Psychic Power Tests
There are many people in the world who believe that they have unique abilities, and so they seek out psychic power tests in order to confirm whether those abilities are real or imagined. While there are a huge number of psychic tests and ESP tests online, psychic power tests actually confirmed the reality of psychic ability many years before the Internet was even invented.
Learn More About Psychic Power Tests
While there are plenty of options available online where you can test your psychic abilities, it's important to review the history of parapsychology and how much scientists have already learned about the phenomenon that you're likely experiencing in your own life. The following examples are summaries of some of the more significant experimental findings within the field of psychic research. The results from these experiments reveal a great deal about the phenomenon of ESP, as well as how prevalent it is throughout society.
The Pearce-Pratt Distance Series ESP Tests
From 1933 through 1934, J.B. Rhine, an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at Duke University, conducted a series of ESP tests concerning a Duke student, Hubert E. Pearce Jr., who had come forward and told J.B. Rhine that he believed he'd inherited his mother's psychic abilities. With the help of J.G. Pratt, a psychology graduate student acting as the assistant, J.B. Rhine ran a series of ESP card tests on Hubert Pearce. In the tests, Pratt was unaware of the card sequences, establishing what scientists call a "double-blind", meaning that neither the test subject nor the scientist performing the experiment know the correct answers.
J.B. Rhine ran a series of psychic power tests with various distances between the cards, held by Pratt, and the psychic, Pearce. They conducted the first series at 100 yards apart, the second series at 250 yards, and then the final two series at 100 yards apart again. In 1936, J.B. Rhine published an article in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology outlining the results of his research.
Results: The results of this early parapsychology research was nowhere near conclusive. However, the results were statistically shocking. The experiments totaled 1850 trials. A statistical calculation of the probability that a person could correctly guess the right card by chance is 20% - 370 correct hits out of the 1850 trials. Hubert Pearce consistently guessed 558 correct hits, a resulting 30% success rate that was 188 successful hits above the expected results from simple chance. These results have been debated during the centuries since, and the significance of the statistical variation remains in question even today.
Princeton ESP Psychic Tests in 2000
Many years later, in 2000, the Journal of Scientific Exploration published a fascinating paper by Dr. Robert Jahn of Princeton University. The paper was titled Contributions to Variance in REG Experiments, and it outlined the results of a twelve-year study conducted by Dr. Jahn and three of his fellow researchers.
This particular study was conducted from 1979 through 1991, running almost perfectly parallel to the government's ongoing ESP research at the same time. The publication described the twelve year study as a series of 1338 trials. Test subjects concentrated on a random number generator and attempted to use their psychic ability to alter the numbers into a particular non-random pattern. Researchers used various generators in order to ensure that a faulty system would not skew the results.
Results: Again, the results were statistically significant in this study. Psychic test subjects were able to influence the numbers 0.01% of the time. This result is four times greater than the calculated results expected by pure chance. The results of this research effectively revealed that psychic ability seems to be a real psychological artifact of the human mind. However, it is terribly weak and extremely difficult to isolate.
Brain Scans Reveal Psychic Ability in 2008
In 2008, a paper was published titled Investigating Paranormal Phenomena: Functional Brain Imaging of Telepathy. This paper described a study where researchers used an MRI brain scanner to watch the brain of a "famous mentalist" while he performed psychic exercises with ESP cards and other tasks. The experiment included a second control subject who had no known psychic abilities. This second subject was also scanned while trying to perform the same psychic tasks.
Results: The published result of this study was that, in the case of a known psychic, the scan revealed activation of the "right parahippocampal gyrus" during an ESP session. The subject without psychic ability had activation in a different part of the brain instead, the left inferior frontal gyrus. The researchers who conducted this study believe that these results represent a method to identify people with authentic psychic ability.
Final Words
Parapsychologists and their skeptical critics have been debating the results of these sort of experiments for many decades. The problems, as the critics point out, is that the statistical significance of the allegedly positive experimental results are so small as to be basically non-existent. Additionally, such statistical variations could easily be accounted for by invalid or flawed research techniques or due to researcher bias. Parapsychologists and other proponents of psychic ability contend that any degree of positive variation is significant when dealing with a phenomenon that appears to be very weak. Proponents argue that just because a phenomenon is weak does not take away from the fact that it is real.
Whether or not you believe that psychic ability is real, the results of parapsychological research over the last few decades do appear to indicate that the human mind seems to have a very weak, latent ability to interact with the world around it in ways that scientists still do not quite completely understand.
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