reactions.

Psi

"Psi" is a greek letter, (capital shown above). The word/letter psi (pronounced "sigh") is used in parapsychology to indicate any kind of parapsychological phenomenon. It provides a substitute for terms like "extra sensory perception" (ESP), "psychokinesis" (PK), or even the survival of bodily death. The term neither implies that such phenomena are paranormal nor says anything about their underlying mechanisms. This is the point of the word: it doesn't commit you to any belief system. More here.

Psychokinesis (PK)

Psychokinesis is the influence of the mind or other paranormal forces on physical objects. Examples include psychokinetic metal bending, influence of intention on random number generators, levitation, and poltergeist phenomena.

Psychometry

Psychometry is the ability of a psychic to get information by touching an object. Often, a psychic will attempt to do a remote "reading" of a person, or get in touch with the spirit of a person, by touching an object which the person owned.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is the process wherein, after the death of the body, some aspect of self —usually called the spirit or soul— is re-born into another infant body. The process is often said to be repeated many times. The belief is widespread, and is basic to religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Remote viewing

Remote viewing is a method of eliciting extrasensory perception under controlled conditions. A viewer attempts to perceive a target which is out of range of the viewer's physical senses— at times thousands of miles away. Sometimes for experimental purposes, the viewer tries to connect with an agent who is at a distant location. The methodology of remote viewing was developed by the militaries of various countries, and has since caught the public imagination.

Retrocognition

Knowing things in the past by psychic means. For example, a remote viewer might see a place as it used to be instead of as it is in the present.

Sensory leakage

In parapsychology, sensory leakage occurs when a person in an ESP test could have acquired the information by normal means. Parapsychologists try to eliminate all possibility of sensory leakage in order to ensure that the only explanation for their results is ESP. Such leakage is hard to prevent, and it is also difficult to know whether or not it has occurred (even for the person attempting to experience ESP). Thus, if the possibility exists, the experiment is often assumed to have been flawed.

Statistically significant

Statistically significant means that a result was unlikely to occur by chance. In a scientific study, the usual threshold for calling something "highly significant" comes when you can be 95% sure that the result is detecting something real- in other words, that it is not due to chance. Another way of saying this is that the result would occur by chance in one case out of 20 (or less). The results of many parapsychological studies have been highly significant. When those studies are put together using meta-analysis, they become far more than what is defined as "highly significant," often with the odds against the results being due to chance at one in a million or less (for more, see this).

Supernatural

Entities, phenomena or forces which are not subject to natural or scientific "laws." The supernatural is contrasted with the paranormal because while the paranormal is assumed to be natural but currently unexplained, the supernatural cannot be explained by natural law, and is thus not a subject for scientific study.

Telepathy

Telepathy occurs when information somehow turns up in more than one mind, and how it got there can't be explained in terms of current scientific theory. There have been many paradigms of how telepathy might occur, ranging from the analogy of radio and television to quantum entanglement (the current preference).