Countless movies, stories, and tales have spun gold out of the concept of extrasensory perception (often referred to as ESP). Consider popular television shows and films like Medium and The Sixth Sense. People are fascinated with the paranormal Ouija boards and tarot card readings, once considered taboo and even somewhat dark are now popular games sold in Toys R Us. But with all this talk and publicity, much of the origin and science of extrasensory perception has been obscured. The actual definition of extrasensory perception is the ability to acquire information by means other than the five canonical senses (taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing), or any other sense well-known to science (balance, proprioception, etc), but there are several different types of ESP, as well as interpretations of it.
Before getting into all the different ideas and challenges associated with extrasensory perception, let’s first consider the history of ESP. The concept itself goes way back, far before popular culture turned it into a cultural phenomenon of sorts. In fact, in many past cultures (i.e. ancient China and Egypt), it was simply expected that people could communicate...