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Clairvoyance (; ) is the claimed ability to acquire information that would be considered impossible to get through scientifically proven sensations, thus classified as extrasensory perception, or "sixth sense". Any person who is claimed to have such ability is said to be a clairvoyant () ().
Claims for the existence of paranormal and psychic abilities such as clairvoyance have not been supported by scientific evidence.Carroll, Robert Todd. (2003). "Clairvoyance". Retrieved 2014-04-30. Parapsychology explores this possibility, but the existence of the paranormal is not accepted by the scientific community.
The scientific community widely considers parapsychology, including the study of clairvoyance, a pseudoscience.
Quote: "He therefore must learn above all else to know himself, so that when he is able to confront a spiritual outer world in the same way as he confronts an objective being he can distinguish himself from what is truth. If he does not learn to delimit himself in this way, he will always confuse that which is only within him, that which is only his subjective experience, with the spiritual world picture; he can never arrive at a real grasp of spiritual reality."Rudolf Steiner An Esoteric Cosmology
Quote: "Another result of this inverse unraveling of things in the astral world is that it teaches man to know himself. Feelings and passions are expressed by plant and animal forms. When man begins to behold his passions in the astral world he sees them as animal forms. These forms proceed from himself, but he sees them as if they were assailing him. This is because his own being is objectivised—otherwise he could not behold himself. Thus it is only in the astral world that man learns true self knowledge in contemplating the images of his passions in the animal forms which hurl, themselves upon him. A feeling of hatred entertained against another being appears as an attacking demon."
Early researchers of clairvoyance included William Gregory, Gustav Pagenstecher, and Rudolf Tischner.Roeckelein, Jon. (2006). Elsevier's Dictionary of Psychological Theories. Elsevier Science. p. 450. Clairvoyance experiments were reported in 1884 by Charles Richet. Playing cards were enclosed in envelopes and a subject under hypnosis attempted to identify them. The subject was reported to have been successful in a series of 133 trials but the results dropped to chance level when performed before a group of scientists in Cambridge. J. M. Peirce and E. C. Pickering reported a similar experiment in which they tested 36 subjects over 23,384 trials. They did not find above chance scores.Hansel, C. E. M. The Search for a Demonstration of ESP. In Paul Kurtz. (1985). A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 97–127.
Ivor Lloyd Tuckett (1911) and Joseph McCabe (1920) analyzed early cases of clairvoyance and concluded they were best explained by coincidence or fraud.Joseph McCabe. (1920). Is Spiritualism Based On Fraud? The Evidence Given By Sir A. C. Doyle and Others Drastically Examined. Chapter The Subtle Art of Clairvoyance. London: Watts & Co. pp. 93–108Tuckett, Ivor Lloyd. (1911). The Evidence for the Supernatural: A Critical Study Made with "Uncommon Sense". Chapter Telepathy and Clairvoyance. K. Paul, Trench, Trübner. pp. 107–142 In 1919, the magician P. T. Selbit staged a séance at his flat in Bloomsbury. The spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle attended and declared the clairvoyance manifestations genuine.Baker, Robert A. (1996). Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions From Within. Prometheus Books. p. 234. Christopher, Milbourne. (1996). The Illustrated History of Magic. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 264.
A significant development in clairvoyance research came when J. B. Rhine, a parapsychologist at Duke University, introduced a standard methodology, with a standard statistical approach to analyzing data, as part of his research into extrasensory perception. A number of psychological departments attempted and failed to repeat Rhine's experiments. At Princeton University, W. S. Cox (1936) produced 25,064 trials with 132 subjects in a playing card ESP experiment. Cox concluded: "There is no evidence of extrasensory perception either in the 'average man' or of the group investigated or in any particular individual of that group. The discrepancy between these results and those obtained by Rhine is due either to uncontrollable factors in experimental procedure or to the difference in the subjects." Four other psychological departments failed to replicate Rhine's results.Joseph Jastrow. (1938). ESP, House of Cards. The American Scholar. Vol. 8, No. 1. pp. 13–22. "Rhine's results fail to be confirmed. At Colgate University (40, 000 tests, 7 subjects), at Chicago (extensive series on 315 students), at Southern Methodist College (75, 000 tests), at Glasgow, Scotland (6, 650 tests), at London University (105, 000 tests), not a single individual was found who under rigidly conducted experiments could score above chance. At Stanford University it has been convincingly shown that the conditions favorable to the intrusion of subtle errors produce above-chance records which come down to chance when sources of error are eliminated."Hansel, C. E. M. The Search for a Demonstration of ESP. In Paul Kurtz. (1985). A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology. Prometheus Books. pp. 105–127.
It was revealed that Rhine's experiments contained methodological flaws and procedural errors.Harold Gulliksen. (1938). Extra-Sensory Perception: What Is It?. American Journal of Sociology. Vol. 43, No. 4. pp. 623–634. "Investigating Rhine's methods, we find that his mathematical methods are wrong and that the effect of this error would in some cases be negligible and in others very marked. We find that many of his experiments were set up in a manner which would tend to increase, instead of to diminish, the possibility of systematic clerical errors; and lastly, that the ESP cards can be read from the back."Wynn, Charles; Wiggins, Arthur. (2001). Quantum Leaps in the Wrong Direction: Where Real Science Ends...and Pseudoscience Begins. Joseph Henry Press. p. 156. "In 1940, Rhine coauthored a book, Extrasensory Perception After Sixty Years in which he suggested that something more than mere guess work was involved in his experiments. He was right! It is now known that the experiments conducted in his laboratory contained serious methodological flaws. Tests often took place with minimal or no screening between the subject and the person administering the test. Subjects could see the backs of cards that were later discovered to be so cheaply printed that a faint outline of the symbol could be seen. Furthermore, in face-to-face tests, subjects could see card faces reflected in the tester's eyeglasses or cornea. They were even able to (consciously or unconsciously) pick up clues from the tester's facial expression and voice inflection. In addition, an observant subject could identify the cards by certain irregularities like warped edges, spots on the backs, or design imperfections."Terence Hines. (2003). Pseudoscience and the Paranormal. Prometheus Books. p. 122. "The procedural errors in the Rhine experiments have been extremely damaging to his claims to have demonstrated the existence of ESP. Equally damaging has been the fact that the results have not replicated when the experiments have been conducted in other laboratories."
Eileen Garrett was tested by Rhine at Duke University in 1933 with Zener cards. Certain symbols were placed on the cards and sealed in an envelope, and she was asked to guess their contents. She performed poorly and later criticized the tests by claiming the cards lacked a psychic energy called "energy stimulus" and that she could not perform clairvoyance on command.Hazelgrove, Jenny. (2000). Spiritualism and British Society Between the Wars. Manchester University Press. p. 204. The parapsychologist Samuel Soal and his colleagues tested Garrett in May 1937. Most of the experiments were carried out in the Psychological Laboratory at the University College London. A total of over 12,000 guesses were recorded but Garrett failed to produce above chance level.Russell, A. S; Benn, John Andrews. (1938). Discovery the Popular Journal of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press. pp. 305–306 Soal wrote: "In the case of Mrs. Eileen Garrett we fail to find the slightest confirmation of Dr. J. B. Rhine's remarkable claims relating to her alleged powers of extra-sensory perception. Not only did she fail when I took charge of the experiments, but she failed equally when four other carefully trained experimenters took my place."Samuel Soal. A Repetition of Dr. Rhine's work with Mrs. Eileen Garrett. Proc. S.P.R. Vol. XLII. pp. 84–85. Also quoted in Antony Flew. (1955). A New Approach To Psychical Research. Watts & Co. pp. 90–92.
A well-known recent study of remote viewing is the US government-funded project at the Stanford Research Institute from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. In 1972, Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ initiated a series of human subject studies to determine whether participants (the viewers or percipients) could reliably identify and accurately describe salient features of remote locations ( targets). In the early studies, a human sender was typically present at the remote location as part of the experiment protocol. A three-step process was used. First, target conditions to be experienced by the senders were randomly selected. Second, in the viewing step, participants were asked to verbally express or sketch their impressions of the remote scene. Third, these descriptions were matched by separate judges, as closely as possible, with the intended targets. The term remote viewing was coined to describe this overall process. The first paper by Puthoff and Targ on remote viewing was published in Nature in March 1974; in it, the team reported some degree of remote viewing success. After the publication of these findings, other attempts to replicate the experiments were carried out with remotely linked groups using computer conferencing.
The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Targ and Puthoff's remote viewing experiments at the Stanford Research Institute. In a series of 35 studies, they could not do so, so they investigated the original experiments' procedure. Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Targ and Puthoff's experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets, or the date of the session at the top of the page. They concluded that these clues explained the experiment's high hit rates. Marks achieved 100% accuracy without visiting any of the sites but by using cues. James Randi has written that controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues inadvertently included in the transcripts.
In 1980, Charles Tart claimed that a rejudging of the transcripts from one of Targ and Puthoff's experiments revealed an above-chance result. Targ and Puthoff again refused to provide copies of the transcripts, and they were not made available for study until July 1985, when it was discovered they still contained . Marks and Christopher Scott (1986) wrote: "considering the importance for the remote viewing hypothesis of adequate cue removal, Tart's failure to perform this basic task seems beyond comprehension. As previously concluded, remote viewing has not been demonstrated in the experiments conducted by Puthoff and Targ, only the repeated failure of the investigators to remove sensory cues."
In 1982, Robert G. Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering at Princeton University, wrote a comprehensive review of psychic phenomena from an engineering perspective. His paper included numerous references to remote viewing studies at the time. Statistical flaws in his work have been proposed by others in the parapsychological community and the general scientific community.
Skeptics say that if clairvoyance were a reality, it would have become abundantly clear. They also contend that those who believe in paranormal phenomena do so for merely psychological reasons.Chris French; Wilson, Krissy. (2007). Cognitive Factors Underlying Paranormal Beliefs and Experiences. In Sala, Sergio. Tall Tales About the Mind and Brain: Separating Fact From Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–22. According to David G. Myers ( Psychology, 8th ed.):
The search for a valid and reliable test of clairvoyance has resulted in thousands of experiments. One controlled procedure has invited 'senders' to telepathically transmit one of four visual images to 'receivers' deprived of sensation in a nearby chamber (Bem & Honorton, 1994). The result? A reported 32 percent accurate response rate, surpassing the chance rate of 25 percent. But follow-up studies have (depending on who was summarizing the results) failed to replicate the phenomenon or produced mixed results (Bem & others, 2001; Milton & Wiseman, 2002; Storm, 2000, 2003).
One skeptic, magician James Randi, had a longstanding offer of U.S. $1 million—"to anyone who proves a genuine psychic power under proper observing conditions" (Randi, 1999). French, Australian, and Indian groups have parallel offers of up to 200,000 euros to anyone with demonstrable paranormal abilities (CFI, 2003). Large as these sums are, the scientific seal of approval would be worth far more to anyone whose claims could be authenticated. To refute those who say there is no ESP, one need only produce a single person who can demonstrate a single, reproducible ESP phenomenon. So far, no such person has emerged. Randi's offer has been publicized for three decades and dozens of people have been tested, sometimes under the scrutiny of an independent panel of judges. Still, nothing. "People's desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does not exist." Susan Blackmore, "Blackmore's first law", 2004.Myers, David. (2006). Psychology. Worth Publishers; 8th edition.
Clairvoyance is considered a hallucination by mainstream psychiatry.
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