Discovery Lab Answers

Psi for a ten-year-old

Psi is a word for abilities that scientists study — like knowing what someone is thinking without them telling you, or knowing something is about to happen before it does. It’s like having a kind of invisible sense.

There are a few types:

Telepathy is when one person’s thoughts seem to reach another person’s mind without words or signals.

Precognition is when someone knows ahead of time what is going to happen — like dreaming about something that later comes true.

Clairvoyance is kind of like seeing or knowing about something far away that no one told you about.

Scientists test whether psi is real by running careful experiments. For example, they might ask people to guess which card will come up next, or what picture someone else is looking at in another room, and see if they guess right more often than just luck would predict.

Some experiments show results that look like psi might be happening. Other experiments don’t find anything. Scientists keep studying it to try to figure out what’s really going on — whether psi is real, or whether something else explains the results ^[2], ^[3], ^[5].

Nobody has proven that psi definitely exists, but it’s a real area of science that serious researchers study, especially in universities and labs that specialize in parapsychology.

If you want to explore more about how scientists test these ideas, the ESP-Nexus Phenomena section has pages about each type of psi ability.