Extra 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 parapsychology to the other sciences- physics, biology, and psychology.



Let's take physics, which is the study of the physical. ESP has yet to be explained in physical terms, so physicists cannot account for it. But why is ESP non physical? For one thing it does not depend on time. In precognition, time is not a factor. Furthermore, as in telepathy and clairvoyance, ESP does not depend on distance.



However, there is another side of the coin. PK is a type of energy. Physicists study energy. In the past, new elements, new planets, and other physical things have been discovered when scientists found physical phenomena consisting of the gravitational pull on one object by another undiscovered object. The problem was checked out and the unknown object was found. Could this happen with PK?







Biologists and psychologists also must go to work on the problem. There may be some form of mental energy in ESP which we have not yet discovered.



Russian scientists seem to be more concerned with ESP experimentation than scientists of any other country.



In 1972, Stanley Krippner and Richard Davidson of the Maimonides Institute went to Russia where they met Edward Naumov who directs the Institute of Technical Parapsychology at the City of Moscow Engineering Institute. He is also a memberof the physics department there and was the host for thr visiting Americans.



Krippner and Davidson compared some of the work in Russia to the Americans. They said that in the united states and in other western countries research is planned so that it will prove the existence of ESP and PK. In Russia, however, its is not usually done this way. Researchers are are more interested in looking for practical applications of ESP, since they feel that the existence of ESP and PK has already been established.



The soviet government supports their research. And instead of referring to ESP as extra sensory perception, they call it biological information, also clairvoyance is called bio-location. The Russians are also spending a lot of time studying dowsing and skin-vision. In some parts of the world, people are said to be able to find water by holding a stick in a certain way and and walking over a field. These people are called dowsers. An example of skin-vision is when a person can precieve the color of a card while blind folded, merely by feeling it.



Everyone has hear of stories in witch, for example, a woman is at work and she senses an eerie feeling about her child. Moments later the telephone rings and it is the school nurse calling to inform her that her ...