Psychic Abilities
A common but little-explained area, used and more accepted openly by mainstream culture than any other paranormal event are psychic abilities. It is not too infrequent to hear average or "normal" people talk about their "psychic" girlfriend or grandparent. Quite frequently, couples in marriage or intimate partners display this quality after living together for a period of time. Each is able to read the other's mind to varying degrees of success. Another common example is when someone in your office claims to be able to know when the telphone will ring before it actually rings.

The practice of psychic power has more integrity in the public eye when it is used for something like finding a lost child, healing someone from a distance, or finding the criminal of an unseolved crime. A notable and recent cinematic production Minority Report, based on a short story, portrays a multi-faceted world of high technology police and well-trained psychics, called "pre-cogs" that predict accurately, with precognitive visual projections, murders and crimes before thay are committed.

ESP, or Extra Sensory Perception is the scientific term that inludes the area of psychic ability, but in most resource materials and scientific literature, the term "psychic" is treated with little confidence or respect, and therefore rarely mentioned.

Parapsychology
Parapsychology is the study, typically using scientific methods, of unexplained mental phenomena that appear to violate the laws of established science. The topics of parapsychology fall into two broad categories: extra-sensory perception or anomalous cognition, (including telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition), and anomalous operation (including near-death experiences, and telekinesis).

These phenomena have no clear explanation within the parameters of (established) science. As of this writing, the gathering of evidence in a controlled environment for the existence of any such phenomenon has been frustratingly problematic, due to the high incidence of fraud and the extremely difficult controls required. Every claimed case of such phenomenon, to date, has failed to convince skeptics, even those tests designed to be performed in a controlled setting and with controls for fraud. Scientists suspect that if proof of such occurrences ever appeared, an explanation of the phenomenon might require revising existing physical and psychological models. Therefore, part of the mission of parapsychology is to establish scientifically, using repeatable, well-controlled experiments, whether or not the various parapsychological phenomena are real--or whether, on the other hand, reports of them might be explained by coincidence, fraud, imagination, or auto-suggestion.

For these reasons, parapsychology is not taken seriously by most mainstream psychologists and other scientists, who say that, despite a great deal of laboratory work, no carefully controlled and conducted experiments have ever given any convincing evidence that any of the anomalous phenomena they investigate are actually real. They maintain that continuing research in the area is pseudoscience.

Parapsychology is sometimes considered a sub-branch of psychology. There is a well-known professorship and program at the University of Edinburgh in parapsychology and a handful of other programs around the world, including at Duke University and University of Utrecht?. Historically organisations such as the Society for Psychical Research have represented parapsychology.

Glossary: Out of Body Experience | Astral Projection | Remote Viewing | Lucid Dreaming | Extra Sensory Perception | Psychic Abilities