ESP and related abilities

In My Humble Opinion
21

The point is, if it was ESP, then you should have been able to duplicate it at some point since then. Even if you had no idea how you did it, it’s still unlikely that you could accidentally do it once and never do it again.

With that said, from a scientific perspective I’ll say that ESP doesn’t exist since many experiments and our knowledge of the brain has concluded that there aren’t any hidden abilities like ESP. However, also from a scientific perspective, I can’t completely rule out the possibility of the existence of ESP and will say that it could possibly exist, but that we just haven’t discovered it yet. This is unlikely, of course, but not out of the question.

22

OK, I have opted for the short version, skipping much background stuff to spare you dear and faithful readers from a full blown episode of the Twilight Zone:

Once upon a time long ago, I was awakened from a sound sleep by the voice of an ex- girlfriend calling me from out in the yard, with some stress in her voice. I slipped on some jeans, went out and called “What’s the matter?” “What are you doing here?’ Things like that. No answer.
After several more calls by me, with still no answer, I went back into the house, got a flashlight, and looked around. Nothing.
So I says: “Damn, that was weird”, and having lost all interest in sleep, crammed for an Organic Chemistry exam that was scheduled for the next day.

Three days later, I got a letter from my grandmother, telling me that the girl that had been “calling me from the yard” had been assaulted and badly hurt. The time and date matched the time and date that I heard her voice in the yard. Only thing is, my grandmother and the girl were in my hometown, 700 miles away from where I was going to college.

Now you, dear reader, have some options:

  1. I’m telling a lie. I would say that there’s no profit in me spinning such a yarn on a message board that’s known for skepticism, but if you think I’m choosing to lie: Your choice, no hard feelings.

  2. I confused the sequence of events. I can tell you I didn’t. As you may imagine, I did a good deal of checking and cross checking at the time. The chemistry exam the next day pretty much locked the sequence of events in for me.

  3. All time world-class coincidence. Possible. Quite a stretch, but just possible. I’ve never before or since woke up thinking I heard someone calling for me and then they weren’t there. This didn’t come like a dream does. This was like a noise that woke me up.

  4. It could have been an ESP event.

You may be able to find some other explanations. Please free to comment.

Personally, I kinda’ think it was an example of ESP, but I’ll hold open the possibility of coincidence.
Anyway, if you accept my account as something I believe to be fact, you can see why, when the Op asked: “ESP, possible or total crap”, I’m not willing to state “total crap.”

Epilog: I never told anyone about this before now. I did send the girl who was hurt a get-well card, but I didn’t make any mention of the odd happenings with me. Whatcha’ gonna’ say anyway?
My grandmother visited the girl in the hospital and relayed a message of thanks for the card back to me, but I personally never saw or heard from her again.

JcoM

23

The only thing I can think of is that the voice you heard was just a random girl’s voice, and then when you heard about the news you connected that random voice to the person who was assaulted. The fact that you heard a female plea for help the night a girl was assaulted is just an extraordinary coincidence. That’s all I can say without saying that you’re lying or anything.

Still, it’s fun to think that things like these are really supernatural events. It can make you feel special and rethink your outlook on life. There’s a lot we still don’t understand about the world, and while publicly it’s foolish to attribute them to hoakey supernatural powers, in your own mind the only limit is your imagination.

That sounded like the end of a really cheesy documentary. Sorry.

24

Thanks for the tale, man. Creepy!

25

I don’t think you’re lying. I’m sure it happened as you recall it, but remember that you had been asleep. I’d go with Yumblie that you heard a random voice, perhaps from the street or nearby, and in your dream you connected it to your ex. Just a thought.
No question that it’s creepy though.

26

My Mom is a great one for saying she knew such and such was goign to happen. I think most of the time, she gets these “precog” feelings and then if, and only if, the event does really happen, she makes a mental note about it. You do that for years, and you eventually convince yourself that you’re psychic.

One of the strongest examples of this happened when I was around 10. She woke up around 4 am because she thought she smelled gas. Once she was more awake, she didn’t smell it, and so went back to sleep. But then, a couple hours later, when my Dad was leaving for work she made sure to mention it to him. She told him, in fact, to check the gas tanks on the cars in the garage and not to light up a cigarrette before doing so. Turns out his truck was leaking gas.

I’ve thought about that incident a lot over the years. I’ve concluded that, even though their bedroom was 50 ft. away from the garage, it’s likely air currents in the house brought the smell of the gas to her. Maybe it was such a slight odor it would register only in an unconscious way, and that’s why she recognized it while sleeping/dreaming, but not while awake. ESP? I doubt it.

That being said, I want to believe. But, if believing means I have to experience some sort of ESP even for myself, I’m not sure it’s worth it. I want to believe in ghost, but I’d loose it if I really saw/heard one, too.

27

A few scientists are researching ESP in a truly scientific way.
I’m with Montfromork that so much anecdotical evidence is at least interesting to research.

One of the best known scientists who researches ESP is Rupert Sheldrake. On this board are a few threads about his favourite topic: “psychic pets”, pets who seem to know in advance that their boss comes home. All the other reasons even Cecil Adams could think of to explain that phenomenon have been researched and do not explain everything
:do we smell a Cecil-directed dare here? yep!
Both anecdotical evidence and controlled experiments indicate there is something about the phenomenon that normal science can not yet explain.

For more see www.sheldrake.org
Sheldrake also invites people to participate in some do it yourself at home ESP tests, like “do you sense it when someone stares at your neck?”

Fun and food for thought.

28

Unfortunately, human memory and eyewitness testimony is so bad that anecdotal evidence really is unrelaible. Here are two examples of some of the research done on the unreliability of memory, both from Science Daily:[ul][li]This one mentions how about one-third of people can be convinced that they shook hands with Bugs Bunny, a Warner Bros. character, at Disneyland.This one mentions how people were led to believe that they kissed frogs.[/ul][/li]In these examples, the subjects were not only convinced that they did the action, but the fabricated memory of doing so was implanted into their minds. They remembered doing those things. So stories are creepy and fun, and may point to something worth investigating, but IMO they constitute no proof. Quite frankly, memory is so bad that I wouldn’t even convict some one on eye witness testimony, let alone believe in psychic powers.

Please note: This is not to call into question Mr. Carter of Mars’s character, sincerity, honesty, intelligence, or anything of the sort. In all honesty I appreciate him having the courage to share it.

29

Sheldrake’s experiments are too dependent on anecdotal evidence to be considered actual research. It’s difficult to build in controls. Tests of the gravitational constant are up to physicists, but things like the awareness of somebody staring at you from behind, or thinking of somebody just before they call can be explained by the tendency of people to forget “misses” and remember “hits.”

Let’s take the staring test and look at it, shall we? If two people sat in a room and one was told to stare at the other at intervals, and note the times and how long the stare lasted, the other person would then need to mark down when he/she felt “stared at,” and the numbers would then be compared. There are several problems built in, such as how long the starer would have to fix eyes, compared to when the other person “sensed” the stare. Peripheral vision would have to be ruled out by positioning, and there could be no auditory input, such as a difference in breathing. Probably one person would need to be in one room and the other in another room, separated by a window.

I don’t know if controlled tests have been done, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they have, and have generated results consistent with guessing.