Extrasensory Perception (ESP)

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 thi

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hod to those which border on the scientifically validated method. One problem however, with research into ESP is that people who have these types of experiences are often unable to duplicate them at will, or within the laboratory situation. Scientists are also investigating the way animals perceive and react to ESP, and are finding striking similarities between quantitative data on animals and humans with a greater than average predilection for ESP (Schmeidler, 1969, pp. 13-19). Early evidence of ESP was often characterized by little more than parlor games: picking cards from a hidden deck, guessing the identities or shapes of drawings from behind curtains. Some of these early experiments resulted in success, but have been reevaluated in the contemporary scientific world by being no more than statistical flukes and coincidences (Mishlove, 1983, pp. 143-203). For instance, if a person is asked to identify the shape of a hidden card and there are five variables, statistics show that there is a good chance the person will get 40 percent correct. Does that mean that the person has a gift for ESP? No, some scientists say, it means that there are certain mathematical laws which govern the probability of an event occurring withi
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Approximate Word count = 1852
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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