The inner life
Extrasensory Perception
Direct answer
Extrasensory Perception: Extrasensory perception, ESP for short, is the claimed gaining of knowledge without the use of the known senses. J. B. Rhine made it the common name for telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition in 1934.
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At a glance
- Also called
- ESP, extra-sensory perception, sixth sense
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Precognition, Zener Cards
Extrasensory perception, ESP for short, is the claimed gaining of knowledge without the use of the known senses. J. B. Rhine made it the common name for telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition in 1934.
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What does ESP stand for?
Extrasensory perception is an umbrella term. It gathers three claims: telepathy, knowledge of another mind; clairvoyance, knowledge of a hidden object or distant scene; and precognition, knowledge of a future event. What they share is negative: the knowledge is said not to come through sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell, nor by reasoning from what those give.
That definition is the weakness of the idea as well as its meaning. ESP is whatever is left when ordinary explanations have been ruled out, so every test turns on whether they truly were. Much of the history of the research is the finding of ordinary channels that had been missed: cards read from the back, scores miscounted, cues in a transcript.
On the tree of the hidden arts: The sixth sense.
What sets Extrasensory Perception apart
The term is defined by what it leaves out. Nothing in it says how the knowledge arrives, only that the eyes, ears and other senses were not the route. So a result counts as ESP only after every ordinary route has been closed, and the standing objection to any positive finding is that one was left open. Rhine chose the phrase to sound like a branch of the study of perception, and it gave the field its three initials.
- Popularised: J. B. Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception, 1934
- Covers: telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition
- Leaves out: psychokinesis, which is acting and not perceiving
- Wider label: psi, proposed in 1942 by Robert Thouless and B. P. Wiesner
- Common test: guessing twenty-five Zener cards, five expected by chance
Often mistaken for something else: A sixth sense is the everyday phrase and often means no more than a sharp hunch; ESP is the technical claim that knowledge came by no sense at all.
The story behind Extrasensory Perception
The phrase was used in German and French before Rhine, who took it as the title of his monograph of 1934 and so fixed it in English. His tests at Duke University used the Zener cards. Popular writers soon made ESP a household word and attached it to the older notion of a sixth sense. Researchers later preferred the broader label psi, which also covers psychokinesis.
Why Extrasensory Perception matters
Extrasensory Perception is the word under which the whole question entered science and ordinary speech, so its exact scope is worth knowing.
How to read Extrasensory Perception
Writers reach for it for any knowing that seems to skip the senses; in the laboratory it means a score above chance with every ordinary channel closed.
Extrasensory Perception in practice: an example
A card guesser scores seven right in twenty-five where five are expected. Whether that is ESP depends on hundreds more runs and on who could see what.
Where readings of Extrasensory Perception go wrong
A lucky run in a guessing game is expected by chance alone, and is no sign of a gift.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- ESP, extra-sensory perception, ESP meaning, sixth sense
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What does ESP stand for?
Extrasensory perception: knowledge said to be gained without the known senses. The initials were made popular by the work of J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s.
What are the kinds of ESP?
Three are usually listed. Telepathy is knowledge of what another person is thinking, clairvoyance is knowledge of a hidden or distant thing, and precognition is knowledge of an event before it happens.
Is ESP the same as intuition?
No. Intuition, as psychologists study it, is fast recognition built on experience and works through the ordinary senses. ESP is defined as knowing that does not come through the senses at all.
