ESP (extrasensory perception)

Robert Todd Carroll

SkepDic.com

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episode 5: ESP

New Neuroimaging Fails To Demonstrate ESP Is Real 1/4/08

According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 41% of Americans believe in ESP.

This is a decline from surveys done during the last decade of the 20th century that found belief in ESP steady at 50%.

ESP (extrasensory perception)

ESP or extrasensory perception is perception occurring independently of sight, hearing, or other sensory processes. People who have extrasensory perception are said to be psychic. It is commonly called ESP, a term popularized by J. B. Rhine, who began investigating the phenomenon at Duke University in 1927. ESP refers to telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and in recent years, remote viewing and clairaudience. The existence of ESP and other paranormal powers such as telekinesis, are disputed, though systematic experimental research on these subjects, known collectively as psi, has been ongoing for over a century in parapsychology.

Most of the evidence for ESP is anecdotal and is dismissed by skeptics as based on one or several of the following:

incompetence or fraud by parapsychologists or believers in psi
trickery by mentalists
cold reading
subjective validation
selective thinking and confirmation bias
poor grasp of probabilities and of the law of truly large numbers
shoehorning, retrospective clairvoyance, and retrospective falsification
gullibility, self-deception, and wishful thinking

The following case is typical of those cited as proof of ESP. It is unusual only in that it involves belief in a psychic dog, rather than a psychic human. The dog in question is a terrier who has achieved fame as having ESP as exhibited by his ability to know when his owner, Pam Smart, is deciding to come home when she is away shopping or on some other business. The dog's name is Jaytee. He has been featured on several television programs in Australia, the United States and England, where he resides with Pam and her parents, who were the first to perceive the dog's psychic abilities. They observed that the dog would run to the window facing the street at precisely the moment Pam was deciding to come home from several miles away. (How the parents knew the precise moment Pam was deciding to come home is unclear.) Parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake investigated and declared the dog is truly psychic. Two scientists, Dr Richard Wiseman and Matthew Smith of the University of Hertfordshire, tested the dog under controlled conditions. The scientists synchronized their watches and set video cameras on both the dog and its owner. Alas, several experimental tries later, they had to conclude that the dog wasn't doing what had been alleged. He went to the window and did so quite frequently, but only once did he do so near the exact time his master was preparing to come home and that case was dismissed because the dog was clearly going to the window after hearing a car pull up outside his domicile. Four experiments were conducted and the results were published in the British Journal of Psychology (89:453, 1998).

Much of the belief in ESP is based upon apparently unusual events that seem inexplicable. However, we should not assume that every event in the universe can be explained. Nor should we assume that what is inexplicable requires a paranormal (or supernatural) explanation. Maybe an event can't be explained because there is nothing to explain.

Most ESP claims do not get tested, but parapsychologists have attempted to verify the existence of ESP under controlled conditions. Some, like Charles Tart and Raymond Moody, claim success; others, such as Susan J. Blackmore, claim that years of trying to find experimental proof of ESP have failed to turn up any proof of indisputable, repeatable psychic powers. Defenders of psi claim that the ganzfeld experiments, the CIA's remote viewing experiments and attempts to influence randomizers at Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research have produced evidence of ESP. Psychologists who have thoroughly investigated parapsychological studies, like Ray Hyman and Blackmore, have concluded that where positive results have been found, the work was fraught with fraud, error, incompetence, and statistical legerdemain.