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Parapsychology & Psychic Phenomena

About this category

Parapsychology and psychic phenomena is the category of the claimed faculty: seven practices whose premise is that perception and action can reach beyond the senses' reach, the telepath's mind-to-mind contact, the remote viewer's distant target, the psychokinetic's bent spoon. Its entries are the library's most experiment-dense, a century of controlled testing behind them: the card experiments and their frauds, the Ganzfeld debates, the government program's twenty million dollars, and the replication record that the field's honest chroniclers state plainly.

The category's shape is that the practices are real communities with real training, the remote viewing's protocol schools and the psychic development circles, while the effects they claim sit at the edge of what experiments can resolve, the meta-analyses' small positives against the skeptic population's nulls. The entries present both records without verdicts, the practitioners' experience and the laboratory's findings, and they keep the fraud history, the exposures and the confessions, in the record rather than edited out.

What unites them is the claim's stakes: these are the practices whose truth or falsity matters most, and whose testing has been most thorough. The category's counsel: the training is the practice's real product, attention and awareness disciplines valuable whatever the psi verdict; test claims before believing them, the field's own standards being the guide; and the history of this category is the history of the question, worth reading in its own right. Start with the remote viewing protocols as a discipline, and hold the ontology loose.