ESP, or extra sensory perception, is a phenomenon that has been a part of social thought and culture since recorded history. Examples are rife in the historical and mythological literature in both the Eastern and Western Worlds of people who were able to sense events before the happened, able to tell things about an object just by touching it, or able to "see" objects that were hidden from them. Within the cultural milieu then, ESP is often accepted as fact certain individuals have gifts that are beyond the normal schemata.
In fact, the belief in the paranormal has become so commonplace that recent statistics show that over 58 percent of Americans "claim that they have personally experienced ESP" (Myers, 1981, p. 18). Skeptical psychologists however, believe that people often fail to recognize chance events for what they are. In their minds, the billions of events that happen each day insure that some coincidences will occur (Myers, 1981, p. 18). Others are less skeptical, and see the "science" of the paranormal as demanding the type of scientific analyzation and inquiry of their fields as the only way in which modern man can glean understanding of events which are not always pragmatic in tone (LeShan, 1987).
for the average scientist, psychic phenomena are something that in reality do not exist. His training conditions him to a belief, almost absolute in its intensity, that certain phenomena are possible while others are not. In consequence, if he thinks about psychic phenomena at all, it is in terms of "What must be wrong with the experiments?" rather than that here may be an exciting insight into the possibilities inherent within nature, and within the range of human capability (Dubrov & Pushkin, 1982, p. 3).
Scientific research in paranormal phenomena, in particular ESP, began toward the end of the nineteenth century. At that time the scientific world was awash with new medical discoveries, new techniques of ...