Is ESP real?

CBS’ “Early Show” host Chris Wragge speaks with psychologist Dr. Jennifer Hartstein about the recent study that points to the existence of extrasensory perception.

Intuitive decision making and “listening to your heart”

We now have a better understanding about how to use our intuition by following our bodies’ signals, based on recent research that determined whether reactions produced by the body during key decision-making moments can be trusted to give us the best guidance.

“We often talk about intuition coming from the body—following our gut instincts and trusting our hearts,” says Barnaby D. Dunn, of the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, U.K., first author of the new paper published in Psychological Science.

During the study, participants had both their heart rates and sweat on their fingertips measured to help them learn to make the most appropriate choices during a card game. Most players gradually found a way to win at the card game and they reported having relied on intuition, based on their bodies’ reactions, rather than reason.

Although the quality of the advice that people’s bodies gave them varied, interestingly, the participants who were the most accurate were the ones who were more aware of their heartbeat. So for some individuals, being able to ‘listen to their heart’ helped them make wise choices, whereas for others it led to costly mistakes.

Is this evidence that we can see the future?

New Scientist: Extraordinary claims don’t come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven’t yet happened can influence our behavior.

Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal.

What’s more, skeptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can’t find any significant flaws.

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Study Aims to Identify IED Detection Experts

J.D. Leipold, Army News Service: Some Soldiers seem to have a sixth sense at being able to spot improvised explosive devices, researchers found, while others were unable to see the deadly weapons hidden in brush or buried in the middle of a road.

How and why only certain Soldiers could see IEDs was something the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization decided needed to be studied. So for the last 18 months a joint group of researchers has been striving to identify what particular skills, abilities and characteristics are needed to detect IEDs.

The study’s director, Jennifer Murphy, Ph.D., said JIEDDO leadership was hearing stories from the field every now and then that there would be a Soldier who just happened to be exceptional in his ability to identify IEDs, so she and the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences came into the picture.

“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way we could identify people who have this skill before they deploy because it would save so many lives,” she said, “because right now the way it is, we have to wait for the tour to unfold to see who is good and who’s not.”

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Proving Psychic Phenomena

Can our mind really display extra-sensory abilities beyond the five senses? One expert set out to define and prove the validity of such psychic powers as precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, out-of-body experiences, and telepathy.

Neuroscientist Diane Hennacy Powell, a former Harvard Medical School professor, attempts to logically answer long-standing questions about the possibilities of psychic phenomena, and the relationship between our brain and consciousness, in her book, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena. Extra-sensory abilities can be explained, she says, by applying the theories of Einstein and quantum physics. She also provides empirical data developed over the past few decades from several well-designed and rigorously supervised experiments that reinforce the existence of such phenomena.

Largely ignored by scientific field experts because of a lack of a viable theory to explain the mechanisms, and because the data associated with it defies the traditional model of consciousness, psychic phenomena have developed a stigma and researchers tend to ignore the possibility of existence. However, Dr. Powell concludes that modern physics consistently explains how these abilities can exist and how they work. She points out that Dean Radin’s book, Entangled Minds, contains detailed information about the abundant studies that have shown highly statistically significant evidence for ESP. In fact, she says, there is more evidence for ESP than there is for the use of aspirin to prevent strokes or heart attacks.

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Intuition More Than Just Fringe Science

Researchers from the University of Leeds report that intuition is a real psychological process that lies just beyond our conscious awareness.

Gerald Hodgkinson, the lead author of the report that appears in the British Journal of Psychology, says it isn’t just a random response. Recent research over the past few years has led the scientists to conclude that intuition is a result of the way the brain processes information when faced with serious time pressures, information overload, situations where they lack all the information to make an informed decision, and potentially hazardous situations where an individual does not have the luxury to be able to deliberate and collect all the facts.

They define intuition as a combination of pattern recognition — where an individual takes a mental shortcut in a given situation, relying upon interpreting a given outcome based upon a mental template compiled from past experiences — and external clues. This process then triggers an emotional response or physical sensation that allows an individual to recognize the most appropriate course of action.