Are psychic abilities real?

No claimed ability has produced an effect that survives independent replication. Several have been tested carefully — the ganzfeld experiments and the AWARE study among them — and that is worth more than an opinion.

What is the baseline in a psychic experiment?

In the ganzfeld protocol the subject picks one image of four, so guessing blind scores 25%. Any claimed hit rate means nothing until you know that number, and popular articles almost never print it.

Which ability has the strongest evidence?

Mediumship, under the quintuple-blind designs used by the Windbridge Institute — and even there the samples are small and outside replication is thin.

Is being an empath the same thing?

Partly. Emotional contagion is real, replicated and works through face, voice and posture. What has not been shown is the version that works without them.

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.

The number every article leaves out

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

Ability	The claim	Status
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 and 9 described leaving their bodies and looking down.

Not one of them reported a target.

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 →

Psychic abilities

Guessing blind scores 25%

All 11, and what happened when they were tested

The single most informative experiment