Extrasensory Perception
Published by Alex Gineitis on Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 10:46 AM
The novel Slan by A. E. van Vogt has become a science-fiction classic. First serialized in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction in 1940, the story relates the adventures of a boy with telepathic powers and his conflicts with nontelepathic adversaries.
Telepathy has become a staple of science fiction and is taken for granted as a power of the mind in many novels and films. But is it real?
Telepathy belongs to a larger category of phenomena called extrasensory perception. Extrasensory perception, or ESP, is the capacity to be aware of external events without the use of one of the conventional senses such as vision or hearing.
ESP is referred to as the sixth sense, but there are at least seven readily identified senses. ESP should more accurately be called the eighth sense.
