Is Psychic Ability Real?

Psychic energy, or “psi" is the transfer of information or energy that cannot be explained by a physical process.   People who can do this consciously are called psychics.  But does it really exist?  Many don’t think so - either because they’ve never experienced it themselves, or because they’ve heard about or had personal experience with one of the great number of fake psychics making money off believers. 

In the 1930s a set of psi testing methods were developed at Duke University.  These consisted of a repetitive procedure in which the subject attempted to determine a target symbol from a set of alternatives.  The percentage of time the subject was correct determined the amount of psychic ability he or she had.  However, these types of tests failed to capture the types of psi that have been reported in everyday life.   

For example, psychic energy has often been linked to meditation, hypnosis, drug use and especially dreaming.  These altered states of consciousness, whether self-induced or naturally-occurring, have been the conduit for psychic experiences by individuals who did not consider themselves psychics - or think they had any such ability.   

Researchers in the last 40 years or so have attempted to verify these anecdotal observations.  Several tests on meditation indicate that it does, indeed, facilitate psi.  Hypnosis, which is almost identical to meditation in effect but just uses a facilitator to achieve the trance state, has also proven to enhance one’s psychic ability. 

To study how psychic energy reveals itself in dreams, the Maimonides experiments chose a subject to sleep in a dream laboratory.  When the experimenter determined the subject had entered REM sleep, he’d signal another participant, the “sender", to begin.  This “sender" would concentrate on a randomly selected picture, trying to “send" this image to the sleeping subject.  When the subject was nearing the end of REM sleep, he was awakened and asked to tell everything he remembered about his dreams.  This was repeated several times during the night. 

Independent judges were asked to judge the similarity of the dreams as described and the pictures the sender had been looking at.  They also judged the similarity of the dreams to a different, randomly selected picture.  The judges didn’t know which picture was which.  The similarity rating was closer with the real pictures than the control pictures. 

These newer tests led the experimenters to think that psi is a weak signal that can be easily clouded by other information coming in through the normal five senses.   

Further studies were designed in which the subjects’ five senses were blocked and the subject was relaxed using traditional techniques.  The sender was separated and acoustically isolated as he attempted to send visual data, again chosen at random, to the subject.  At the same time, the subject gave a constant verbal description of the thoughts going through is mind.  This went on for approximately 30 minutes per session.  The subject was then given four visual cues, one of which the sender had been trying to communicate and asked which of them was most like the imagery he had experienced.  Again, this test indicated the presence of psi with statistically significant results. 

One must take these tests with a grain of salt because of what is known as “selective reporting". Failed experiments are reported far less than successful ones.   So whether or not psychic energy really exists is still hotly debated.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to Psychics

» left by Anonymous 2 years 349 days ago.

it seems as though alot of psychics when tested they are asked to do something they don't claim to be able to do, like if one claims to be able to speak to the dead or predict what is going to happen in the future, the tester will say alright then what is on this card? did the psychic claim to guess what was on the card in the present? or at all? in many cases i would assume the answer is no.   It appears to be like asking picaso to prove he can paint well, and then saying ok then picaso if you really can paint well prove it and sing jingle bells.

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