Extrasensory perception definition
Extrasensory perception or ESP is defined as the ability to receive information from another person without using the conventional physical senses, but rather through mind reading and information implanting. It is also referred to as the sixth sense.
So, you’re here to learn about extrasensory perception. Maybe you’ve experienced some event, yourself, that made you suspect having psychic powers, or maybe a friend of yours did some trick on you and you want to myth-bust it because you don’t believe in anything other than science-based evidence?
Whatever the reason that brings you here, I’m going to make sure that by the end of this article, you’ll have required all the information you need to start a career as a police consultant like Patrick Jane from the TV show, the mentalist, or to expose your friend’s trick and look super cool or a party pooper. It all depends on the type of friends you have, I’m not here to judge.
Extrasensory perceptions examples
ESP example number 1:
Let’s start this by a little experiment. First of all, I need you to sit down in a quiet place, take deep breaths, and just relax.
Second, I’m going to read you some math problems and I want you to answer those problems out loud, for instance if I say 2+9, you would answer…okay, hello! Let’s try this again, if I say 2+9 you should say…
Thank you.
For your own enjoyment and learning, I strongly encourage you to play along here.
1+1…
2+2…
3+3…
4+4…
Now, say the number 6 out loud 10 times…..
Name a vegetable.
If I’m right, you should’ve said the word carrot, jaw dropping, huh? Well, at least I hope it was.
In case you didn’t want to play along or for some reason it didn’t work for you, I want you to trust me on this. Most people when doing this experiment answer the word carrot.
I have planted through my powers of ESP the word carrot into your head. Fascinating, right?
Based on my extrasensory perception powers I can feel that you still have some doubts. Let’s do another experiment to put your mind to rest.
ESP example number 2:
I want you think of a country that starts with the letter D, any country.
Take the last letter of that country name, and think of an animal that starts with that letter.
Now, take the last letter of the animal name and think of a color.
I want you to focus on those three words now, while I take a second to read your mind…
Are you thinking about an orange kangaroo in Denmark?
Okay, enough about psychics. Let’s get to the science of it.
The psychology behind extrasensory perception
As it turns out, if I walked up to you and asked you to name a vegetable without setting an extrasensory perception mood (e.g. relaxing and math problems), your answer would most likely be the word carrot. The way that the human mind encodes the category of vegetables has this structure to it. Carrots are for a variety of reasons a prototypical vegetable.
The illusion of ESP was created here because while you weren’t aware of that structure of the category: vegetable, I was.
There is simply information in the structure of how humans think about vegetables that lets me know what’s happening inside your brain.
For the second experiment, the same principals apply here. There is only one commonly known country that starts with the letter D-Denmark- and only one common animal name that starts with K-Kangaroo-, and Orange is the most common color that starts with the letter O.
The mind reading machine
We humans pick up tidbits of what people say or how they say it, and then use that to infer what they’re likely thinking. This process is often very fast and very unconscious that we might even experience it as a sort of mind reading. This is truly fascinating. However, there is nothing paranormal about it.
You see, just like with most our other senses. We use our sensory apparatus to pick up what’s going on around us, and then our brain gives us its best guess. This process can be altered sometimes as in the case of Synesthesia.
In this article, we’ll be focusing on how that functions when the thing you’re perceiving is people. We won’t be looking into the conventional senses (e.g. vision, sounds).
Paranormal phenomena includes a lot of different subcategories like mind reading which we already touched on a little, clairvoyance, precognition…etc.
There are “psychics” who claim they can contact the dead, predict the future, and even change the course of that future.
In almost every case, there is evidence that capitalizing on tricks just like the ones used above can explain these seemingly mystical phenomena.
Is mind reading possible?
We can read other people’s minds, and we do that all the time. Can we predict the future? In a way, yes we can, but not in any mystical fashion.
By having pre-acquired data about the surroundings, and guessing the most likely event to follow a certain event. We can infer what will happen in the future. And if that information is specific and accurate enough, one might perceive it as clairvoyance which is simply not the case.
Just think of yourself catching a baseball that was thrown at you. In some sense, this is also predicting the future. If you reach for the current location of the moving ball, you’ll miss it. If you want to catch it, you’ll have to reach ahead of it, along its path of motion, aiming for some location that the ball will occupy in the future.
Even 4 months old infants can do this with a ball rolling ahead of them.
Is this considered as predicting the future? Yes.
Are you making use of extrasensory perception or clairvoyance? Not one bit.
How we infer others thoughts based on standard perception
The role of the visual system in extrasensory perception
One of the most useful sources of information on what’s happening inside someone’s mind is where they are looking.
We are extremely good at knowing when someone is looking at us. For instance if you’re in a stadium with thousands of people, each staring at a slightly different thing and one of them is staring at you. Your attention would be drawn immediately to those set of eyes.
This is an amazing feature we have. Just think about it. The only thing we have to work with, to determine where someone is looking at, is the amount of visible sclera (white of the eye).
If someone is standing next to you and looks to the opposite direction, more white will be seen from your side and if he looks at your side, less sclera will be seen.
This allows us to establish not only the direction of their gaze, but also 3D depth by considering where the two eyes are looking together, to fixate some position at a particular distance from their head.
As a small experiment, the next time you have a conversation with someone, instead of looking at their eyes, try fixating your eyes at a position right through them.
Of course, you won’t be able to see anything since their face is blocking your vision but that’s not the point. After a few seconds, the person will notice that something is off, and turn around to see what caught your eyes.
The ability to track the gaze of others is present and functional within the first few months after a child is born. It’s not only available and accurate at this age, but it seems to play a very critical role on how children learn new words.
How our eyes give us extrasensory perception superpowers
The gaze-tracking feature also plays an important role in ‘extrasensory perception’, if someone is looking at the door or at their watch, you will have a pretty good idea on what their next step is going to be.
If a poker player stares at the chips for a second, it can tell you a lot about his intentions. That’s why a lot of professional poker players wear sun glasses to avoid being ESPed by others.
Usually, the focus of your gaze is where your attention is pointed at.
However, we are the only species that are capable of staring at someone and keep on doing that while focusing on something in our field of sight.
This is believed to be helpful because of the amount of information we can give unintentionally just by where our gaze is focused on.
The role of facial expressions in extrasensory perception
Facial expressions can tell us a great deal about what someone is thinking or going to do. When someone is smiling that means they’re happy, and when they’re frowning it means they’re sad. But this isn’t interesting mind reading.
What’s interesting is when someone is smiling but you can tell that they’re not happy.
At the end of the super bowl or a football game, it is common for the players from the losing side to congratulate the winning team and as they do they usually shake hands and smile, but it’s pretty clear they’re not happy at all about losing.
And once they’re in their locker room, they will express that sadness many different ways (e.g. screaming, yelling, and crying).
A great deal of research is focused on finding out how this works, how we’re able to detect true feelings behind fake facial expressions even in very good actors or in this case, very good liars.
The best lie detector is not the polygraph or some fancy new technology to read your mind, it’s simply the human visual perception. You can always tell when someone’s facial expression reflects his actual feelings or is simply a mask to hide his true emotions.
The microexpressions field
A very rich source of facial expressions information is something called micro-expressions. These were discovered and categorized by a very famous researcher called Paul Ekman, which resulted in the introduction of a very complex system called the facial action coding system.
The idea behind micro-expressions is that when you feel some emotional response regardless of how socially appropriate it is, your face responds in an unconscious automatic way. You can then mask that response with a more socially appropriate consciously chosen facial expression.
But that second response is slower than the instant unconscious expression. This leads to leakage of your true emotions briefly.
Is there any real ESP?
Up to this point, I’ve argued that you can read minds and to some extent predict the future. I’ve described this as to being due not to some extrasensory perception or clairvoyance, but due to standard sensory based inferential processing.
Inferences based on the standard five senses we’re all familiar with.
It would be quite boring if this was the end of the story, and I’d be a real party pooper. So, let me switch gears for a second here.
Scientific evidence that ESP is real
In the late 1980’s, a social psychologist at Cornell University by the name of Daryl Bem did a very ambitious and to some extent a risky project. He decided to test to see if there was such a thing as ESP, telepathy, or clairvoyance.
Bem referred to this as Psi phenomena. To his logic the extrasensory perception term is problematic since he’s suggesting that there is a sense that enables us to take in and process this information. Thus, the use of the word ‘Psi’.
Many demonstrations suggest that these things actually exist, but there’s always been problems with these demonstrations, there’s always been some explanation to the findings that could be explained by other means, such as the ones mentioned in this article.
Bem was already a very established and well known researcher with hundreds of published research on social psychology when he started this project.
Psi phenomena and telepathy
Bem decided to devote this experimental skill to develop a well-designed assessment of telepathy. An assessment solid enough that if it works, it would be beyond the reach of those tricks-based explanations.
The Ganzfeld procedure
He settled on something called the Ganzfeld procedure. For this procedure you have two participants, they sit in two different rooms that are isolated from one another, so there would be no way for one participant to contact or send secret messages to the other one.
One of the participants is designated as the sender, while the other one as the receiver. The sender in these studies watches a randomly selected video clip (30 seconds video clip) and then meditates to it.
As she does, she places white goggles on her eyes and listens to soft static on headphones. This the Ganzfeld part of the Ganzfeld procedure. It is based on removing structured visual and auditory input (goggles and noise from headphones) from the outside environment into the brain.
Meanwhile, the receiver spends some time in the other room. He also wears the goggles and the headphone. He simply sits for 30 minutes and meditates while the sender is doing her sending by meditation in the other room.
At the end, the receiver is shown a selection of 5 video clips, all with 30 seconds in length and then he attempts to pick one of which the sending was telepathing.
The results of the ESP expirement
If there is no telepathy, then the receiver should occasionally pick the right video clip, right?
These are simple probabilities. On an average of about 1 in 5 times success rate. If it’s pure guess, the receiver would be correct 20% of the time. And if you bring two random people off the street then that is exactly what you find.
However, among close friends who both spend time each week meditating, the average performance is consistently around 34%. Now it might seem like 34% is not that big of a deal, but given the number of people tested, it’s really striking. The odds of getting that 14% extra by chance is vanishingly small.
It seems likely that there is something systematic that enables the receiver to do better than just guessing. So, what is it? What makes these close friends who meditate perform better than random people? The answer to that question remains highly controversial. There are many who doubt these findings including myself.
With that being said, the experiment is clearly designed the right way. There is no easy way to explain these findings. And the methods followed and applied rise up to the standards required to accept something new in the field of sensory perception.
Conclusion
In the end, there are many different logical explanations to rule out any psi phenomena, extrasensory perception, telepathy, or clairvoyance involved in some trick or experiments. But the experiment done by Bem has kept the door open for the ESP field to be explored more, and to not simply be considered as a myth. What I also find fascinating is the events witnessed by people of extrasensory perceptions and the stories behind them, so feel free to share your experience or thoughts about the subject in the comment section below.