Can the lab prove ESP?

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

The only area of the paranormal that has attracted serious scientific research is Extra Sensory Perception. Parapsychologist James Lumsden explains the techniques used to quantify ESP.

Anecdotal support for Extra Sensory Perception is not uncommon. It is estimated that just under half of the UK population will experience what is believed to be an ESP episode during their lifetime, with telepathy proving most likely.

These self reports, however, do not satisfy those who are sceptical of psychic phenomena. Human beings are fallible, they argue. ESP episodes must be due to misperception, self-delusion, coincidence and even fraud. If ESP is real you should be able to create it upon demand, and measure it under laboratory conditions.

So how do researchers go about measuring ESP? As you would expect, the aim is to create experimental conditions which limit any opportunity for the problem outlined above to manifest themselves. In turn it is also desirable to conduct studies where the outcome is unambiguous. You want to identify whether participants provide information that can be judged as accurate or inaccurate – straightaway. Accordingly, many studies employ what’s known as a formed choice protocol where there a fixed number of options to choose from. Heads or Tails? is forced choice.

You can read the rest of this feature in Paranormal Magazine issue 38

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Psychic Powers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Can the lab prove ESP?”

anthony Says:
July 31st, 2009 at 1:23 am
hi my name is anthony kerrigan,im part of a paranormal investigation team called ‘ghosteire’ here in ireland,we have experienced lots of unexplainable stuff in our investigations,we do sum strange experiments,they do sumtimes get gud results.can also email me on ghosteire@yahoo.co.uk not many people do investigations in ireland so we are going through uncharted teriortary:-)