Here are excerpts from two different scienctific studies about ESP.  Btw, the second excerpt from the scientist Bem is an extremely famous experement that we don’t often hear about.

Piers Howe and Margaret Webb, both of the University of Melbourne in Australia, showed 48 volunteers pairs of photographs of people, a split second apart, some of which had minor changes (e.g., a haircut, the addition of red lipstick) and some of which were identical. The volunteers consistently detected that there was a change but could not say what the change was.

“From their perspective, they were able to sense changes they could not see. We had induced the impression of a sixth sense,” says Howe. But the sixth sense doesn’t exist: It’s simply a matter of detecting a change we are unable to verbalize.

A report by Daryl Bem of Cornell University published in 2011 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology triggered outrage in the psychological community.

Methodology: Bem conducted nine experiments involving 1,000 subjects. In some, subjects were shown two computer images of curtains and told that behind one of the curtains was an image, behind the other, a blank screen. They were to click on the curtain that they believed covered the image. In some tests, the images were soft-core pornography. (Volunteers were warned ahead of time that if they objected to such images, they should not participate in the study.) In other tests, the images were non-erotic. For each click, they had a 50-50 chance of being correct. When the images were non-erotic, the results were close to chance: 49.8 percent. But the subjects correctly located the pornographic images 53.1 percent of the time. Other tests checked the volunteers’ memories of lists of words, showing that they could anticipate which words they’d be asked to recall. Overall, although the effect was small, it was statistically significant.

Personally I am convinced of ESP.  That being said, not in some magical weird form.  More in the likeness of pattern recognition.  What I mean by this is if there are a set of conscious and unconscious patterns that happen in your daily life, soon enough you may subconsciously be recognizing events based on the outcome of previous patterns.

This was a really great writeup by Susan Brink.  The entire piece is on National Geographic

photo by Mauro Sartori