Extra Sensory Perception

Have you ever thought of a friend or family member who you have not spoken to for a while, only to have them call you the same day? Or perhaps had an old and long forgotten song playing in your mind, and then turn the radio on to find it playing? Well this could be a coincidence of course, but it could also be an example of Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP for short.

So what is ESP? Well, ESP is a broad term for many things, such as mediumship and premonitions etc. Very different things, but what they all have in common is that they cannot be felt through the five senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight, which is why it is often referred to as the ’sixth sense’. People who talking about having a ‘hunch’ or ‘gut feeling’ about something are probably experiencing some kind of ESP, making it something most of us experience every day but rarely stop to think about. The subject has fascinated parapsychologists and those who work in the paranormal field for many years, and the Ganzfeld experiment* has yielded some very promising results after being conducted by parapsychologists under controlled conditions.

We often experience these things during our work with Haunted Devon. There are some gifted people within our group whose powers of ESP seem to be higher than most people. These people may be described as mediums, sensitives, clairvoyants, clairaudients or clairsentients. They seem to be ‘tuned’ more precisely than others, allowing them to pick up on negative energy that may surround a building, they may see things in their mind when they enter a location, they may even ‘hear’ voices of persons unknown. We are all born with some powers of ESP and we all have the ability to tap into these powers with the right training. There is much research being done into this area and you can learn more during your work with Haunted Devon.

*About the Ganzfeld experiment (text courtesy of Wikipedia rights acknowledged)

“The ganzfeld experiments are among the most recent in parapsychology for testing the existence of and affecting factors of telepathy, which is defined in parapsychology as the paranormal acquisition of information concerning the thoughts, feelings or activity of another person. In the early 1970s, Charles Honorton had been investigating ESP and dreams at the Maimonides Medical Center and began using the ganzfeld technique as a more efficient way to achieve a state of sensory deprivation in which it is hypothesised that psi can work. Since the first full experiment was published by Honorton and Sharon Harper in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1974, the ganzfeld has remained a mainstay of parapsychological research”

“In a typical ganzfeld experiment, a "receiver" is placed in a room relaxing in a comfortable chair with halved ping-pong balls over the eyes, having a red light shone on them. The receiver also wears a set of headphones through which white or pink noise (static) is played. The receiver is in this state of mild sensory deprivation for half an hour. During this time, a "sender" observes a randomly chosen target and tries to mentally send this information to the receiver. The receiver speaks out loud during the thirty minutes, describing what he or she can see. This is recorded by the experimenter (who is blind to the target) either by recording onto tape or by taking notes, and is used to help the receiver during the judging procedure.”

“In the judging procedure, the receiver is taken out of the ganzfeld state and given a set of possible targets, from which they must decide which one most resembled the images they witnessed. Most commonly there are three decoys along with a copy of the target itself, giving an expected overall hit rate of 25% over several dozens of trials.”

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