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.
A psychic is a person who claims to use powers rooted in parapsychology, such as extrasensory perception (ESP), to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance; or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, such as psychokinesis or teleportation. Although many people believe in psychic abilities, the scientific consensus is that there is no proof of the existence of such powers, and describes the practice as pseudoscience.
Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as being beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Notable paranormal beliefs include those that pertain to extrasensory perception, spiritualism and the pseudosciences of ghost hunting, cryptozoology, and ufology.
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.
Dean Radin investigates phenomena in parapsychology. Following a bachelor and master's degree in electrical engineering and a PhD in educational psychology Radin worked at Bell Labs, as a researcher at Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh, and was a faculty member at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He then became Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, USA, later becoming the president of the Parapsychological Association. He is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Radin's ideas and work have been criticized by scientists and philosophers skeptical of paranormal claims. The review of Radin's first book, The Conscious Universe, that appeared in Nature charged that Radin ignored the known hoaxes in the field, made statistical errors and ignored plausible non-paranormal explanations for parapsychological data.
Nina Kulagina, Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina was a Russian woman who claimed to have psychic powers, particularly in psychokinesis. Academic research of her phenomenon was conducted in the USSR for the last 20 years of her life.
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.
Charles Henry Honorton was an American parapsychologist and was one of the leaders of a collegial group of researchers who were determined to apply established scientific research methods to the examination of what they called "anomalous information transfer" and other phenomena associated with the "mind/body problem"—the idea that mind might, at least in some respects, have a physical existence independent of the body.
Robert George Jahn was an American plasma physicist, Professor of Aerospace Science, and Dean of Engineering at Princeton University. Jahn was also a founder of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR), a parapsychology research program which ran from 1979 to 2007.
Robert Henry Thouless was an English psychologist and parapsychologist. He is best known as the author of Straight and Crooked Thinking, which describes flaws in reasoning and argument.
Evan Harris Walker, was an American physicist and parapsychologist.
John Gerald Taylor was a British physicist and author. He is notable for writing a book critical of paranormal phenomena.
In spiritualism, ectoplasm, also known as simply ecto, is a substance or spiritual energy "exteriorized" by physical mediums. It was coined in 1894 by psychical researcher Charles Richet. Although the term is widespread in popular culture, there is no scientific evidence that ectoplasm exists and many purported examples were exposed as hoaxes fashioned from cheesecloth, gauze or other natural substances.
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.
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.
Jan Guzyk (1875–1928), also known as Jan Guzik was a Polish spiritualist medium known for his alleged ability of psychokinesis. Guzyk was exposed as a fraud by psychical researchers Harry Price and Max Dessoir.
