[Rain]

Seriously.

I've always thought it would be wonderful to have an extra ability. Why do you sometimes know what your best friend or loved one is going to say? That's ESP right?

That feeling of deja vu, that's sorta ESP right?

Any little thing really. You can tell the time by looking at the clouds and weather. Or you can sense somebody's mood accurately. These are extra senses, extra abilities that many others don't possess. And they help in day-to-day life too.

How come our off-topic forum has never discussed ESP in depth? Does none of you believe in it?

I wish I have ESP. I want the obliterate kind of power - zap all the disagreeables.

[pclayton]

Eerie. I had a funny feeling you were going to post this thread.....

[jtfanclub]

The one that gets me is subsonics.

You're sitting at a traffic light. Nobody coming. Light turns green. You put your foot on the gas, and for some reason you don't push down. A second later, somebody tears through the traffic light at 80 miles an hour...if you'd obeyed the traffic laws, you'd be dead.

How did you know? Has to have been the vibrations of the fast moving car. Nothing else makes sense.

Another neat one is...a magician asks you to pick a number between 1 and 100, and be sure to remember it. He then tells you what number you just picked. ESP? Or did you mouth the number to aid your remembering it?

The one that nobody seems to explain is a mother knowing the exact moment her child dies, half a world away. How is that one possible?

[Al_U_Card]

Unfortunately, selective memory is at fault here. We remember the successes and forget the failures. That is why newbies plunk down aces etc. They remember winning the trick and not the opp's king in front of their ace that took one later. Positive reinforcement anyone?

[helene_t]

Deja Vu is a well-explained illusion and ESP does not exist.

Nature is amazing enough as it really is. Go visit your local science center if you need some astonishing adventure. There's no reason to believe in all kind of weired fantasies.

[Rain]

helene_t, on May 15 2007, 04:05 PM, said:

Deja Vu is a well-explained illusion and ESP does not exist.

Nature is amazing enough as it really is. Go visit your local science center if you need some astonishing adventure. There's no reason to believe in all kind of weired fantasies.

[mike777]

helene_t, on May 15 2007, 05:05 PM, said:

Deja Vu is a well-explained illusion and ESP does not exist.

Nature is amazing enough as it really is. Go visit your local science center if you need some astonishing adventure. There's no reason to believe in all kind of weired fantasies.

Yes, now with Cern we can worry about "Ice-9-type transition" and "strangelets" per old comments from Nobel Prize winner, Wilczek.

Leave it to the europeans to kill us all off.

[luke warm]

helene_t, on May 15 2007, 05:05 PM, said:

Deja Vu is a well-explained illusion and ESP does not exist.

i think this is just helene's opinion

have all instances of deja vu been well explained? was someone born a minute ago who possesses esp?

[Al_U_Card]

You may not want to know because once you find out, its too late.

[han]

I believe in ESP.

[Winstonm]

With ESP, how do you know it's true deja vu and not simply something you knew would happen? And if you haave a true deja vu, how do you explain not knowing it was going to happen?

[Winstonm]

Hannie, on May 15 2007, 10:22 PM, said:

I believe in ESP.

Well, if you put that under your pillow, the deja vu fairy will replace it with a quarter that looks exatly like a quarter you used to have when you were a kid

But, with ESP, you probably already knew that.

[han]

Oh wait, I thought you said ESPN. No, I don't believe in ESP.

[Winstonm]

Hannie, on May 15 2007, 10:26 PM, said:

Oh wait, I thought you said ESPN. No, I don't believe in ESP.

I thought ESPN was deja vu - I keep seeing the same thing over and over.

[Al_U_Card]

C'mon Hannie, 'fess up! Under that crusty mathematician's exterior lies an incredible lightness of being. Sensitive to the ethereal planes, your internal perceptions help you to undersand the true sense of this post.....

[Gerben42]

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i think this is just helene's opinion

If you really do not think ESP is a bunch of nonsense, here is how it works. I'm sure you've heard of the "standard" test with the 5 cards with symbols, something like circle, triangle, wiggly line, eye, bird (oh that's hieroglyphs but you get the idea).

The idea is that there are 5 different symbols and the test person has to find out which one is being shown. Suppose I have 1000 test persons who perform this test 20 times. Their "no ESP" expectation is 20 / 5 = 4 correct answers. Some will get more right, some exactly 4, some less. From this test I take everyone who has at least 7 right. In round 2 I have my 86 test persons who passed this test. From this set I select again those who get at least 7 right. I'm left with 8 persons, of which one gets 7 or more right a third time.

Gee, we have found this incredible psychic who defeated the odds and got at least 7 times out of 20 three times in a row. The odds of that are like, whoa, 1 to 1000.

So the odds that this person is not a psychic is a 1000 to 1. Tada!

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Nature is amazing enough as it really is. Go visit your local science center if you need some astonishing adventure. There's no reason to believe in all kind of weird fantasies. 

I don't understand the sad smiley. Is it not enough to see the beauty of nature around us? If you say no I think you may not have really looked.

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The one that nobody seems to explain is a mother knowing the exact moment her child dies, half a world away. How is that one possible?

They do? Or they think they do? I'm not saying they are lying.

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You're sitting at a traffic light. Nobody coming. Light turns green. You put your foot on the gas, and for some reason you don't push down. A second later, somebody tears through the traffic light at 80 miles an hour...if you'd obeyed the traffic laws, you'd be dead.

Sorry to be the bad sceptic here and debunk all your stories but I have to.

For each accident there are so many near misses. I would not have been here if my parents had driven half a second later on a certain road in Austria because they would not have continued their journey on the road but in an avalanche with their car.

People don't always push down when the light turns green. Most of the time yes, but sometimes no. Human reliability never is 100%. Almost all of the times you don't notice, but this one time you do.

<waiting until loud protests saying "this is not how it went" die down>

Another thing that should be mentioned here is that your conscious perception is only part of the story. The brain (which we only start to understand partially) uses more information than that we consciously perceive. This is called "instinct". It is good to have these automatic reactions as they help us survive. It is very possible that you COULD already have had information about the car about to speed over the crossing but didn't have the information consciously yet.

If this is what you mean by 6th sense, yes you could say I believe in this because it is a testable hypothesis which is supported by evidence.

If you mean telepathy, that is just a bunch of hogwash.

[Gerben42]

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Given all that you can determine with great accuracy what they're going to say in a given situation sometimes.

I know usually to mindboggling precision what my partner is going to say when I have returned the wrong suit. There you have it, I am telepathic, worship me!

[Al_U_Card]

Gerben42, on May 16 2007, 06:33 AM, said:

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Given all that you can determine with great accuracy what they're going to say in a given situation sometimes.

I know usually to mindboggling precision what my partner is going to say when I have returned the wrong suit. There you have it, I am telepathic, worship me!

Only because you have heard it SO many times....lol

There is much reality in your notion of the unknown capacity of our brains and how we cannot yet fully understand its utilities. Hopefully with time and a certain open-mindedness (has to be kept open as there is so much in there) we will come to a more complete understanding.

[jtfanclub]

Gerben42, on May 16 2007, 06:18 AM, said:

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The one that nobody seems to explain is a mother knowing the exact moment her child dies, half a world away. How is that one possible?

They do? Or they think they do? I'm not saying they are lying.

I don't know, but there's a number of documented cases.

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Another thing that should be mentioned here is that your conscious perception is only part of the story. The brain (which we only start to understand partially) uses more information than that we consciously perceive. This is called "instinct". It is good to have these automatic reactions as they help us survive. It is very possible that you COULD already have had information about the car about to speed over the crossing but didn't have the information consciously yet.

But I already mentioned that. This is almost certainly subsonics...frequencies too low for you to hear, but not to feel. If it were a train coming, you'd literally feel it. With a car (or an avalanche) it's not strong enough literally shake the car but it is strong enough to 'feel it in your bones'.

Just because it's ESP doesn't mean it's 'magic'. Your body is, for example, very sensitive to oxygen levels...you can feel something is 'wrong' long before you start to suffocate (although carbon monoxide confuses it). What would you call that? Sight? Hearing? Smell? Touch? Taste? Or is it...extra-sensory? You have a lot more than 5 senses.

Take a person, blindfold him, and give him ear plugs. Have people walk in front of him, one at a time. The person will be able to tell much higher than random if the person walking in front of them is angry, sad, happy, etc. A hundred years ago, that would have been considered ESP. Now, we'd just say it's phermones or subsonics.

Now take two people, have one of them draw a card, look at it, and have the other person guess. If the guessing is more correct than random, that proves...what? Magic? Tiny visual cues (pupils expanding for face cards, surprise when the same card is drawn twice in a row)? Telepathy? Something else?

Suppose it was telepathy. So what? That would just mean that we were releasing some phermone, or perhaps an electrical impusle, that could be read. To disbelieve in ESP is to disbelieve in science. Of course the body has abilities that we don't understand. And until we understand them, they remain ESP. That's what science is all about.