Mythbusting: ESP is a Well-Established Scientific Phenomenon
Let’s say you’re at home, just relaxing on the couch. The day’s been great, but something feels off, you just can’t put your finger on it. Before you got home someone came into your house and moved all of your furniture over exactly one inch. It’s such a subtle difference you would never think you could notice it, but nonetheless, something feels wrong. This is a basis of the notion of ESP, Extra Sensory Perception or in short, sight beyond our senses. Let’s dive right into some myth-busting.
Extra Sensory Perception is defined as perception without the use of any of the five senses, or the ability of the mind to notice a change in their environment, despite that they cannot exactly …show more content…
From this curiosity, we spread the belief of ESP like a wildfire in America, reaching from the era Spiritualism after the first world war, even to current day shows such as Medium or Fringe. But boiled down into numbers, a shocking 50% of 1,000 people reported believing in ESP in a survey conducted by gallup.com. From 1997 to 2003, a hotline service called Miss Cleo’s Psychic Hotline conned 6 million people out of a total of over $1 billion, simply promising to deliver 3 minutes of important information about their futures. Even the American government looked into the use of clairvoyance for military procedures, under the program known as “Stargate”. The program was active in 1972 and shelled out over $20 million of taxpayer dollars to acquire information such as nuclear facilities within the Soviet Union. An idea with such a widespread backing makes you wonder, what is the truth behind …show more content…
This hypothesis was constructed from experiments conducted by Dr. Piers Howe from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. These studies consisted of four separate experiments, which they deemed necessary to measure our ability to see and sense change. The researchers designed a computer program to flash two images of the same woman onto the screen. In some pairings, there would be small, almost unnoticeable features changed. Once finished, the test subjects were asked if they saw any changes in her appearance, then asked to choose which was changed from a list of 9 items. Susan Scutti from Medical Daily writes their results as, “Out of the 100 trials where a change had occurred, the participants were correct in stating this for 73 trials, and of these, they were able to identify correctly what had changed in 60 trials. For 13 trials, then, the participants correctly identified a change had occurred without being able to correctly identify what had changed.” In conclusion, their findings supported the theory that even if we cannot verbalize what has changed, we can regularly detect the changes around us. The article continues on to go more in depth into “mindsight”, sampling from a research paper published in 2004 by Psychological Science. The writer was Dr. Ronald A. Rensick, who argues that
Let’s say you’re at home, just relaxing on the couch. The day’s been great, but something feels off, you just can’t put your finger on it. Before you got home someone came into your house and moved all of your furniture over exactly one inch. It’s such a subtle difference you would never think you could notice it, but nonetheless, something feels wrong. This is a basis of the notion of ESP, Extra Sensory Perception or in short, sight beyond our senses. Let’s dive right into some myth-busting.
Extra Sensory Perception is defined as perception without the use of any of the five senses, or the ability of the mind to notice a change in their environment, despite that they cannot exactly …show more content…
From this curiosity, we spread the belief of ESP like a wildfire in America, reaching from the era Spiritualism after the first world war, even to current day shows such as Medium or Fringe. But boiled down into numbers, a shocking 50% of 1,000 people reported believing in ESP in a survey conducted by gallup.com. From 1997 to 2003, a hotline service called Miss Cleo’s Psychic Hotline conned 6 million people out of a total of over $1 billion, simply promising to deliver 3 minutes of important information about their futures. Even the American government looked into the use of clairvoyance for military procedures, under the program known as “Stargate”. The program was active in 1972 and shelled out over $20 million of taxpayer dollars to acquire information such as nuclear facilities within the Soviet Union. An idea with such a widespread backing makes you wonder, what is the truth behind …show more content…
This hypothesis was constructed from experiments conducted by Dr. Piers Howe from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. These studies consisted of four separate experiments, which they deemed necessary to measure our ability to see and sense change. The researchers designed a computer program to flash two images of the same woman onto the screen. In some pairings, there would be small, almost unnoticeable features changed. Once finished, the test subjects were asked if they saw any changes in her appearance, then asked to choose which was changed from a list of 9 items. Susan Scutti from Medical Daily writes their results as, “Out of the 100 trials where a change had occurred, the participants were correct in stating this for 73 trials, and of these, they were able to identify correctly what had changed in 60 trials. For 13 trials, then, the participants correctly identified a change had occurred without being able to correctly identify what had changed.” In conclusion, their findings supported the theory that even if we cannot verbalize what has changed, we can regularly detect the changes around us. The article continues on to go more in depth into “mindsight”, sampling from a research paper published in 2004 by Psychological Science. The writer was Dr. Ronald A. Rensick, who argues that