Extra Sensory Perception, which will be referred to as ESP for the remainder of this paper, can take on several different forms. ESP can be divided into four major categories; telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. Telepathy denotes to the ability to directly transfer a thought from or to someone else’s mind. This can be simplified to mind-reading or mind-to-mind communication. Clairvoyance denotes to the ability to have knowledge of something that you acquired by paranormal means, which is also known as remote viewing. Precognition denotes a form of clairvoyance where a person can predict an event and/or thought of someone else before it happens. Psychokinesis is the most unique example of ESP. Psychokinesis which is more commonly known as telekinesis, is having the ability to move something using only the power of your mind and having no physical interaction with the object in question. The most common example of telekinesis is levitation, be it an object or a person. ESP in all of its forms is very abstract concept, making it hard to quantify through experimentation.

ESP began to be tested scientifically as early as 1934 when Dr. William McDougal and Dr. J. B. Rhine began to experiment with ESP at Duke University. This experiment was also said to be one of the first which could test for clairvoyance and telepathy individually. Telepathy would be tested by the testing agent simply visualizing and the participant guessing what they are visualizing, while clairvoyance would be tested through things such as guessing the diagrams on cards. In both situations the results would have to be significantly beyond chance in order to be considered any kind of proof for clairvoyance or telepathy. The tests were conducted using Zener cards. Zener cards were devised by Dr. K. E. Zener with the goal of being able to reliably test for clairvoyance. The cards came in sets of 5 with a different symbol on each of the cards. In the tests conducted by Rhine there would be 5 sets of Zener cards shuffled together and participants would guess “down through” all the cards in the deck without having any of the cards removed from the deck until all the cards have been guessed to keep the probability the same throughout. On average the participants would guess anywhere from 8.9 to 9.9 of the 25 cards correctly.