Glossary

Common terms for words used
on this site.

Abandonware :

Games that are at least
five years old and not sold by
companies anymore.
They are generaly considered
illegal but the copywrite has expired.
Sometimes the game company re-issues the game
as a classic and then it is not abandonware anymore.

Apparition :

the visual manifestation of a
deceased person (commonly referred to as a
'ghost') or of a living person, known to be
beyond the sensory range of the percipient.

astral projection :

see out-of-body experience

clairvoyance :

knowledge of external objects or
events without the use of the physical senses.

ESP :

extra-sensory perception; knowledge of
an external event without the intermediary of any
of the known senses. ESP includes the
phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance, and
precognition.

forced-choice procedure :

a test in which the
subject must try to select
the ESP target from a
predefined set of known possibilities
(e.g., the five symbols of ESP cards).

Ganzfeld :

(German for "uniform or whole field").
A sensory-deprivation protocol for inducing a
state of consciousness between wakefulness
and sleep; in parapsychology, the ganzfeld is
typically used in association with telepathy
experiments.

out-of-body experience (OBE):

a spontaneous or intentionally induced experience in which the
person feels their consciousness to be located
elsewhere than where their body is located; in
the esoteric literature, referred to as astral
projection.

paradigm :

a system of scientific interpretation
which is embedded in a cultural worldview and
implicitly favors certain ways of carrying out and
evaluating scientific research.

paranormal :

phenomena which seem to go
beyond known laws of cause and effect;
frequently used as a synonym to
parapsychological or psychic.

parapsychology :

scientific domain dealing with
phenomena which cannot be explained by the
known laws of physics or biology; the modern
equivalent of psychical research.

PK :

see psychokinesis.

placebo effect :

a cure or alleviation of
symptoms following an intervention which the
patient believes to be effective against the
ailment, but which, in fact, is completely neutral
(e.g., a sugar pill). Such effects seem to based on
the person's own self-healing capacity, which is
triggered by the belief that they are receiving an
active medication.

precognition :

knowledge of a future event
which could not have been predicted or inferred
by normal means.

projective psi :

psi phenomena which imply an
influence of the person on the external world -
e.g., as an agent influencing another person's
thoughts, in telepathy, or the state of biological
or inanimate systems, in PK.

psi :

generic term for person-environment
interactions which cannot be understood on the
basis of known sensory, mechanical or
energetic systems. Psi can be both projective
(PK) and receptive (ESP).

psi-games :

computer psi tests resembling
games (e.g., video games).

psychic healing :

the healing of one person by
another, when this is brought about by purely
mental means, i.e., without the use of any known
mechanical, chemical or energetic means.

psychokinesis (PK) :

mental influence upon an
object, a process, or a system, without the use of
any known mechanism or energy. PK includes:
bio-PK : influencing living systems, whether
humans, animals, plants or micro-organisms.
macro-PK : directly observable, large-scale
influence upon objects. micro-PK : influencing
the statistical behavior of random systems, such
as dice or electronic noise.

psychometry :

the apparent ability of certain
psychics to describe the history of a particular
object and of people with which it has been in
contact simply by holding that object.

receiver :

the person who functions as the
receptive pole in a psi interaction (i.e., picking up
information from another person, in telepathic
exchanges).

receptive psi :

psi phenomena in which the
person receives some information from the
environment, or from other people, without the
use of any of the known senses. Receptive psi
generally refers to ESP, and may include either
real-time phenomena (clairvoyance, telepathy) or
time-displaced phenomena (precognition,
retrocognition).

remote viewing :

ESP information identifying a
physical location or object at a distance from the
receiver. Sometimes used synonymously to
clairvoyance, it could actually involve any ESP
capacity (telepathy, clairvoyance or
precognition.)

run :

a series of trials in an ESP or PK test, often
constituting the unit of statistical measurement ;
in an ESP-card test a run consists of 25 trials.

sender :

in experiments, the person viewing the
target-image which a remotely located receiver is
supposed to describe.

sheep-goat effect :

a tendency towards
divergent psi test scores (sometimes statistically
significant ones) according to whether the
subjects believe in psi or not: 'goats', who doubt
the existence or pertinence of psi, tend tend to
score negatively on psi-tests, whereas 'sheep'
tend to score positively.

statistical significance :

a result is said to be
significant when there is no more than a 5%
chance that the same result could have been
produced by random fluctuations. This is
expressed as p = .05 .

subject :

the person who is tested for psi in
parapsychological experiments. The term refers
to the person considered responsible for any
observed psi effects; e.g., in a telepathy
experiment, the subject is the receiver, whereas
in a 'psychic healing' experiment, it is the one
who acts as healer.

subliminal perception :

perceptions registered
below the threshold of awareness or
consciousness.

spritualism :

a quasi-religious popular
movement which developed in the 18th and 19th
centuries, and which held that the soul survives
bodily death, and that the living can
communicate with the spirits of the deceased.

target :

in ESP, the object or event which the
receiver tries to guess (image-targets,
card-targets, location-targets, etc.); in PK, the
object, process, or system which the subject
tries to influence.

telepathy :

an exchange of information between
two people without any known sensory or
energetic interaction.

trial :

the experimental unit of a test; for example,
in an RNG/computer test, a single click on the
button; in an ESP-card test, a single guess of the
hidden target-card.

Zener cards :

synonymous to ESP cards; a deck
of 25 cards made up of 5 different symbols
(circle, square, cross, star, waves). Used for
telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition
experiments.

Since this pages creation
8/31/98

© 1998 -Webmaster-