11 abilities · what was tested, and how it went

Psychic abilities

Eleven abilities people claim, each with the experiment actually run on it — the study, the sample size and the result. Seven were tested and failed replication, three have never been tested as distinct abilities at all, and one is still argued over. That is a more useful map than "how to develop your gift", and nobody else in this subject prints it.

Each claimed ability, and what the tests found: medium, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, clairsentience, clairaudience, psychometry, empathy, astral projection, healing and aura reading.

Psychic Abilities: What Each One Claims, and What Was Actually Tested

The number every article leaves out

Guessing blind scores 25%

25% is the baseline in the ganzfeld protocol — one image chosen from four. Any claimed hit rate means nothing until you know it.
7 of the 11 were tested and did not survive independent replication.
3 have never been tested as separate abilities — every protocol scores the answer, not the channel it arrived through.

Untested is not disproven, and we keep those apart. Psychometry has been available for testing since 1842 and has attracted almost none — that is a fact about the research, not about the claim.

All 11, and what happened when they were tested

AbilityThe claimStatus
Mediumship Receiving information from people who have died Tested, contested
Clairvoyance Seeing objects, places or events beyond the reach of the senses Tested, replication failed
Telepathy Transferring thought directly between minds Tested, indistinguishable from clairvoyance
Precognition Knowing an event before it occurs Tested, replication failed
Clairsentience Receiving information as a physical sensation rather than an image Never tested separately
Clairaudience Hearing voices or sounds beyond ordinary hearing Never tested separately
Psychometry Reading the history of an object by holding it Essentially untested
Psychic empathy Feeling other people's emotions directly, at a distance or without cues The ordinary version is real, the distance version is not shown
Astral projection Leaving the body and perceiving from outside it Tested, target never read
Psychic healing Improving health by intention, touch without contact, or prayer at a distance Tested at scale, no benefit found
Aura reading Seeing a coloured field around a person and reading it Tested, never passed

The single most informative experiment

Between 2008 and 2012 the AWARE study installed visual targets on high shelves in 15 hospitals — images that could only be read from near the ceiling. Across 2,060 cardiac arrests, 140 survivors were interviewed. Of the 101 who completed the detailed interview, 9 had near-death experiences and 2 described seeing or hearing real events during their resuscitation.

Neither reported a target. The one account that could be checked against events took place in an area where no shelf had been installed.

That is the shape of the whole field in one result: the experience is real, reportable and common enough to study, and the claim attached to it does not survive a shelf with a picture on it.

The full AWARE result →   Aura colours against the spectrum →