ABSTRACT
What are paranormal phenomena? UFOs? Bigfoot? Mind-reading? Ghosts? Spoon-bending? By ‘paranormal’, I do not mean ‘supernatural’ or ‘beyond nature’, where the phenomena are by definition incompatible with scientific theorizing and investigation. Rather, I mean that the phenomena appear to suggest that organisms can interact with their environment in ways that are not explicable within current scientific understanding. This does not mean that paranormal phenomena can never be understood, but it may mean that some of our present scientific knowledge and theories would need to be adjusted to accommodate them. We do not yet know exactly how paranormal phenomena operate. Indeed, there is still some debate as to whether such phenomena even exist. The particular paranormal phenomenon that I shall concentrate on in this chapter is extra-sensory perception (ESP), of which a further definition and examples are given below.
