Parapsychology
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Parapsychology
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, telepathy, teleportation, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (also called telekinesis), and psychometry (paranormal), psychometry) and other paranormal claims, for example, those related to near-death experiences, synchronicity, apparitional experiences, etc. Criticized as being a pseudoscience, the majority of mainstream scientists reject it. Parapsychology has been criticised for continuing investigation despite being unable to provide reproducible evidence for the existence of any psychic phenomena after more than a century of research. Parapsychology research rarely appears in mainstream scientific journals; a few niche journals publish most papers about parapsychology. Terminology The term ''parapsychology'' was coined in 1889 by philosopher Max Dessoir as the German . It was adopted by Joseph Banks Rhine, J. B. Rhine in the 1930s as a replacement for the term ''psychical research'' ...
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Telepathy
Telepathy () is the purported vicarious transmission of information from one person's mind to another's without using any known human sensory channels or physical interaction. The term was first coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Frederic W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), and has remained more popular than the earlier expression ''thought-transference''.Glossary of Parapsychological terms – Telepathy
Parapsychological Association. Retrieved December 19, 2006.
Telepathy experiments have historically been criticized for a lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no good evidence that telepathy exists, and the topic is gene ...
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Joseph Banks Rhine
Joseph Banks Rhine (September 29, 1895 – February 20, 1980), usually known as J. B. Rhine, was an American Botany, botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology, founding the parapsychology lab at Duke University, the ''Journal of Parapsychology'', the Rhine Research Center, Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, and the Parapsychological Association. Rhine wrote the books ''Extrasensory Perception (book), Extrasensory Perception'' and ''Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind''. Early life and education Rhine was the second of five children born to Samuel Ellis Rhine and Elizabeth Vaughan Rhine in Juniata County, Pennsylvania, Waterloo, Juniata County, Pennsylvania. Samuel Rhine had been educated in a Harrisburg business college, had taught school and later had been a farmer and merchant. The family moved to Marshallville, Ohio, when Joseph was in his early teens.Denis, Brian. (1982). ''The Enchanted Voyager''. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice� ...
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Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance (; ) is the claimed ability to acquire information that would be considered impossible to get through scientifically proven sensations, thus classified as extrasensory perception, or "sixth sense". Any person who is claimed to have such ability is said to be a clairvoyant () (). Claims for the existence of paranormal and psychic abilities such as clairvoyance have not been supported by scientific evidence.Robert Todd Carroll, Carroll, Robert Todd. (2003)"Clairvoyance" Retrieved 2014-04-30. Parapsychology explores this possibility, but the existence of the paranormal is not accepted by the scientific community. The scientific community widely considers parapsychology, including the study of clairvoyance, a pseudoscience. Usage Pertaining to the ability of clear-sightedness, clairvoyance refers to the paranormal ability to see persons and events that are distant in time or space. It can be divided into roughly three classes: precognition, the ability to perceive o ...
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Psychic
A psychic is a person who claims to use powers rooted in parapsychology, such as extrasensory perception (ESP), to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance; or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, such as psychokinesis or teleportation. Although many people believe in psychic abilities, the scientific consensus is that there is no proof of the existence of such powers, and describes the practice as pseudoscience. Psychics encompass people in a variety of roles. Some are theatrical performers, such as stage magicians, who use various techniques, e.g. prestidigitation, cold reading, and hot reading, to produce the appearance of such abilities for entertainment purposes. A large industry and network exist whereby people advertised as psychics provide advice and counsel to clients. Some famous psychics include Edgar Cayce, Ingo Swann, Peter Hurkos, Janet Lee, Miss Cleo, John Edward ...
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Extrasensory Perception
Extrasensory perception (ESP), also known as a sixth sense, or cryptaesthesia, is a claimed paranormal ability pertaining to reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke University botanist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as intuition, telepathy, psychometry, clairvoyance, empathy and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition. Second sight is an alleged form of extrasensory perception, whereby a person perceives information, in the form of a vision, about future events before they happen ( precognition), or about things or events at remote locations ( remote viewing). There is no evidence that second sight exists. Reports of second sight are known only from anecdotes. Second sight and ESP are classified as pseudosciences. History In the 1930s, at Duke University in North Carolina, J. B. Rhine and his wife Louisa E. Rhine conducted an invest ...
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Psychokinesis
Telekinesis () (alternatively called psychokinesis) is a purported psychic ability allowing an individual to influence a physical system without physical interaction. Experiments to prove the existence of telekinesis have historically been criticized for lack of proper scientific control, controls and repeatability. There is no reliable evidence that telekinesis is a real phenomenon, and the topic is generally regarded as pseudoscience. Reception Evaluation There is a broad scientific consensus that telekinetic research has not produced a reliable demonstration of the phenomenon. A panel commissioned in 1988 by the United States National Research Council to study paranormal claims concluded that:despite a 130-year record of scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or "mind over matter" exercises... Evaluation of a large body of the best available ev ...
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Precognition
Precognition (from the Latin 'before', and 'acquiring knowledge') is the purported psychic phenomenon of seeing, or otherwise becoming directly aware of, events in the future. There is no accepted scientific evidence that precognition is a real effect, and it is widely considered to be pseudoscience. Precognition violates the principle of causality, that an effect cannot occur before its cause. Precognition has been widely believed in throughout history. Despite the lack of scientific evidence, many people believe it to be real; it is still widely reported and remains a topic of research and discussion within the parapsychology community. Precognitive phenomena Precognition is sometimes treated as an example of the wider phenomenon of prescience or foreknowledge, to understand by any means what is likely to happen in the future. It is distinct from premonition, which is a vaguer feeling of some impending disaster. Related activities such as predictive prophecy and fort ...
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Paranormal
Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as being beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Notable paranormal beliefs include those that pertain to extrasensory perception (for example, telepathy), spiritualism and the pseudosciences of ghost hunting, cryptozoology, and ufology. Proposals regarding the paranormal are different from scientific hypotheses or speculations extrapolated from scientific evidence because scientific ideas are grounded in empirical observations and experimental data gained through the scientific method. In contrast, those who argue for the existence of the paranormal explicitly do not base their arguments on empirical evidence but rather on anecdote, testimony and suspicion. The standard scientific models give the explanation that what appears to be paranormal phenomena is usually a misinterpretation ...
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Psychometry (paranormal)
In parapsychology, psychometry (from Greek language, Greek: ψυχή, ''psukhē'', "spirit, soul" and μέτρον, ''metron'', "measure"), also known as token-object reading,Psychometry
– Key Words Frequently Used in Parapsychology, Parapsychological Association (2006-12-17)
or psychoscopy, is a form of extrasensory perception characterized by the claimed ability to glean accurate knowledge of an object's history by making physical contact with that object.Leonard Zusne, Zusne, Leonard; Jones, Warren H. (1989). ''Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking''. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. pp. 193–194. Supporters assert that an object may have an Energy (esotericism), energy field that transfers knowledge regarding that object's history. There is no evidence that psychomet ...
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Max Dessoir
Maximilian Dessoir (8 February 1867 – 19 July 1947) was a German philosopher, psychologist and theorist of aesthetics. Career Dessoir was born in Berlin, into a German Jewish family, his parents being Ludwig Dessoir (1810-1874), "Germany's most admired Shakespearean actor", and Ludwig's third wife Auguste Grünemeyer (died about 1924). Max earned doctorates from the universities of Berlin (philosophy, 1889) and Würzburg (medicine, 1892). He was a professor at Berlin from 1897 until 1933, when the Nazis forbade him to teach. An associate of Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud, Dessoir published in 1890 a book on ''The Double Ego'', describing the mind as divided into two layers, each with its own associative links - its own chain of memory. He considered that the 'underconsciousness' (''Unterbewusstein'') emerged in such phenomena as dreams, hypnosis, and dual personality. His work was built on by Otto Rank in his study of the Doppelgänger. In an article of 1894, Dessoir pu ...
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Bertold Wiesner
Bertold Paul Wiesner (1901–1972) was an Austrian-born physiologist. He is noted for coining the term 'Psi' to denote parapsychological phenomena;Thouless, R. H. and Wiesner, B. P., 'On the Nature of Psi Phenomena'. Journal of Parapsychology Vol 1. (1946) pp107-119.Thouless, R. H., "Experiments on Paranormal Guessing". British Journal of Psychology 33 (1942) pp15-27. for his research into human fertility and the diagnosis of pregnancy; and for being the biological father of more than 600 people by anonymously donating sperm used by his wife the obstetrician Mary Barton to perform artificial insemination on women at her private practice in London.Stevens, B., (Writer & Director) 'Bio-Dad' Documentary. Barna-Alper Productions. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) 2009. First marriage and early work in Austria Wiesner's PhD was awarded in 1923 with a dissertation about the autophoric transplantation of ovaries in rats. He was briefly married to the Jewish Austrian author, pl ...
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Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motivation, motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the Natural science, natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the Emergence, emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.Hockenbury & Hockenbury. Psychology. Worth Publishers, 2010. A professional practitioner or researcher involved in the discipline is called a psychologist. Some psychologists can also be classified as Behavioural sciences, behavioral or Cognitive science, cognitive scientists. Some psychologists attempt to understand the role of mental functions in i ...
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