Discovery Lab Answers

Explaining Psi to a Child

Psi is a word scientists use for something unusual that doesn’t have an ordinary explanation yet. It refers to the idea that sometimes people might know things or sense things without using their eyes, ears, or the normal five senses.

Think of it this way: you already know that radio waves are invisible and travel through the air, and your radio picks them up. Psi is kind of like that — except instead of a radio picking up waves, it might be a person’s mind picking up information in a way we don’t fully understand.

There are a few types of psi that researchers study:

• Telepathy — when one person might know what another person is thinking, even when they’re far apart.
• Precognition — when someone might know something about the future before it happens.
• Clairvoyance — when someone might know something about a place or object without seeing it normally.

Scientists run careful experiments to test whether psi is real. They give people puzzles to solve, or pictures to guess, or things to know about, and they check whether people get more right answers than they would by pure luck or chance. Some experiments show results that look like psi might be real; other experiments don’t find anything. That’s why scientists are still studying it — the answer isn’t settled yet.

The important thing to know is that ESP-Nexus takes no position on whether psi is real. The scientists’ job is just to test it carefully and honestly, report what they find, and let people make up their own minds.

If you want to explore more, the Phenomena section on ESP-Nexus has pages on ganzfeld experiments and other research methods scientists use to study psi.