Question

Is there such a thing as ESP?

Answer 1

There may be no topic in psychology quite as controversial, or as fascinating, as extrasensory perception, or ESP.  There are three forms of ESP that psychologists study: 1. Telepathy- transfer of information from one person to another without known mediation of sensory communication, 2. Clairvoyance- acquisition of information about places, people, or events without mediation of known senses, and 3. Precognition- acquisition of a future event that could not be anticipated through any known processes of inference. In a study of telepathy, or psi, for example, participants are seated in two separate rooms; while one “transmits” signals, the other attempts to “receive” them.  However, critics argue that many of the effects demonstrated in ESP experiments can simply be explained by faulty methodology and sensory “leakage” in which participants inadvertently give away the answers.  The only extra-sensory feature of ESP would be, if this were true, the fact that people who can perform feats involving ESP are actually very good at reading people’s very subtle signals.

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Answer 2

If any ESP processes exist, then participants' brains should respond differently to ESP and non-ESP stimuli.  Instead, results showed that participants’ brains responded identically to ESP and non-ESP stimuli, despite reacting strongly to differences in how emotional the stimuli were and showing subtle, stimulus-related effects.