ESP
ESPExtra Sensory Perception
Everyone knows about the five senses. Taste: the sense that allows us to enjoy an essential part of life, eating. Hearing: the sense that enables us to carry a conversation with each other. Sight: without this we not be able to do things we take for granted, like driving for instance. Touch: this detects pain and prevents us from injuring ourselves further. Smell: this helps us identify hazardous chemicals which stops us from burning our lungs.
But what about a sixth sense? What if you could read someone's mind and know what there really thinking when they say hello? Well, some believe that there is indeed a sixth sense; ESP.
Extra sensory perception, or ESP, is defined as a way of receiving information without using one of our five senses. The study of ESP is a part of a science called parapsychology. This is also called psychical research, or psi for short. Besides ESP, there is another branch of psi communication which includes the phenomenon in which an object seems to be moved by the mind alone. The mover does not touch the object which can be living or non living. This is called psychokinesis or PK.
There are three accepted types of ESP, clairvoyance, precognition,and telepathy. Clairvoyance is the extra sensory perception of events that are taking place at the exact time of the perception, but the sensor cannot know of these events through any of the five senses. Precognition is the extra sensory perception of events in the future. And finally, telepathy is the extra sensory perception of someone elses mental state.
For centuries, stories about ESP sounded suspicious to those who had scientifically trained minds. After all, they were usually tales told after the fact. The event had already happened when the subject might have foretold it in a dream, for example. So, it was impossible to test weather or not there is a such thing as ESP.
But, one basic principle of science is that an idea should not be rejected just because it is hard to believe. We make mistakes sometimes, but a strange notion should be tested before it can be rejected.
The problem was, who was to study ESP? The geologists, biologists, astronomers, chemists, and physicists are not equipped to do it. There lines of work include familiar properties of nature. So, for a long time, ESP was considered to be a supernatural phenomenon. That meant that ESP experiments were put on the shelf as far as scientists were concerned.
In the middle of the 1940�s, a new idea was born. It was thought that the three types of ESP were just different examples of the same thing. From that premise came an attempt to relate...
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