Esp - the Sixth Sense

ESP - The Sixth Sense

Many claim to be able to see into the future or read the thoughts of people around them. Whereas, others believe that they can bend a spoon just by looking at it. There is no hard scientific evidence to prove that ESP is real or just a figment of one's imagination. In this paper, I plan to provide you with the true knowledge of extra-sensory perception.

ESP can be broken into four categories:

"1. Telepathy - a person's awareness of another's thoughts, without any communication through normal sensory channels.

2. Clairvoyance - knowledge acquired of an object or event without the use of the senses.

3. Precognition - knowledge a person may have of another person's future thoughts, or of future events.

4. Psychokinesis - a person's ability to influence a physical object or an event, by merely thinking about it. (Some researchers consider psychokinesis a part of psi, but not strictly extra-sensory "perception")" (Thomas, ND).

Out of these four categories, telepathy is the most common one that people claim to have. ESP also reminds me of the movie "Twilight," the vampires in the movie have some of these "skills." Edward one of the main characters can hear what people are thinking or in other words he has the telepathy skill. His sister Alice uses the "skill" precognition, she can see the future for certain people.

Daryl Bem of Cornell University claims "that he has statistically significant evidence for extrasensory perception" (Cookson, 2011). His research used volunteers to predict what might happen in the future, to me still needs more solid proof. Bem's research with the volunteers was just a little one-sided; he had them predict "whether a picture will appear on the left or right side of a computer screen" (Cookson, 2011).

Having ESP is a hard concept for some people to grasp. Not too many people believe extrasensory perception exists; not without scientific proof. People of today's world like to see some kind of proof that these traits can actually be true. Scientists are the window to this world, seeing as how ESP is more on a scientific level. They are more likely to believe that aliens are walking the Earth than for someone to say "I can read your thoughts" or "Look I can bend a spoon just by thinking about it.

Scientists have been conducting experiments to provide evidence to prove if ESP is real or just a thing of the mind. "The existence of ESP has come to be defined negatively, as the absence of any alternative explanation for statistical departure from a chance baseline" (Thomas, ND). ESP experiments have been in the works since the 1930's, starting with "The Rhine Experiments" conducted by Joseph Banks Rhine, a botanist from Duke University.

Joseph Rhine "made the "ESP cards" famous by his use of them in guessing experiments" (Thomas, ND). Rhine claimed to have found significant evidence and published it in his book. Unfortunately, no one was able to duplicate his findings so the Rhine experiment was considered false.

The next experiment was created by two physicists whose names