Extra Sensory Perception (ESP)

 Extra sensory perception, or ESP, is the ability to perceive things without using the five senses. It's controversial because it sometimes seems real but can never be entirely proven.

In short, ESP has no scientific consensus. Skeptics say it's not real, while believers are convinced that ESP is a fact of life.

I'm going to start by explaining what ESP is. It's the ability to perceive things with one or more of your five senses without using them.

This can manifest in several ways.

The most well known is telepathy. That's when one person reads another person's mind. For instance, you can read words or images in someone else's head.

The second kind is clairvoyance. That's when one person gets a mental image of something without being there in person.

People have been talking about ESP since before the dawn of history and it is still shrouded in mystery. It's also called sixth sense, which refers to the traditional five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.

The sixth sense is not an extra sense, but the ability to use one's ordinary senses in a more effective way. In ancient Chinese and Indian philosophy, the sixth sense was called 'intuition' or 'inner vision', which refers to your intuition.

Intuition is a form of rational thinking. People often use it to make important decisions and solve problems in the absence of other information. It is a kind of thought that goes beyond logical reasoning, which people are used to.

The ability to use intuition is the most important factor in using ESP. Some people say that they have a 'gut feeling', which means they can feel instinctively what others cannot do rationally.

The sixth sense is sometimes referred to as 'sixth consciousness', which means that you are conscious of all things. In other words, your mind can understand everything in the universe.

When ESP is involved, it can be divided into two kinds: extrasensory perception and paranormal psychic phenomena.

Have you ever noticed how your senses interpret reality? As a child, I remember being fascinated by the possibilities of what could be outside my senses. Perception is an interesting thing to think about because it shows how our minds work on top of our physical beings.

Our senses are a very powerful tool for our own survival and can be fooled easily. Have you ever seen an optical illusion? How about the famous "checker-shadow" illusion? These types of illusions clearly demonstrate how different interpretations of reality by your brain, based on what it sees through one or more senses. In some cases, like this checker shadow illusion, we even just see something that's not really there.

I think that these illusions are even more interesting when you consider what is not an illusion. Walking down the street, you can see clearly with your eyes and ears a man walking by. But from his perspective, he sees the world through a completely different set of senses! He hears nothing but the sound of his feet on the pavement, feels no wind or warmth against his skin, smells only himself and whatever he has eaten recently.

Without his sense of sight, he never knows that you exist and vice versa. Yet chances are that the two of you will not interact on this day because your sensory interpretations of reality do not align.

What if we could take our own abilities of illusion perception and use them to my advantage? What if I could find a way to manipulate the sense interpretations of reality in another person's brain, so that they see and hear what I want them to?

This is a fascinating concept because it allows me to think about what my own senses are doing to the outside world. It's kind of like an inside-out view; I could see how reality would look if I had different senses!