Parapsychology — the scientific study of psychic phenomena — has been a real academic field since the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882. Its history is one of the most fought-over in science: dismissed again and again as pseudoscience by mainstream psychology and physics, and again and again producing results that conventional theories cannot explain. The core things it studies go by the name psi (the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet, picked because it takes no side on how any of it works). They include extra-sensory perception (ESP: picking up information through something other than the five known senses), psychokinesis (PK: affecting physical systems with the mind alone), and survival phenomena (evidence that consciousness continues after the body dies). Decades of controlled lab research have built up a body of evidence that, judged by normal scientific standards, is much stronger than most people — scientists included — realize.
Dean Radin, Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and author of 'The Conscious Universe' (1997), 'Entangled Minds' (2006), and 'Real Magic' (2018), has done the most thorough meta-analyses of the parapsychology research. Looking across more than a thousand psi experiments from the past century, he finds combined effect sizes that are statistically significant at odds of billions to one against chance — far past the bar routinely used to approve drugs or accept nutrition studies. The Ganzfeld experiments alone — controlled telepathy trials using mild sensory deprivation — have been meta-analyzed several times and show a steady hit rate of about 32 percent where 25 percent is expected by chance: a small but very repeatable effect, confirmed independently in labs across the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Psychic ability runs on a scale, from everyday to dramatic, and most people have experiences at the easy end all the time — without calling them psychic. The sudden 'knowing' that a phone call is coming right before it rings; the dream that shows a future event with odd accuracy; the instant strong read on someone's character that turns out right; the flash of creative insight that arrives whole, out of nowhere — in the parapsychology view, these are all the same underlying psi capacity that produces confirmed results in the lab. What differs is not the ability itself but how developed it is, what conditions are present, and how much attention you bring to it.
The framework that makes the most sense of the whole range is the information-based model proposed by several researchers, including Ervin Laszlo's A-field theory (covered in the Akashic Records archive). In this view, the mind is not produced by the brain alone. It is connected to — and can draw information from — a non-local field of information that underlies physical reality. The psychic faculties are just the different channels the mind uses to sample different kinds of information from that field: visual information (clairvoyance), sound (clairaudience), body and emotional information (clairsentience), direct knowing (claircognizance), information from other people's minds (telepathy), information from the future (precognition), information stored in objects (psychometry), and information from distant places (remote viewing).