Extrasensory perception

Extrasensory Perception

AI-generated illustration of a Zener card experiment, not a photograph.

TYPEParapsychological phenomenon

FIELDParapsychology

ALSO KNOWN ASESP; sixth sense; cryptaesthesia; psi

NOTABLE CASE(S)J. B. Rhine's Extra-Sensory Perception (1934); Daryl Bem's "Feeling the Future" studies (2011)

STATUSUnconfirmed

Extrasensory perception (ESP), sometimes called a "sixth sense," is a claimed ability to acquire information about the external world through means other than the five recognised physical senses. As an umbrella term, ESP is generally understood to cover Telepathy (mind-to-mind communication), Clairvoyance (perception of remote or hidden objects and events), and Precognition or retrocognition (awareness of future or past events beyond ordinary inference). Psychokinesis — the purported ability to influence physical objects by thought alone — is generally treated as a related but separate category, since it concerns output (acting on the world) rather than input (perceiving it).

Terminology

The specific English term "extrasensory perception" is most closely associated with parapsychologist J. B. Rhine, who used it as the title of his influential 1934 book summarising his research at Duke University. Rhine was not, strictly speaking, the first person ever to use an equivalent term — the German physician Gustav Pagenstecher had used Aussersinnliche Wahrnehmung ("extrasensory perception") as the title of a 1924 text — but it was Rhine's 1934 book that fixed the English phrase in both scientific and popular usage. Rhine reformulated Frederic Myers's earlier definition of telepathy into a broader, more clinical framing: perception occurring "in a mode that is just not sensory." The more general term "psi," intended as a neutral label covering both ESP and psychokinesis without presupposing any particular mechanism, was introduced by psychologists in 1948.

History

Rhine's Duke laboratory

In 1930, Rhine joined psychologist William McDougall in establishing what became the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. There, Rhine and colleagues — including his wife, Louisa E. Rhine, who focused on collecting spontaneous case reports rather than laboratory testing — conducted an estimated 90,000 experimental trials using human subjects. The lab's standardised methodology used Zener cards (also now known as ESP cards): a deck of 25 cards divided among five symbols — circle, cross, wavy lines, square, and star — used in controlled card-guessing tasks.

Rhine's 1934 book Extra-Sensory Perception, published by the Boston Society for Psychic Research, attracted significant public attention after a favourable notice from The New York Times science editor, cementing both the term and the general public's interest in the subject. The book received a far more sceptical reception within academic psychology. A 1936 attempt at replication by W. S. Cox at Princeton University, using 132 subjects across more than 25,000 trials, found no evidence of ESP in any individual subject or in the group as a whole; Cox attributed the discrepancy with Rhine's results either to uncontrolled experimental factors or to genuine differences between the subject groups tested. Four further psychology departments reported similarly unsuccessful replication attempts.

Ganzfeld and remote viewing

Later generations of ESP research moved away from card-guessing toward other paradigms, notably the ganzfeld technique developed from 1974 by Charles Honorton (see Telepathy) and the remote viewing protocols developed by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, which drew directly on the methodological and terminological groundwork Rhine had laid decades earlier.

Daryl Bem and "Feeling the Future"

In 2011, social psychologist Daryl Bem published nine experiments in the mainstream Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title "Feeling the Future," reporting that participants' behaviour could be statistically influenced by randomly selected stimuli presented only after their responses had already been recorded — a generalised, laboratory-style variant of precognition. Eight of the nine experiments reported statistically significant results. Because Bem's studies used conventional, widely-adopted psychological protocols rather than parapsychology's more specialised experimental traditions, the paper drew unusually wide attention and controversy across the whole of academic psychology, not just parapsychology specifically.

Multiple independent replication attempts followed, including a widely cited set of three unsuccessful replications published by Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Chris French in 2012. The controversy is widely credited as a pivotal moment in psychology's broader "replication crisis," contributing to reforms in the field including pre-registration of studies and a greater emphasis on open data and methodology. Bem and colleagues later published a 2015 meta-analysis covering 90 attempted replications from 33 laboratories in 14 countries, reporting an overall statistically significant combined effect; critics, including psychologist Ulrich Schimmack, disputed this conclusion, arguing the original findings were more likely explained by questionable research practices than by a genuine effect, and calling for the original paper's retraction.

Scientific reception

The scientific community broadly rejects ESP as a genuine phenomenon, citing the absence of a robust evidence base, the lack of any accepted theoretical mechanism that would explain it, and the field's long history of failed independent replication; ESP is generally considered pseudoscience by mainstream science. Supporters, including some parapsychologists, argue that meta-analyses aggregating results across many individual studies — of card-guessing, ganzfeld, and precognition experiments alike — show small but statistically consistent effects that are difficult to dismiss purely as chance, while acknowledging these effects have proven difficult to demonstrate reliably in any single well-controlled study.

Relevance to The Vault

ESP sits at the foundation of formal parapsychological research generally, and several organisations and figures already documented in the Vault — including the Rhine Research Center (the direct institutional descendant of Rhine's own Duke laboratory), Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, and Charles Honorton — trace their work directly back to the research tradition this article describes.

Bibliography

• Rhine, J. B. (1934). Extra-Sensory Perception. Boston Society for Psychic Research.

See also

• Parapsychology
• Telepathy
• Clairvoyance
• Precognition
• Psychokinesis
• J. B. Rhine
• Louisa E. Rhine
• Rhine Research Center
• Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
• Anomalistic Psychology

VAULT ASSESSMENT

CLASSIFICATION

Parapsychological phenomenon / umbrella term for telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition

EARLIEST REPORT

Rooted in 19th-century psychical research (see Telepathy); English term fixed by Rhine's 1934 book

MODERN REPORTS

1930s Zener card experiments–present; includes the 2011–present Bem/"Feeling the Future" precognition controversy

EVIDENCE

Some individual studies and several meta-analyses report small, statistically significant effects; independent replication has repeatedly failed or produced conflicting results, and no effect has been demonstrated to the broad satisfaction of the scientific community

INVESTIGATIONS

J. B. Rhine and the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory; the Rhine Research Center; Charles Honorton; Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research; Daryl Bem

ASSESSMENT

No form of ESP has been reliably demonstrated under independently replicated, well-controlled conditions; it remains widely regarded as pseudoscience by mainstream science, though debate over specific studies and meta-analyses continues within parapsychology and, following the Bem controversy, within psychology more broadly

STATUS

Unconfirmed

External links

• Sacred Texts — full text of Rhine's Extra-Sensory Perception (1934)
• Psi Encyclopedia — Feeling the Future (Precognition Experiments)
• The Skeptic's Dictionary — ESP
• Rhine Research Center — official site
• Wikipedia — Extrasensory perception