Anpsi: examining if animals have psychokinetic powers.
Autoganzfeld: the system automatically randomises the targets and records the responses, thus eliminating human error and experimenter effects. Also, the entire experimenter procedure is automated, making replication even easier!
Clairvoyance: comes from the French clair, meaning clear, and voyance, meaning visibility. The term refers to a supernatural power to see objects, etc. that cannot be perceived by the usual senses.
Coincidence: an occurrence of two or more events happening at the same time by mere chance.
Deception: Hyman (1989, p. 133) defines deception as “. . . an agent acts or speaks so as to induce a false belief in a target or victim.”
Electrohypersensitivity: electromagnetic “pollution” causes anomalous experiences, especially ghosts and alien visitations.
Extra-sensory perception: refers to an ability to acquire knowledge and information without the use of our five main senses (sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell) or from any previous experiences. It is a general term that encompasses things like telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyant abilities.
Fantasy proneness: a personality trait where a person is prone to fantasising and having a vivid imagination.
File–drawer effect: the term given to the number of studies that must have been undertaken giving nonsignificant results that have not been published (and are in a file drawer somewhere) to render a metaanalysis nonsignificant.
Ganzfeld procedure: in a typical procedure, participants are placed in a room and allowed to relax on a comfortable chair. Halved ping-pong balls are placed over their eyes and a red light is shone into their face.
Also, they wear headphones that play them white noise so that they experience mild sensory deprivation.
Near-death experience: the perception reported by someone who was clinically dead but revived or nearly died (this is the crucial difference between this and out of body experiences—the latter can occur in nonlife threatening situations).
Out-of-body experience: refers to instances when a person believes that they have had a sensation of floating out of their own body and being able to see their own body and the environment surrounding it.
Pseudoscience: refers to when a belief, e.g. in some parapsychological phenomenon, is based on a body of knowledge or “evidence” that appears to be scientific. However, on closer inspection, this may not be the case as it does not adhere to scientific principles or methods.
Psychic healing: Benor (1995, p. 234) defines psychic healing as “. . . the intentional influence of one or more people upon one or more living system without utilising known physical means of intervention.”
Psychic mediumship: refers to a type of relationship that a living person says they have with spirits.
Mediums tend to claim that they can communicate with spirits and pass on messages to loved ones “left behind” in the “earthly” world.
Psychokinesis: derives from the Greek words psyche, meaning mind and kinesis, which means movement.
Therefore, “psychokinesis” literally means mind movement! This reportedly occurs when the mind can supposedly affect matter, space, time, or energy in a way that cannot be explained by the current laws of physics.
Self-deception: when we mislead ourselves to accept as true what is most likely false. Some psychologists believe it is a way we can justify false beliefs.
Sheep–goat effect: refers to belief in the paranormal. A sheep is a believer and a goat is a non-believer.
Statistical significance: the idea that the results from a study are not due to chance but by the manipulation of an independent variable (in an experiment) or that two variables are truly correlated. Conventional significance is set at p _ 0.05, this is, there is a 5% probability that results could be due to chance. A level below this means that the results are statistically significant.
Superstition: a belief or notion that is not based on reason or knowledge that highlights the “significance” of some behaviour to the individual.
Telepathy: apparent communication from one mind to another.
Temporal Lobe Lability Hypothesis: an idea that stimulation of the temporal lobes of the brain cause anomalistic experiences.