Parapsychology
Wikipedia contributors · 2024 · Wikipedia
Summary
Overview of parapsychological research, its mainstream methodological criticisms, and its history.
Why it matters here
Useful general-audience anchor for psi-related claims; gives both the field's self-description and the standard sceptical critique.
Linked claims
Often subsumed under remote viewing in modern parapsychology. As an everyday claim, very poorly supported.
About two-thirds of adults report experiencing it. The neurological mechanisms are partly understood; the spiritual interpretations (past lives, glimpsing other timelines) are much larger claims.
Given how many dreams we have, occasional 'matches' are statistically inevitable and powerfully memorable.
Reports stretch back centuries and across every culture. Most well-investigated cases reduce to pareidolia, infrasound, expectation, or fraud; the broader 'soul of the dead' reading is essentially unverifiable.
A tradition rich in reports — Joseph of Cupertino, Daniel Dunglas Home, TM 'yogic flying' — but zero reproductions under controlled conditions. The investigated cases reduce to fraud or illusion.
Most 'intuition' is unconscious inference. A small subset of presentiment studies suggests something else may also be in play.
The reported experience of knowing, sensing, dreaming, or picturing a future event before it happens — sometimes called premonition, presentiment, future sensing, or anomalous anticipation. Real as a common human report; controversial as evidence the future is being directly perceived.
Famous macro demonstrations have collapsed under scrutiny. Lab work on random event generators shows very small effects, hotly disputed.
The CIA's declassified Stargate program ran for two decades and reported above-chance results. The official 1995 review judged the operational utility insufficient.
Decades of ganzfeld and card studies report small effects at meta-analytic level. Critics argue methodological flaws explain them.
Related evidence hubs
Lab-tested claims of telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, and PK.
Telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, PK.
What consciousness is, how it relates to brains, and whether it's basic to reality.
Mind–brain relation, qualia, intentionality.
Cryptomnesia, anoxia models, cold reading. Counter-anchors.
Evidence around dying, near-death experience, and what (if anything) continues.
Whether anything of mind continues.
Reports of contact with the deceased.