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Do you believe in ESP?
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Here's one from my favorite source for new science stories, Daily Science.com. According to researchers, they used neuroimaging to explore whether ESP exists or it doesn't. Their finding...it doesn't.
But for some reason I don't think that will convince everyone.
What about the Beauty Brains community? How many of you believe that ESP is real? With the proliferation of tv shows like Medium, The Dead Zone and Psychic's Challenge, it seems like more and more people are convinced.
Even though I want to believe it's true, my science brain says, "No way!" How about yours? -
I've been conflicted in the past but.I now believe some people may have special abilities. Here's why:
About a year ago, I heard this woman on the radio who helps solve crimes. Specifically, she works with police departments that have exhausted all leads. She was interviewed by a famous news investigator in the Chicagoland area at length and she spoke about specific cases this reporter was very familiar with. Then, one of the lead detectives who had worked with her in the past called in and shared additional details of how she had helped his department find a murder victim's body. I actually got the chills listening to it.
On a lighter note, I just love the scene at the beginning of the movie "Ghostbusters" where Bill Murray is doing ESP experiments with the two college kids. The pretty blond, who is unable to identify any of the pictures on the cards, is always told she's right by Bill Murray's smarmy character....and the nerdy boy, who identifies each card correctly, is told he's wrong after each guess and keeps getting zapped!
Makes me laugh every time I see it!!!
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Yes and no...
perhaps super strong instincts?
and is ESP related to supernatural stuff? I totally believe in supernatural phenomenoms, but my fav. show growing up was this Taiwanese show that's a bit related to Medium.. but so much cooler.. and scarier.. -
Karen--me too! I think that is when I fell in love with Bill Murray!
In no way at all do I believe that I have any kind of ESP, BUT I dreamt of 9/11 the day before it happened. My sister had been home from California for her bridal shower and she accidently left her wallet in my car and since my dad was taking her to the baltimore airport I had to meet them there on the 10th. BUT at the time I was working a split shift at the before and after care program. I had been up since 5:30am and didn't have class until later that day so when I got back from work at 9am I decided to take a quick nap before I had to meet them at 1ish. In my dream there were no specifics but there were 2 buildings that got hit by airplanes. I woke in a sweat, rushed to meet my sister, told her I loved her and just felt very ominous for the rest of the day. It was rainy. We all know what happened the next day. Since it was rainy my sister's flight landed in Philly and she was there overnight and on Tuesday 9/11 she took off...after the first building was hit her flight got landed in Pittsburgh. She was 22 and somehow ended up with the last rental car in the airport.
That's my weird ominous 9/11 story. -
No, I definitely don't believe in ESP, though I do believe in instinct. I believe that we subconsciously pick up on clues that we are consciously unaware of, which gives us those weird feeings of something being wrong. It's an adaptive response. For example, you may pick up on someone's body language before you actively think about it and it may cause you to have that feeling that something is not quite right.
So, no, I don't believe in ESP and didn't need a scientific study to come to this conclusion. In fact, if I did believe in ESP, a study of brain imaging would not convince me that it was not real. I still think that there is so much about ourselves that we don't understand. If you don't really know what something like ESP is or how it works (since it's not real), how can you design a study to prove whether it's real or not? -
I think Pas described it perfectly. Some people are better at picking up clues and this can make them appear to know something that the rest of us don't, just like animals can sense subtle changes in weather or atmospheric conditions and this makes them appear to know that an earthquake is coming or that a volcano is about to erupt.
I do believe in ghosts though, mostly because my mother believes in ghosts.
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I agree with purple, some people are able to process clues about things from what they perceive that others can't. I think I will call that intuition.
That said, this coming from my husband (which is a neuroscientist) the study is BS, psicology is not a hard science and hence it cannot conlusively, through scientific experimenst prove or disprove anything. It is useful to make rules to understand what's going on in the human brain, but a lot of this sort things are relative and cannot be conclusively tested.
I guess by definition extrasensory perception exists, it is something you perceive that is not due to your senses, not due to obtaining external information from the enviroment. It is known that you can directly stimulate the brain and make someone think they "perceived" something. So it is possible that some circuits in the brain are being activated in some way that makes you believe you are experiencing something. Have you ever been in bed and felt that you were falling down, while in a dream?
The brain is much more complex that we think. However if reffering to ESP as supernatural, put it this way, there may be forms of life iIdo not know about, but it has to be made with carbon atoms and obey the laws of physics, that's what I think (I am pretty sure ghosts do not fall in this category) -
Does anyone ever finish their significant other's sentences? My husband and I do all the time...but then again we have been together almost 9 years. But the other morning I got up and went downstairs for a while...my husband was still sleeping and when I went back to bed a little while later he was awake and we hadn't even said good morning when I started singing a line from a song (don't ask me why I was singing this particular line) by Good Charlotte I don't wanna be in love, I don't wanna be in love and he looked at me and said he was thinking that exact same part of the song at the same time I was singing it. But then again we do that ALL the time. I like being in tune with him!
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Wow...something I know something about...I have spent years studying 19th C. Spiritualism because an artist (Evelyn De Morgan) that I study used private automatic trance writing as an aid to creativity. In her case her automatic writings were messages from spirits giving accounts of the afterlife and/or moral lessons. As a result her paintings are often a reflection of spiritualist ideas. Of course I believe that the ideas that came through to her via the automatic writings were retrieved from her OWN subconscious beliefs. During the 19th Century most mediums (MANY of them FRAUDULENT) were women because it was felt that the were more intuitive than men. Here is a link to De Morgan's works if you are interested (Yawn!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&returnto=Evelyn_De_Morgan
As to ESP all I can say is that when I am writing on De Morgan and get stuck on a particular problem or topic I sometimes get little hintts from her...suddenly I look back at a book I hadn't consulted for years...or decide to go through my research material and suddenly find something that perfectly fits in with what I am writing about. My research partner has even better experiences...he has gone to places in Florence, Italy on a whim only to find that they have associations with De Morgan.
So that's my story...whether this is truly ESP or just concentration or intuition I can't say but I like the idea that my artist helps me out from time to time.
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I had time to read the article at dailyscience.com tonight. Two things in the information prevent me from coming to the clear conclusion that ESP doesn't exist:
This statement by the graduate student doing the study: "If any ESP process exists, then participants' brains should respond differently to ESP and non-ESP stimuli." But that's an assumption; we really don't know that the brain responds differently to ESP stimuli because we know so little about ESP. Of course, experiments start with an assumption but maybe that's not the right assumption to start with for this one.
Maybe they didn't do the experiment with the right group of people. It did not say that the participants in the experiment believed they had any special ESP processes so I'm assuming they believed they did not. I would have liked for them to have done these experiments with people who believed that they DID and then see if there was any enhanced response in their brains during the activities. For example, I don't believe I have any special ability in this area so I'm pretty certain that if I had been a participant, my brain scan wouldn't have shown anything either.... but just because I don't possess this ability doesn't mean it doesn't exist in other people. It might be a very rare phenomena in a very select group of people. I say do it again with people who think they possess the ability.
I still don't know what I think about ESP. This experiment was an interesing new approach to an old debate but wasn't the nail in the coffin for me. -
Karen I agree the experiment is flawed
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I believe in ESP. I am a practicing occultist and I have seen more then enough to prove that ESP exist for me, however I have no way to prove it to anyone else.
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I absolutely believe that some people are gifted with abilities in regard to ESP. The FBI and police departments throughout the country enlist the services of trained psychics to help them with unsolved cases, many which are solved due to the efforts of these extraordianry people. I recently saw a program called Ghostly Encounters in which a psychic named Noreen Renier helped hem to solve a case of which they had no leads. The police detective sent her mug shots of possible suspects and information related to the case. She said that none of the mug shots were of the killer. She then worked with police sketch artist to come up with the face of the perpetrator and handed it over to the police inspector along with information regarding initials, type of vehicle, and the age (32) at which the perp would be when they would solve the case and arrest him. They were disappointed because they didn't get anywhere on the case right off the bat. They had finger prints that didn't match up to anyone, but over the years, the system for analizing and matching the prints was improved, and finally a guy was arrested for a drinking related charge whose prints matched the prints from the case. He was 32 years old when they cracked the case which is exactly what she had told them would happen. Paint that they had found on the victims matched his truck that the psychic had described, and the sketch she had come up with years before looked exactly like him and the initials matched.
I was interested in this woman for a particular reason. My son's fiancee' s aunt went missing about a year ago. She was in the process of getting a divorce from her abusive and mentally unstable husband. She was a dispatcher for the La Fayette, GA police department, and he was a police officer for the same department until they fired him after the incident for having explosives in his locker. They were just looking for an excuse to can him because everyone thought he murdered her. Her body has not been found, which is why I am so interested in the psychic. I have given her name and website address to the family. This has been on national news, and featured on several programs at the time it happened. Her name is Teresa Parker, and her husband is Sam Parker. All of her family, and the FBI and GBI believe he did it, and they finally collected enough evidence against him to arrest him. They arrested him today, so we are all ecstatic that he has finally been arrested. There will be a news conference today at 4:00, so it will probably be on national news tonight. I know that Greta Van Sustran covered the story, so she'll probably do an update tonight. I am hoping that the family will use Noreen Renier to help them locate her body if she can.
Anyway, didn't mean to go on and on, but that's why I'm so interested in this subject. So, any of you gals that are inclined to pray, please remember my future daughter-in-law, Ashten, and her family. It would be great if they could find her body so that the family can lay her to rest and have closure. -
I'm skeptical of any reports of ESP powers covered by the media. They just do not point a critical eye to the claims of the people involved.
The story you described about Noreen Renier is interesting but most likely glossed over all the "facts" that she reported which weren't actually true. There is a trick that magicians do where you make enough guesses and you are bound to get something right. That doesn't mean they have psychic powers. The fact that police and FBI agents use psychics doesn't impress me nor does it prove that there is any value in it.
After Googling Noreen Renier, you find plenty of evidence that suggests she's a fraud.
I found this particularly interesting
"Noreen Renier's current web site includes a long listing of colleges and universities under the heading "Teaching Appointments" and "Adjunct Faculty Member". Among them are the University of Florida, the University of Delaware, and the University of Virginia. But Noreen Renier has never graduated from a four year accredited university or college. During one court deposition she could not even recall the year of her high school graduation or the name of her school.
Nor has she ever been a faculty member at any of the colleges or universities listed. So what do the terms "teaching appointment" and "adjunct faculty member" mean to Noreen Renier? Webster's defines "adjunct" as "an associate or assistant of another" --- but these colleges and universities do not refer to Renier as a faculty assistant, or a faculty associate."
I hope the family you gave the information doesn't get taken in by this fake psychic detective. -
I believe in it, but like faith, I don't think it can actually be tested and therefore proven. I have had intuitive moments, dreamt of upcoming events, had some incredible deja vus. I think it's more like Anthony Michael Hall's character in The Dead Zone where he can only know something after touching or seeing ther person and even then, it's not a guarantee.
Lauri -
While I'm not a big believer in things like ESP and paranormal stuff, I LOVE the Dead Zone show!!
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