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Extrasensory Perception (ESP)

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Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion
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Extrasensory perception refers to the alleged processes of precognition, telepathy, and clairvoyance that take place via channels other than the sensory system that biologists and psychologists have been researching with scientific means. Precognition is the knowledge of future events obtained not through logical reasoning but through dreams or other psychical awareness. Telepathy is the sending and receiving of message over a distance, through nonphysical means. Clairvoyance is the perception of an object that is out of normal sight. Some records exist of people who have such experience of anomalous information transfer. Goulding and Parker (2001) claim that 25–45 % of the western population may report some form of ESP or other paranormal experiences.

Some clinical psychologists regard such experiences as delusion and therefore associate them with mental disorder, while the more new-age-oriented psychologists do not agree with this correlation (Targ et al. 2000). Besides the...

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Correspondence to C. Harry Hui .

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Hui, C.H. (2014). Extrasensory Perception (ESP). In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_214

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_214

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