Extrasensory perception is a collective term for various hypothetical mental abilities. These abilities (along with other paranormal phenomena) are also referred to as psi.
The major types of ESP are:
* Telepathy - the ability to read another person's thoughts
* Clairvoyance - the ability to "see" events or objects happening somewhere else
* Precognition - the ability to see the future
* Retrocognition - the ability to see into the distant past
* Mediumship - the ability to channel dead spirits
* Psychometry - the ability to read information about a person or place by touching a physical object
A closely related psi phenomenon, not technically part of ESP, is telekinesis, the ability to alter the physical world with mind power alone.
All of these abilities are based on the idea that human beings can perceive things beyond the scope of known bodily senses. 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. The term ESP itself was coined in 1934, by Duke University professor J.B. Rhine, one of the first respected scientists to conduct paranormal research in a university laboratory.
ESP believers around the world have different ideas of how these abilities manifest themselves. Some people believe everybody possesses these abilities, and we involuntarily experience moments of ESP all the time. 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. Most believers think that everybody has the potential for ESP, but that some people are more in tune with their paranormal abilities than others.
Believers also disagree on how ESP actually works. One theory says that, like our ordinary 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 we haven't been able to detect scientifically.
This theory was fairly popular in the early 20th century, but it's out of favor today due to several inherent problems. For one thing, the explanation only accounts for telepathy, not clairvoyance or precognition. Presumably, if the information travels as electromagnetic energy, it has to be sent by someone -- it has to travel from mind to mind. It doesn't explain how information would move through time or from an object to a mind.
Secondly, the theory doesn't jibe with what we know about ourselves and the universe. In most reported cases of telepathy, ESP works totally independent of distance. That is, the power of the "signal" is the same whether the transmitting mind and the receiving mind are in the same room or on opposite sides of the earth. No other form of energy behaves this way, skeptics point out, so it doesn't make sense that "psi waves" would either. Furthermore, it seems strange that we haven't found any unexplained sense organs in the body that might pick up on this energy, nor any evidence of the energy waves themselves.
In light of these problems, the prevailing theory among believers today is that ESP is a result of something beyond the known physical world. For example, many people view it as "spillover" from another reality. According to this theory, in addition to the physical universe we are consciously aware of, we all exist in another dimension that has completely different governing laws. Time and space work very differently in the other reality, allowing us to know about other people's thoughts, distant events or things that haven't happened yet in the physical reality. Normally, our awareness of this plane of existence is completely unconscious, but every once in a while, the conscious mind picks up on this information.
Needless to say, this theory is also completely outside our scientific understanding of the world. But, according to the theory's proponents, it's not supposed to fit into that conception. Like the concepts of God or an afterlife, the hypothetical reality would not rely on the physical laws of the universe. It would depend on the existence of a soul of some sort.
So, given that it's completely at odds with our understanding of the world, why do so many people believe in ESP? In the next section, we'll find out some of the reasons for this belief, and we'll see what scientific evidence supports it.
Reference: mysteries-and-strangeness.blogspot.com
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Telepathy (from the Greek, tele meaning "distant" and, pathe meaning "affliction, experience"), is the transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals by means other than the "five classic senses" (See Psi). The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, specifically to replace the earlier expression thought-transference. A telepath is a person with the paranormal ability to read others' thoughts and mental contents. Telepathy is one kind of extrasensory perception which, along with psychokinesis, forms the main topics of parapsychological research. Many studies seeking to detect, understand, and utilize telepathy have been done within this field. This research has neither produced a replicable demonstration of telepathy, nor an accepted mechanism by which it might work. Hence the scientific community does not regard telepathy as a real phenomenon. It is hard to unambiguously distinguish telepathy from a number of other parapsychological hypotheses such as clairvoyance.
Although not a recognized scientific discipline, people who study certain types of paranormal phenomena such as telepathy refer to the field as parapsychology. Parapsychologists claim that some instances of telepathy are real. Skeptics say that instances of apparent telepathy are explained as the result of fraud, self-delusion and/or self-deception and that telepathy does not exist as a paranormal power.
Parapsychologists such as Dean Radin, president of the Parapsychological Association, argue that the statistical significance and consistency of results shown by a meta-analysis of numerous studies provides evidence for telepathy that is almost impossible to account for using any other means. (read more)
The Army has given a team of University of California researchers a 4 million grant to study the foundations of "synthetic telepathy." But unlike old-school mind-melds, this seemingly psychic communication would be computer-mediated. The University of California, Irvine explains:
The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would "think" a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target. (read more)
Ingo Swann (born Ingo Douglas Swan on 09/14/1933 in Telluride, CO) is an artist and author, best known for his work as a co-creator (according to his frequent collaborators Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff) of the discipline of remote viewing, specifically the Stargate Project. He has written several books on remote viewing or related topics.
Swann does not identify himself as a "psychic," preferring to describe himself as a "consciousness researcher" who had sometimes experienced "altered states of consciousness." Swann has stated, "I don't get tested, I only work with researchers on well-designed experiments." Swann is dissatisfied in a role as a passive subject. He feels he must contribute to the preliminary design of the research. According to Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, there have been "Swann-inspired innovations" that have led to impressive results in parapsychology. Experiments not controlled by Swann have not been very successful. These are rarely mentioned, and if so, only in passing.
Swann helped develop the process of remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute in experiments that cauught the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is commonly credited with proposing the idea of Coordinate Remote Viewing, a process in which viewers would view a location given nothing but its geographical coordinates, which was developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding. Due to the popularity of Uri Geller in the seventies a critical examination of Ingo Swann's paranormal claims was basically overlooked by skeptics and historians. Uri Geller comments very favorably on Ingo Swann. Geller says, "If you were blind and a man appeared who could teach you to see with mind power, you would revere him as a guru. So why is Ingo Swann ignored by publishers and forced to publish his astounding life story on the Internet?" Both Geller and Swann were tested by two experimenters, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, who concluded that Geller and Swann did indeed have unique skills. However, others have strongly disputed the scientific validity of Targ and Puthoff's experiments. In a 1983 interview magician Milbourne Christopher remarked Swann is "one of the cleverest in the field." Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unobtainable. (read more)
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