Extra-sensory perception

Extra-sensory perception, or ESP, refers to the supposed ability to acquire information by some means other than the normal human senses, such as the traditional five senses of taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing, or any of the other senses well known to science (balance, proprioception, etc.)

Because the definition of sense is vague, the the precise definition of extra-sensory is as well, but the term is generally meant to imply sources of information unknown to modern science. Despite the vagueness of the definition, no one has ever demonstrated ESP in a generally accepted way. The James Randi Educational Foundation offers $1 million to anyone who can demonstrate ESP or any psychic phenomenon. No one has ever collected.

The study of such phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retrocognition, mediumship, psychometry, astroprojection,and telekinesis amongst others, is known as parapsychology

In the early days of radio and electronics, the whole subject seemed magical to most people, including the engineers working on it. It was therefore felt probable that the technology could be used to unleash previously impossible feats of mental ability. This included communication with dead people, who were considered to have moved on to another world or “plane”. Alec Reeves, one of the pioneers of digital communications, http://www.alecharleyreeves.com , considered ESP a perfectly reasonable proposition. He believed that many of his inventions were prompted by the dead pioneer Michael Faraday, and spent much of his earlier years trying to perfect spiritualist telecommunication devices. You can try some of his experiment in some Active-X pages on his web site.