Psychic
A psychic is a person[a] who claims to use powers rooted in parapsychology, such as extrasensory perception (ESP), to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance; or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, such as psychokinesis or teleportation.
Although many people believe in psychic abilities, the scientific consensus is that there is no proof of the existence of such powers, and describes the practice as pseudoscience.
[1] Some famous psychics include Edgar Cayce, Ingo Swann, Peter Hurkos, Janet Lee, Miss Cleo,[2] John Edward, Sylvia Browne, and Tyler Henry.
[4][5][6][7] In 1988 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences gave a report on the subject and concluded there is "no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena".
Attempts to repeat the results, which involved performance on a memory test to ascertain if post-test information would affect it, "failed to produce significant effects" and thus "do not support the existence of psychic ability" of this kind.
[10] French astronomer and spiritualist Camille Flammarion is credited as having first used the word psychic, while it was later introduced to the English language by Edward William Cox in the 1870s.
Perhaps the most widely known system of early civilization fortune-telling was astrology, where practitioners believed the relative positions of celestial bodies could lend insight into people's lives and even predict their future circumstances.
[citation needed] Some fortune-tellers were said to be able to make predictions without the use of these elaborate systems (or in conjunction with them), through some sort of direct apprehension or vision of the future.
[13] It is often said that the Pythia delivered oracles in a frenzied state induced by vapors rising from the ground, and that she spoke gibberish, believed to be the voice of Apollo, which priests reshaped into the enigmatic prophecies preserved in Greek literature.
[15] One of the most enduring historical references to what some consider to be psychic ability is the prophecies of Michel de Nostredame (1503–1566), often Latinized to Nostradamus, published during the French Renaissance period.
Nostradamus was a French apothecary and seer who wrote collections of prophecies that have since become famous worldwide and have rarely been out of print since his death.
By contrast, most academic scholars maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus' quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power.
[21] As the Spiritualist movement grew, other comparable groups arose, including the Theosophical Society, which was co-founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891).
[24] In a 1990 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences, only 2% of the respondents thought that extrasensory perception had been scientifically demonstrated, with another 2% thinking that the phenomena happened sometimes.
Another recurring trope is the conveyance of psychic power through psychoactive drugs, as in the Dune novels and indirectly in the Scanners films, as well as the ghosts in the StarCraft franchise.
Somewhat differently, in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door and Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, psychic abilities may be achieved by any human who learns the proper mental discipline, known as kything in the former work.
Critics such as Ed J. Gracely say that this evidence is not sufficient for acceptance, partly because the intrinsic probability of psychic phenomena is very small.
[39] Magicians such as James Randi, Ian Rowland and Derren Brown have demonstrated techniques and results similar to those of popular psychics, but they present physical and psychological explanations as opposed to paranormal ones.
In an Independent Investigations Group exposé of John Edward and James Van Praagh they discovered that what was actually said on the tape day, and what was broadcast to the public were "substantially different in the accuracy.
"[43] Richard Saunders, Chief Investigator for the Australian Skeptics, and producer and presenter of The Skeptic Zone podcast sought to answer the question “Can self-proclaimed psychics predict unlikely future events with any greater accuracy than chance?”[44] To answer that question he launched "The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project".
Over the course of 12 years, Saunders and then Saunders and his international team of skeptics - Michelle Bijkersma, Kelly Burke, Susan Gerbic, Adrienne Hill, Louis Hillman, Wendy Hughes, Paula Lauterbach, Dr. Angie Mattke, Rob Palmer, and Leonard Tramiel - searched through Australian published media for individuals making psychic or otherwise paranormal predictions.
[45] In an article reported by Pat Foran in CTV News-Toronto, an Ontario woman, known as Marie Jean, depressed after having to sell her home, began seeing a psychic who went by the name of Maha Dev.
Marie Jean reported that Dev claimed she was surrounded by "evil spirits" and that "(her) life could be in danger and (her) sons could lose their lives."
Palmer states "when someone reports to law enforcement that they are a victim of this type of fraud, they are often turned away and told it is a civil matter."
