ABSTRACT
Extrasensory perception (ESP) is the ability to transmit and receive information by means other than the recognized senses. In Victorian times, ESP was considered to be a possible ‘sixth sense’ and was researched by a number of important scientists, including Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge and Alfred Wallace. Another psychologist of the period, J. L. Kennedy, suggested in 1938 that future ESP experiments should attempt to minimize all sensory cues between experimenters—whether visual, auditory or ‘subliminal’—and should eliminate all types of preferences or non-randomness. Most of the pioneering ESP research was based on documented card-guessing sessions and correspondingly, most of the criticisms that arose were an attack on the ‘tightness’ of the laboratory testing procedures. What is most important in all the new research, both in the USSR and in the West, is that there is a new positive attitude among scientists to researching ESP, which did not exist on a large scale.
