Psychic ability is an umbrella term for a range of claimed extrasensory abilities — knowing, sensing, or influencing something through means that fall outside the recognised five senses and cannot be explained by ordinary inference. It covers several distinct claimed abilities, which are treated as separate subtypes on The Vault rather than a single unified phenomenon.
Subtypes
Psychic ability is generally broken down into several distinct claimed abilities:
- Mediumship — claimed communication with the spirits of the dead, most often through what a medium describes as messages, impressions, or direct contact
- Clairvoyance — claimed perception of information (objects, events, people) beyond the ordinary senses, without contact with the dead being involved
- Telepathy — claimed direct perception of another living person's thoughts or feelings
- Precognition — claimed knowledge of a future event before it happens, most often through dreams or a sudden sense of dread (presentiment). See the full Precognition page for its documented cases, including the Aberfan disaster and the British Premonitions Bureau, and for the scientific record around it, including J. B. Rhine's early card-guessing experiments and Daryl Bem's contested 2011 "Feeling the Future" studies
- Tarot and other divination — the use of cards, objects, or ritual practice as a tool for reading or insight, sometimes framed by practitioners as intuition-guided rather than supernatural
Each of these may eventually become its own page and category under Psychic and Tarot as case files accumulate; for now they're treated as facets of psychic ability generally, with Precognition the first to have grown into its own full entry.
Notable example: Derek Acorah
Derek Acorah is one of the best-documented real-world examples of a public figure whose career centred on claimed psychic ability, specifically mediumship, through his long-running role on Most Haunted. His case is also one of the most closely scrutinised: a 2005 on-set test, in which he was fed fabricated details about entirely fictitious spirits and went on to describe contact with them as real, is widely cited in discussions of how psychic claims can be tested and where they've failed under controlled conditions.
Scientific perspective
As with precognition specifically, mainstream science does not recognise psychic ability as an established phenomenon. Laboratory testing going back to J. B. Rhine's Zener card experiments in the 1930s has repeatedly failed to produce results that hold up under tightened controls, and high-profile claimed successes — such as Daryl Bem's 2011 studies — have generally not survived independent replication. Proposed non-paranormal explanations for individual reported cases include cold reading (structuring vague, high-probability statements so a subject supplies the specific detail themselves), confirmation bias (remembering hits and forgetting misses), and, in televised or performance contexts, deliberate research into a subject beforehand.
Related concepts
- Precognition, the most fully documented subtype on The Vault so far
- Parapsychology, the field most associated with formal testing of psychic claims
- Derek Acorah and other pages under Psychic Mediums