Phantasms of the Living is the title of a book by members of the Society for Psychical Research.
What Does “Phantasms of the Living” Mean?
The term refers to apparitions, visions, or sensory experiences of living people, rather than spirits of the dead. The authors collected hundreds of reports in which a person claimed to see, hear, or sense someone who was actually alive but often far away.
Examples included:
Seeing a distant relative suddenly appear in a room.
Hearing the voice of a living person when they were not physically present.
Experiencing a vivid impression of someone during a crisis.
Crisis Apparitions
Some cases involved what researchers called crisis apparitions, experiences occurring when the person perceived was undergoing a serious event such as:
An accident
Severe illness
Emotional distress
Death or near death situations
The researchers wondered whether these experiences might reflect some form of telepathic communication rather than spirit visitation.
Interpretation
Some proposed that some apparitions of living persons might be explained by:
Telepathy (mind to mind influence)
Unconscious psychological processes
Coincidence in some cases
They did not claim that all reports proved paranormal phenomena, but they argued that certain cases deserved scientific investigation.
Modern Perspectives
Today, some psychologists might explain such experiences through factors such as:
Memory distortions
Expectation and suggestion
Stress and emotional arousal
Sleep-related experiences
Coincidence and selective recall
Parapsychologists, however, still regard Phantasms of the Living as a landmark work because it was one of the first systematic attempts to collect and analyze spontaneous apparition reports.
Historical Importance
The book remains influential in:
Parapsychology
Psychical Research
Studies of apparitions and anomalous experiences
Research on telepathy and consciousness
For some historians, Phantasms of the Living represents the beginning of large-scale, evidence gathering research into spontaneous paranormal experiences rather than relying solely on folklore or anecdotal ghost stories.
Apparitions are experiences in which a person perceives a figure, presence, or image that appears real but may not be explained by an obvious physical source. Apparitions may often be described as seeing a deceased person, a living person who is not physically present, an unknown figure, or a non-human entity.
Types of Apparitions
Crisis Apparitions
Reported when someone appears to another person during a time of extreme danger, illness, or death.
The apparition may be later linked to a real-life crisis occurring at the same time.
Bereavement Apparitions
Experienced after the death of a loved one.
The experiencer may see, hear, sense, or even feel the presence of the deceased.
These experiences are relatively common among grieving individuals and do not necessarily indicate mental illness.
Place Related Apparitions
Apparitions reported repeatedly in a particular location.
Commonly associated with “haunted” places.
Living Person Apparitions
Reports of seeing someone who is alive but physically elsewhere.
Sometimes called “phantasms of the living” in parapsychological literature.
Scientific Explanations
Psychologists and neuroscientists have proposed several explanations:
Misinterpretation of sensory information: (shadows, reflections, low light).
Expectation and suggestion: influencing perception.
Grief related experiences: especially after a significant loss.
Sleep related phenomena: such as hypnagogic (falling asleep) or hypnopompic (waking up) hallucinations.
Stress, fatigue, trauma, or certain neurological conditions: consult with a Nuerologist, may also contribute to apparition like experiences.
Parapsychological Perspectives
Within the field of Parapsychology, apparitions have been studied as potential evidence for:
Telepathic communication.
Survival of consciousness after death.
Unknown aspects of human consciousness.
Interactions with non-physical entities.
Researchers associated with the Society for Psychical Research collected thousands of apparition reports and attempted to analyze patterns statistically and historically.
Are Apparitions Evidence of Life After Death?
There is currently no scientific consensus that apparitions prove survival after death. Mainstream science generally interprets apparition experiences through psychological, neurological, and environmental factors. However, some researchers in psychical research argue that certain well documented cases remain difficult to explain completely.
Important Distinction
An apparition experience by itself is not the same as a psychotic disorder. Many psychologically healthy people report sensing or seeing the presence of a deceased loved one, particularly during bereavement. Mental health professionals evaluate such experiences based on the broader context, including distress, functioning, and whether other symptoms are present.
In summary, an apparition is a perceived presence or figure that appears real to the experiencer but lacks an immediately identifiable physical source. Interpretations range from normal psychological processes to paranormal or survival of consciousness hypotheses, depending on one’s perspective and the available evidence.
Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM), also known as Metta Meditation, is a contemplative practice that involves intentionally cultivating feelings of goodwill, compassion, warmth, and kindness toward yourself and others.
The word “Metta” comes from the ancient Pali language and means loving-kindness, benevolence, or unconditional friendliness.
How It Works
During Loving-Kindness Meditation, you silently repeat phrases such as:
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I be safe.
May I live with ease.
You then gradually extend these wishes to others:
Yourself
A loved one
A friend
A neutral person
A difficult person
All beings everywhere
Example Practice
Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and repeat slowly:
May I be safe.
May I be healthy.
May I be peaceful.
May I be happy.
After a few minutes, bring someone you care about to mind:
May you be safe.
May you be healthy.
May you be peaceful.
May you be happy.
Continue extending these wishes outward.
Benefits
Research suggests Loving-Kindness Meditation may help:
Increase positive emotions
Enhance empathy and compassion
Reduce self-criticism
Improve social connection
Lower stress and anger
Increase emotional resilience
Support overall psychological well-being
What Loving-Kindness Is Not
Loving-kindness does not mean:
Approving harmful behavior
Ignoring personal boundaries
Suppressing anger or hurt
Forcing yourself to like everyone
Instead, it involves recognizing the shared humanity of all people while maintaining healthy boundaries.
A Psychological Perspective
From a psychological standpoint, Loving-Kindness Meditation can help counteract the mind’s tendency toward threat detection, self-criticism, and negative mental commentary. By repeatedly practicing goodwill and compassion, individuals may gradually strengthen neural pathways associated with empathy, emotional regulation, and social connection.
Some modern therapies, including mindfulness-based interventions and compassion-focused approaches, incorporate elements of Loving-Kindness Meditation as a way to promote emotional well-being and resilience.
In simple terms, Loving-Kindness Meditation is the practice of training the heart and mind to relate to oneself and others with greater kindness, compassion, and goodwill.
Consciousness Studies is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the nature of conscious experience how and why we are aware of ourselves, our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and the world around us.
It brings together researchers from several disciplines, including:
Psychology
Neuroscience
Philosophy of Mind
Cognitive Science
Artificial Intelligence
Parapsychology (a controversial and widely accepted field)
Major Questions in Consciousness Studies
Researchers explore questions such as:
What is consciousness?
How does subjective experience arise from mind activity?
What is the relationship between the mind and the consciousness?
Do animals possess consciousness?
Could machines become conscious?
What happens to consciousness during sleep, anesthesia, meditation, or altered states?
The “Hard Problem” of Consciousness
The philosopher David Chalmers coined the term “hard problem of consciousness.”
It asks:
Why does physical mind activity produce subjective experience at all?
For example, neuroscience can identify which mind regions process color, but why the experience of seeing “red” feels the way it does remains an open question.
Major Theories
Some influential theories may include:
Physicalism
Consciousness emerges from physical processes in the mind.
Panpsychism
The view that consciousness, or proto-consciousness, may be a fundamental feature of reality.
Areas of Research
Researchers study:
Attention and awareness
Dreams and lucid dreaming
Meditation and contemplative states
Hypnosis
Near-death experiences, NDA
Altered states of consciousness
Brain injuries and disorders of consciousness: Please Consult with a Neurologist
Psychedelic experiences: May Cause Life Long Hallucinations
Consciousness Studies and Parapsychology
Some consciousness researchers investigate reports of phenomena such as telepathy, psychokinesis (PK), remote viewing, and other anomalous experiences. These topics remain highly controversial because evidence has achieved broad scientific consensus. Mainstream controversial consciousness research generally focuses on phenomena that may be reliably observed and replicated under controlled conditions.
Why It Matters
Consciousness studies addresses one of the deepest questions in science and philosophy:
How does subjective experience arise, and what does it tell us about the nature of mind, and reality?
Despite major advances in neuroscience, consciousness remains one of the most challenging and fascinating subjects in modern inquiry.
Macro-PK (Macro-Psychokinesis) refers to alleged psychokinetic effects that are large enough to be directly observed without specialized scientific instruments.
In parapsychology, psychokinesis (PK) is the claimed ability of the mind to influence physical objects or events without any known physical interaction. Macro-PK is distinguished from micro-PK, which involves very small statistical effects, such as attempts to influence random number generators.
Examples of Reported Macro-PK Phenomena
Table levitation
Movement of objects without physical contact
Bending of metal objects
Spontaneous movement of furniture
Apports (the alleged appearance or transportation of objects)
Physical disturbances associated with poltergeist cases
Reports of psychically induced electrical or mechanical effects
Historical Context
Reports of Macro-PK have appeared in:
Spiritualist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Claims surrounding Prophet Ted Owens, who attributed large-scale weather and societal effects to interactions with non-human intelligences.
Scientific Perspective
Macro-PK remains highly controversial. While numerous eyewitness accounts and case reports exist, mainstream controversial science has not accepted Macro-PK as a demonstrated phenomenon because:
Mainstream controversial science has not accepted Macro-PK , because they can not or do not want to accept it. Not being able to explain a fact, does not make it false.
Controlled replications have been difficult but in many instances successful.
Alternative explanations such as it being real, misperception, suggestion, coincidence, fraud, or methodological weaknesses often cannot be ruled out.
No widely accepted physical mechanism explains how consciousness could directly produce such effects, but it is a fact.
Some individuals claim to possess psychokinetic (PK) abilities but are unable to demonstrate them. These individuals may be fraudsters who deceive others into believing they have genuine PK powers.
Within parapsychology, Macro-PK is often considered the most dramatic category of psychokinetic claims because it involves effects that, if conclusively demonstrated under controlled conditions, would have major implications for our understanding of consciousness and physical reality.
Pip: Liberty Psychological Association — where the unconscious mind, the words we choose, and the people who disappear without texting back all get equal billing.
Mara: Shervan K Shahhian at Liberty Psychological Association covers a lot of ground this week — conscious versus unconscious processing, how language shapes perception and identity, the psychology of ghosting, and what it means to feel a movement before you make it.
Pip: Let’s start with the foundational stuff — what the mind actually is, and why most of it is running without your permission.
The Conscious and Unconscious Mind
Mara: The post on conscious versus unconscious mind lays out a core distinction: one is the spotlight, the other is everything the spotlight isn’t hitting.
Pip: The post puts it plainly: “The conscious mind is what you know you are thinking. The unconscious mind is the vast amount of mental activity influencing you outside awareness.”
Mara: So the unconscious isn’t mystical — it’s automatic habits, implicit memory, emotional conditioning, all the processing that happens before conscious thought catches up. Modern neuroscience supports that framing.
Pip: Which connects directly to anxiety among college students — a lot of what drives that anxiety operates the same way, beneath deliberate awareness.
Mara: Right. And the labeling post adds another layer: when we assign a name to a diagnosis or emotion, that label itself shapes how the mind processes the experience — for better or worse.
Pip: The language we use turns out to do more work than most people realize — which is exactly where things get interesting.
Words That Shape Reality
Mara: The post on hypnotic language opens up a question: how much of what words do to us happens without us noticing?
Pip: The post defines it directly: “Hypnotic language is a way of using words to guide attention, influence internal experience, and increase suggestibility, may often be without the listener fully noticing how it’s happening.”
Mara: What that means in practice is that techniques like embedded suggestions, presuppositions, and pacing work because they route around conscious filtering — the conscious mind hears a casual statement while something else is already being processed underneath.
Pip: It’s the linguistic equivalent of the unconscious mind doing its thing — and it’s not limited to therapy rooms.
Mara: The post on person-first language — “they have schizophrenia” versus “they are schizophrenic” — shows exactly that. A single word choice either fuses someone’s identity with a diagnosis or holds those two things apart. That’s real influence, no trance required.
Mara: And the labeling post extends this further: labels can clarify and guide treatment, but they can also calcify into self-concept. Someone who internalizes “I’m broken” as a fixed identity is experiencing the same mechanism — language shaping the internal world.
Pip: So whether it’s a hypnotic script or a diagnostic shorthand, the words land somewhere below the surface.
Mara: That same dynamic — avoidance, silence, the absence of words — shows up in a very different context next.
Ghosting and the Psychology of Disappearing
Pip: Ghosting is the subject here — not just what it is, but what it reveals about the person doing it.
Mara: The post on ghosting frames the core tension clearly: “Being ghosted may feel confusing because there’s no closure. Usually, the healthiest approach is to avoid chasing indefinitely, assume the silence is an answer, and move forward.”
Pip: The upshot is that ghosting is almost always about the ghoster’s coping limits — conflict avoidance, avoidant attachment, overwhelm — not a verdict on the person being ghosted.
Mara: A companion post on ghost movement takes the concept in a different direction — the perceptual experience of sensing motion that isn’t there, driven by hypervigilance or pattern recognition in ambiguous environments. It’s a reminder that absence and ambiguity both prompt the mind to fill in the gaps.
Pip: Whether it’s a person going silent or a shadow at the edge of vision, the mind insists on finding meaning. From disappearing people to the felt sense of movement itself.
Feeling Movement From the Inside
Mara: Kinesthetic imagery is the focus here — specifically, what it means to feel a movement rather than just picture it.
Pip: The post defines the distinction precisely: “Kinesthetic imagery is a form of mental imagery where you feel a movement rather than just see it in your mind. Instead of picturing an action like a movie, you internally simulate the sensations, muscle tension, balance, timing, weight, and motion.”
Mara: The reason this works is neurological — kinesthetic imagery activates some of the same motor planning pathways as actual movement. The mind can practice without the body executing. That has real applications in sports performance, rehabilitation, and reducing performance anxiety.
Pip: It also connects back to the ghost movement post — athletes describe kinesthetic rehearsal as a ghost movement happening inside the body. The same perceptual machinery that misfires under hypervigilance is the one elite performers deliberately engage.
Mara: And the post notes it pairs well with attentional guidance and automaticity training — essentially installing movement patterns below the threshold of conscious effort.
Pip: So this week’s territory runs from the unconscious architecture of the mind, through the words that quietly reshape it, all the way to the body rehearsing movements it hasn’t made yet.
Mara: The thread connecting all of it is how much consequential processing happens outside deliberate awareness — and how much the language we use, or withhold, shapes what surfaces.
Pip: More from Liberty Psychological Association next time.
Pip: Liberty Psychological Association has been quietly building what it calls the most comprehensive online library on mental health, psychology, and parapsychology in the world which is either an ambitious mission statement or a very confident filing system.
Mara: Shervan K Shahhian and Liberty Psychological Association cover a lot of ground here experimental parapsychology, the strange overlap between UAPs and consciousness, and what grief research looks like when you add anomalous experience to the mix. Let’s start with the core concepts telepathy, psychokinesis, and what the evidence actually shows.
Experimental Parapsychology: What the Evidence Shows
Pip: The post on experimental research in telepathy, psychokinesis, and skin vision is essentially asking a deceptively simple question: can the mind reach beyond the body, and what happens when scientists try to test that under controlled conditions?
Mara: The post draws a careful three-layer distinction, and this is the spine of it: “Phenomenological reality people do report meaningful telepathic or PK-like experiences. Experimental signal weak, inconsistent statistical anomalies sometimes appear. Established mechanism still absent in accepted science.”
Pip: So the honest answer is: something shows up in the data, occasionally, but nothing that survives the full gauntlet of replication. That gap between experience and mechanism is where most of the debate lives.
Mara: The Ganzfeld studies post goes deep on exactly that. Receivers in sensory-reduced environments halved ping-pong balls over the eyes, white noise in headphones attempted to identify a target image a sender was focusing on in another room. Hit rates around 32 percent were reported, above the 25 percent chance baseline, and a 1994 meta-analysis by Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton concluded results support a real but weak psi effect. Critics pointed to sensory leakage and the file-drawer problem.
Pip: Thirty two percent doesn’t sound like much until you remember that “chance” is the floor, not the ceiling.
Mara: The post on psychic phenomena gives the broader taxonomy telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, remote viewing, mediumship and notes that the Parapsychological Association continues to investigate these questions. Table levitations get their own treatment too, traced back to 19th-century spiritualist séances and explained most plausibly through the ideomotor effect, where unconscious muscle movements across multiple participants combine into noticeable motion.
Mara: The targeting mechanism of awareness post approaches this from the neuroscience side how the mind selects and stabilizes specific information from a flood of input, through salience detection, attentional orientation, and meta-awareness. In parapsychology contexts, that targeting capacity is framed as trainable, analogous to intentional tuning toward non-local information.
Pip: And then there’s the Super-Psi model, which proposes that all anomalous information in cases like apparitions or mediumship could come from the unconscious psi of living people no spirits required. The catch, as critics note, is that a theory explaining everything explains nothing testable.
Mara: The non-human intelligences post rounds this out NHIs are hypothesized entities believed by some researchers to interact with people through psychic means, associated with experiences ranging from apparitions to UAP encounters. No scientific consensus, but the concept sits at the intersection of several threads this library takes seriously.
Pip: Which brings us somewhere interesting because UAPs and consciousness turn out to share more conceptual territory than you might expect.
UAPs, Consciousness, and the Space Between
Pip: The UAP and paranormal post lays out several interpretive frameworks for why unidentified aerial phenomena and experiences like telepathy or altered states keep appearing in the same reports.
Mara: The consciousness-traveling post draws the clearest line between internal experience and extraordinary claim: “It’s tempting to interpret intense internal experiences as literal travel, but there’s a big difference between ‘It feels like I went somewhere’ versus ‘I actually left my body and traveled.'” The post holds that all reliable evidence supports the first.
Pip: That’s a useful anchor vivid doesn’t mean veridical.
Mara: Ted Owens, covered in a dedicated post, claimed telepathic contact with entities he called Space Intelligences, who he said enabled him to influence weather, electrical systems, and UFO appearances. Parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove investigated him for over a decade and argued the volume of documented predictions warranted serious attention. His case sits at the intersection of psychokinesis, UAP contact, and anomalous cognition unresolved, and still debated.
Mara: Grief and anomalous experience turn out to share some of the same interpretive questions which is where the next territory opens up.
Grief, Adaptation, and Anomalous Bereavement Experience
Pip: The posts on loss and bereavement are asking something that clinical psychology and parapsychology answer very differently: when a grieving person experiences the presence of someone who has died, what is actually happening?
Mara: The dynamic adaptation to loss post frames grief not as a sequence of stages but as an oscillation and puts it plainly: “It’s less about ‘getting over it’ and more about learning to live with it in a transformed way.” The dual process model describes healthy adaptation as moving back and forth between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented coping, never fixed in one.
Pip: That framing alone reframes a lot of how people judge their own grieving.
Mara: A companion post on the same topic reinforces the continuing bonds framework the idea that maintaining a transformed relationship with the deceased, through memory, ritual, and internal dialogue, is not a failure to grieve but part of healthy adaptation.
Mara: The bereavement research post goes further, noting that anomalous experiences after death sensing a presence, dream visitations, hearing a voice are reported consistently across cultures, rarely associated with mental illness, and often reduce grief rather than complicate it. Institutions like the Windbridge Research Center and the Division of Perceptual Studies study these systematically.
Pip: And the post comparing parapsychology with clinical psychology on exactly this terrain makes the interpretive split clear: clinical psychology asks what psychological process caused the experience, parapsychology asks whether it could carry genuine information beyond the known mechanisms of mind.
Mara: Both fields are increasingly willing to say that having an unusual experience is not the same as having a disorder the question is whether it causes distress or impairs functioning, not whether it fits a conventional explanation.
Pip: What ties all of this together is the same gap between what people report experiencing and what science can currently account for.
Mara: That gap is where parapsychology does its work. Next time, more from the library.
Large-Scale PK (Psychokinetic) Phenomena refers to alleged events in which mental intention is claimed to influence physical systems on a large scale, beyond small laboratory effects. In parapsychology, PK (psychokinesis) is the purported ability of consciousness to affect matter, energy, or physical processes without conventional physical interaction.
Examples of reported large scale PK phenomena may include:
1. Weather Modification
Some individuals have claimed the ability to influence storms, rainfall, cloud formation, or other weather systems through mental intention. One of the most famous figures associated with such claims was Ted Owens, who reported that non-human intelligences helped him produce weather anomalies.
2. Electrical and Technological Disturbances
Reports sometimes describe unusual effects on:
Power grids
Radio transmissions
Electronic devices
Communication systems
Researchers have occasionally referred to these as macro-PK claims when the effects are said to extend beyond localized environments.
3. Collective Consciousness Effects
Some researchers have explored whether large groups focusing attention on a common event could influence random physical systems. The best known example is the work of the Global Consciousness Project, which examined deviations in networks of random number generators during major world events.
4. Poltergeist Like Events
Certain parapsychologists have suggested that some dramatic physical disturbances, objects moving, loud knocks, or other unusual events, might represent spontaneous large scale PK generated unconsciously by individuals under stress. This remains highly controversial by some.
Scientific Perspective
Mainstream controversial science does not want to find conclusive evidence that large-scale PK exists. While there have been anecdotal reports and some experimental findings that parapsychologists consider suggestive, the evidence has generally met the standards of reliability, replication, and independent verification required for scientific acceptance.
Parapsychological Perspective
Within parapsychology, researchers may distinguish between:
Micro PK: Small effects on random systems, such as electronic random number generators.
Macro PK: Observable physical effects, such as object movement or large scale environmental changes.
Large Scale PK: Claims involving extensive systems, such as weather, technology networks, or societal scale effects.
For researchers interested in consciousness studies, large scale PK remains a speculative hypothesis rather than an established phenomenon. It is often discussed alongside topics such as remote viewing, psi research, anomalous cognition, and reports of non-human intelligences.
Table levitations (sometimes called table lifting or table tipping), they are phenomena reported in séances, spiritualist gatherings, and some parapsychology investigations in which a table appears to move, tilt, rock, rise, or occasionally lift off the floor without an obvious physical cause.
Historical Background
Table levitation may have became widely known during the 19th-century Spiritualist movement in the United States and Europe. Participants would sit around a table, place their hands lightly on it, and observe movements that some interpreted as communication from spirits.
Researchers and investigators, studied these claims that concluded, that many cases could be explained by unconscious muscular movements exerted by the participants.
Common Explanations
Psychological Explanation
The most widely accepted explanation is the ideomotor effect.
People can produce small muscle movements without being consciously aware of doing so.
When several individuals are touching a table, these tiny movements may combine and create noticeable motion.
Parapsychological Interpretation
Some parapsychologists have suggested that certain cases may involve psychokinesis (PK), the purported ability of the mind to influence physical objects.
Reports of table levitations are sometimes discussed alongside research into telekinesis and other psychic phenomena.
Spiritualist Interpretation
Spiritualists traditionally viewed table levitation as evidence of communication with spirits or non-physical intelligences.
What Has Research Found?
While many reports of table movement have been documented, controlled scientific studies have generally found that ordinary physical and psychological mechanisms may account for most observed cases. Clear, repeatable evidence for genuine levitation under rigorous laboratory conditions has been widely accepted by the Parapsychology community.
Difference Between Table Tipping and Table Levitation
Table Tipping: The table rocks, turns, or tilts while people are touching it.
Table Levitation: The table reportedly rises partially or completely off the ground.
In parapsychology literature, table levitation is often cited as a classic example of a reported psychokinetic phenomenon, though its interpretation remains controversial for some people.
Psychic phenomena: refers to experiences or abilities that appear to involve information, perception, or influence beyond what is currently explained by conventional scientific understanding.
Common examples include:
Telepathy: the claimed ability to perceive another person’s thoughts or mental states.
Clairvoyance: the alleged ability to obtain information about distant places, objects, or events without using the known senses.
Precognition: the purported ability to gain knowledge of future events before they occur.
Psychokinesis (PK): the claimed ability to influence physical objects or processes through mental intention alone.
Remote Viewing: a structured practice in which individuals attempt to describe distant or unseen targets without normal sensory access.
Mediumship: the claimed ability to communicate with deceased individuals or non-physical entities.
Scientific Perspective
The scientific study of psychic phenomena falls primarily within the field of Parapsychology.
Researchers have conducted experiments on telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, and remote viewing for over a century. Some studies have reported statistically unusual results, while many others have replicated those findings consistently. Because scientific knowledge depends heavily on reliable replication, psychic phenomena remain controversial within mainstream science.
Organizations such as the Parapsychological Association continue to investigate these questions, while many psychologists and neuroscientists: (Consult with a Neurologist), argue that existing evidence is sufficient to establish psychic abilities as proven facts.
Psychological Explanations
Many experiences interpreted as psychic may be influenced by normal psychological processes, including:
Pattern recognition
Intuition based on unconscious information processing
Selective memory
Confirmation bias
Coincidence
Emotional sensitivity to subtle social cues
For example, a person may accurately “sense” that a friend is distressed because they unconsciously noticed changes in tone, behavior, or communication patterns rather than through telepathy.
Parapsychological Perspective
Parapsychologists generally distinguish between:
Anecdotal evidence: (personal experiences and reports)
Experimental evidence: (laboratory studies)
Some researchers believe that consciousness may possess capacities not yet fully understood and that certain psychic phenomena, could represent genuine but unfourtntly poorly understood aspects of human experience.
A Balanced Definition
A neutral definition would be:
Psychic phenomena are experiences or alleged abilities involving the acquisition of information or influence that appear to occur outside the currently recognized mechanisms of the six senses or known physical processes.
Whether psychic phenomena represent undiscovered capacities of consciousness, misunderstood psychological processes, coincidence, or a combination of factors remains an open question and an active subject of debate among researchers, psychologists, philosophers, and parapsychologists.
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