levite

Yeah, spoon bending is, generally speaking, a crock.

That said, I do believe in ESP, and I have seen it at work. I think probably everyone has at least some potential to develop Esper abilities, and many of us probably have a number of ESP spikes that we write off to coincidence (which, I am terribly sorry, my dear Will, but I believe to be the word in Rationalist for "I don't like your explanation for this, but I can't explain it myself."), such as flashes of precognition or retrocognition that we ascribe to "deja vu," or moments of telepathic or empathic connection with others that we call "synchronicity," or instances of telekinetic outbursts that we chalk up to "hysterical strength."

That said, I have met a number of people who, using the focus attained from many years of meditation, yoga, tai chi, etc., have been able to sense something of the flow of thoughts in others via touching them, including myself. Granted, there was generally not a high level of specificity in their comments, but it was better than most. Charlatans will generally examine you carefully while they pretend to read your thoughts, so that they can note your reactions and read your body language. Nearly all the folks I am talking about here worked with their eyes closed. Charlatans generally start extremely vague (e.g. "You're thinking about someone close to you.") and these folks tended to go right for more specific reactions (e.g. "You're picturing someone. A girl. With blond hair. You liked her a lot, a long time ago."), and were almost always correct to this level. Prodding them to be more specific (e.g. "Yes, I am. What was her name, and where did I know her?") produced results which varied a lot more in correctness, but I believe were still, on average, on the plus side of 50%, meaning that technically, they were still correct more often than random chance should dictate.

I have encountered at least one genuine telekinetic, who begged me never to reveal his secret to anyone I didn't trust implicitly, lest he end up a government lab rat. In several random settings-- places he could have had no way of knowing we would end up, and thus could not have arranged any kind of trickery-- I saw him move small objects short distances by concentrating on them. His hands were in plain view the entire time, and most of the objects were non-metallic-- salt shakers, coffee cups, cassette tapes (this was quite a while ago), pencils, and suchlike-- and could not have been manipulated by magnets.

I knew one set of twins (fraternal) who could apparently effect clairvoyant or telepathic contact with one another, with varying degrees of success. On their good days, you could give him a word, or even a simple sentence, in the basement of their house, and she could write it out simultaneously in the attic.

My guess is that telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition are all functions of the primal shared consciousness human beings have at the level more or less akin to what Jung would call the Collective Unconscious. The precognition I assume is not a "vision" of "the future" but a mental construction of what the local unconscious is able to posit as an instinctive calculation of probabilities concerning possible future outcomes of events. This is then tapped into by the individual, resulting in a mental picture utilizing data not necessarily readily available to the individual at a conscious level, thus appearing magical.

In any case, we know too little about the workings of the brain, or the ways in which we process bioelectricity and other energies, to dismiss the possibility that there are senses, or aspects of senses, yet unexplained.

__________________
Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)