Clairvoyance is the claimed ability to acquire information that would be considered impossible to get through scientifically proven sensations,thus classified as extrasensory perception,or "sixth sense". Any person who is claimed to have such ability is said to be a clairvoyant.
Extrasensory perception (ESP),also known as a sixth sense,or cryptaesthesia,is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses,but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke University botanist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as intuition,telepathy,psychometry,clairvoyance,clairaudience,clairsentience,empathy and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena and other paranormal claims,for example,those related to near-death experiences,synchronicity,apparitional experiences,etc. Criticized as being a pseudoscience,the majority of mainstream scientists reject it. Parapsychology has also been criticized by mainstream critics for claims by many of its practitioners that their studies are plausible despite a lack of convincing evidence after more than a century of research for the existence of any psychic phenomena.
Parapsychology is a field of research that studies a number of ostensible paranormal phenomena,including telepathy,precognition,clairvoyance,psychokinesis,near-death experiences,reincarnation,and apparitional experiences.
Telepathy is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers,a founder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR),and has remained more popular than the earlier expression thought-transference.
In American science fiction of the 1950s and '60s,psionics was a proposed discipline that applied principles of engineering to the study of paranormal or psychic phenomena,such as extrasensory perception,telepathy and psychokinesis. The term is a blend word of psi and the -onics from electronics. The word "psionics" began as,and always remained,a term of art within the science fiction community and—despite the promotional efforts of editor John W. Campbell,Jr.—it never achieved general currency,even among academic parapsychologists. In the years after the term was coined in 1951,it became increasingly evident that no scientific evidence supports the existence of "psionic" abilities.
Helmut Schmidt was a German-born physicist and parapsychologist whose experiments on extrasensory perception were widely criticized for machine bias,methodological errors and lack of replication. Critics also noted that necessary precautions were not taken to rule out the possibility of fraud.
Joseph Banks Rhine,usually known as J. B. Rhine,was an American botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology,founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University,the Journal of Parapsychology,the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man,and the Parapsychological Association. Rhine wrote the books Extrasensory Perception and Parapsychology:Frontier Science of the Mind.
William G. Roll was an American psychologist and parapsychologist on the faculty of the Psychology Department of the University of West Georgia in Carrollton,Georgia. Roll is most notable for his belief in poltergeist activity. He coined the term "recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis" (RSPK) to explain poltergeist cases. However,RSPK was never accepted by mainstream science and skeptics have described Roll as a credulous investigator.
Charles T. Tart is an American psychologist and parapsychologist known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness,as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology,and for his research in parapsychology.
Dream telepathy is the purported ability to communicate telepathically with another person while one is dreaming. Mainstream scientific consensus rejects dream telepathy as a real phenomenon. Parapsychological experiments into dream telepathy have not produced replicable results. The first person in modern times to claim to document telepathic dreaming was Sigmund Freud. In the 1940s,it was the subject of the Eisenbud-Pederson-Krag-Fodor-Ellis controversy,named after the preeminent psychoanalysts of the time who were involved:Jule Eisenbud,Geraldine Pederson-Krag,Nandor Fodor,and Albert Ellis.
Douglas Scott Rogo was a writer,journalist and researcher on subjects related to parapsychology. Rogo was murdered in 1990 at the age of 40. His case remains unsolved.
Stephen E. Braude is an American philosopher and parapsychologist. He is a past president of the Parapsychological Association,Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration,and a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland,Baltimore County.
Sensory leakage is a term used to refer to information that transferred to a person by conventional means during an experiment into extrasensorial perception (ESP).
The Psychology of the Psychic is a skeptical analysis of some of the most publicized cases of parapsychological research by psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann. The first edition,published in 1980,highlights some of the best-known cases from the 1970s. The second edition,published in 2000,adds information from the intervening 20 years as well as substantially more documentation and references to the original material.
In psychology,anomalistic psychology is the study of human behaviour and experience connected with what is often called the paranormal,with few assumptions made about the validity of the reported phenomena.
Gardner Murphy was an American psychologist who specialized in social and personality psychology and parapsychology. His career highlights include serving as president of the American Psychological Association and the British Society for Psychical Research.
Telekinesis is a hypothetical psychic ability allowing an individual to influence a physical system without physical interaction. Experiments to prove the existence of telekinesis have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no reliable evidence that telekinesis is a real phenomenon,and the topic is generally regarded as pseudoscience.
Charles Edward Mark Hansel was a British psychologist most notable for his criticism of parapsychological studies.
The Psychology of the Occult is a 1952 skeptical book on the paranormal by psychologist D. H. Rawcliffe. It was later published as Illusions and Delusions of the Supernatural and the Occult (1959) and Occult and Supernatural Phenomena (1988) by Dover Publications. Biologist Julian Huxley wrote a foreword to the book.
