Part of a series on the |
Paranormal |
---|
Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (also called telekinesis), and psychometry) and other paranormal claims, for example, those related to near-death experiences, synchronicity, apparitional experiences, etc.[1] Criticized as being a pseudoscience, the majority of mainstream scientists reject it.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Parapsychology has also been criticized by mainstream critics for claims by many of its practitioners that their studies are plausible despite a lack of convincing evidence after more than a century of research for the existence of any psychic phenomena.[1][10][11]
Parapsychology research rarely appears in mainstream scientific journals; a few niche journals publish most papers about parapsychology.[12]
This article is part of a series on |
Alternative medicine |
---|
![]() |
The lure of the 'para'-normal emerges, it seems, from the belief that there is more to our existence than can be accounted for in terms of flesh, blood, atoms, and molecules. A century and a half of parapsychological research has failed to yield evidence to support that belief.
The overwhelming majority of scientists consider parapsychology, by whatever name, to be pseudoscience.
Parapsychology has failed to gain general scientific acceptance even for its improved methods and claimed successes, and it is still treated with a lopsided ambivalence among the scientific community. Most scientists write it off as pseudoscience unworthy of their time.
Many observers refer to the field as a 'pseudoscience'. When mainstream scientists say that the field of parapsychology is not scientific, they mean that no satisfying naturalistic cause-and-effect explanation for these supposed effects has yet been proposed and that the field's experiments cannot be consistently replicated.
We consider [questionable research practices] in the context of a meta-analysis database of Ganzfeld–telepathy experiments from the field of experimental parapsychology. The Ganzfeld database is particularly suitable for this study, because the parapsychological phenomenon it investigates is widely believed to be nonexistent ... results are still significant (p = 0.003) with QRPs.
Today, parapsychology is not taken seriously by most academics.
Cordón
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).If parapsychologists can convince the skeptics, then they will have satisfied an essential criterion of a genuine science: the ability to replicate hypotheses in any and all laboratories and under standard experimental conditions. Until they can do that, their claims will continue to be held suspect by a large body of scientists.
Mainstream science is on the whole very dubious about ESP, and the only way that most scientists will be persuaded is by a demonstration that can be generally reproduced by neutral or even skeptical scientists. This is something that parapsychology has never succeeded in producing.