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clairvoyance or second sight
Clairvoyance is an alleged psychic ability to see things beyond the range of the power of natural vision or vision assisted by technology. Clairvoyance is often associated with precognition (psychically knowing something will happen) or retrocognition (psychically "seeing" something that has already happened). The faculty of seeing into the future is called "second sight" if it is not induced by scrying, drugs, trance, or other artificial means. Psychically seeing things at a distance is sometimes called remote viewing.
People can predict the future. We do it all the time, but we usually, if not always, do it by taking into account our experience, knowledge, and surroundings. Some predictions by psychics come true. So do some predictions by non-psychics. No doubt much of our anticipation of the future is unconscious and second nature, but it is based on quite natural and mundane abilities, not on mysterious or supernatural powers.
People can have visions or relate stream of consciousness perceptions or feelings that can be interpreted as descriptions of places or things out of the range of vision. The fact that such visions can be subjectively validated as "accurate" does not imply that any clairvoyance has occurred. If a person could provide accurate and detailed descriptions of remote or future events on a regular basis, that person would be celebrated as truly clairvoyant. That no such person has ever existed in recorded history is a sign that stories of people with second sight are mythical exaggerations.
Anyone can throw out strings of words or sentences or draw pictures that other people can find meaningful and apparently clairvoyant. This fact, however, is irrelevant to establishing that clairvoyance is real. Subjective validation and selective thinking, acting in concert with wishful thinking, ignorance of cognitive biases, and occasional fraud can account for the widespread belief in the reality of clairvoyance. (Depending on which poll one cites, between 25% and 40% of us believe that clairvoyance is real.)
Attempts by scientists to establish the reality of clairvoyance have been going on since the middle of the 19th century. So far, the overwhelming bulk of the evidence indicates that clairvoyance does not exist. (For a short history of the attempt to establish by scientific means the reality of clairvoyance and other psychic abilities, click here. See also the entry on the ganzfeld experiments.) One of the latest attempts at establishing the reality of clairvoyance in a scientific experiment involves measuring galvanic skin response or brain activity (as measure by an fMRI) in presentiment experiments. Presentiment is a feeling that something strange or unusual is about to happen. If the feeling is especially foreboding, it is called a premonition. In presentiment experiments, however, what is measured is not the conscious feeling of anything, but the alleged unconscious effect on a machine of a physical response occurring before a stimulus is presented. Those doing this kind of research have no way of knowing that what they observe on their machines is in any way related to the stimuli they present. Assuming such a connection begs the question. The researchers might equally assume that the electrical resistance of skin in a subject or the blip of color on an fMRI caused the researcher to select the stimulus presented.
See also Edgar Cayce, clairaudience, dermo-optical perception, dream, ESP, extraordinary human function, medium, mentalist, Raymond Moody, paranormal, parapsychology, psi, psi-missing, psychokinesis, telepathy, Zener cards, and "What If Dean Radin is Right?" by Robert T. Carroll.
further reading
The Hundredth Monkey and Other Paradigms of the Paranormal, edited by Kendrick Frazier (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991).
Frazier, Kendrick and James Randi, "Predictions After The Fact: Lessons Of The Tamara Rand Hoax," in Science Confronts The Paranormal, ed., Kendrick Frazier (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1986), first published in the Skeptical Inquirer 6, no.1 (Fall 1981): 4-7.
Randi, James. Flim-Flam! (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books,1982), especially chapter 13, "Put Up or Shut Up," where he gives accounts of tests done on several psychics who have tried to collect the $10,000 Randi used to offer to anyone who can demonstrate any psychic power. So far, no one has collected, even though the offer is now $1,000,000!
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updated 04/18/09
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