Test Your ESP with a Psychic Test!

When asked to take a psychic test, you may be faced with a variety of tests.  Claiming to be psychic is very easy but proving it tends to be difficult.  You may be faced with Zener cards, a deck of playing cards or a book.  And do you have precognition or telepathy?  Or is it clairvoyance.  Conducting a psychic test can also be difficult, as there is always a margin of error based on a really good guess.

In defining a psychic test, it is important to know what you are testing for.  Precognition is discerning future information.  Clairvoyance is referring to the ability to gain information thru means other than the known human senses.  Clairvoyance is often related to remote viewing and outside of parapsychology it is most commonly used to refer to the perception of past or future events and communications with the dead.  Telepathy is pretty much the same thing as clairvoyance but is not connected with remote viewing or communications with the dead.  A person with telepathy is able to read the thoughts and stored information in the brain of others.

The first psychic test is the use of Zener Cards.  There are just five different Zener cards: a hollow circle, a Greek Cross, three vertical wavy lines (or just waves), a hollow square and a hollow five-pointed star.  There are five cards of each design in a pack.  These cards are used to test for clairvoyance.  The experimenter (person conducting the test) will shuffle a deck, observe the symbol and notate the answer of the person being tested until the entire deck has been used.  In this type of test, it is very important that the subject cannot see the any cards and does not receive any vocal or visual clues from the experimenter.  In some cases, a physical barrier can be placed between the experimenter and the subject.  These cards can also be used to test for telepathy; in which case one subject will draw a card and attempt to project the image on it from their mind to the mind of the other subject.

The deck of cards psychic test is a little more complicated.  It too test for precognition and telepathy but can also be used to test clairvoyance.  When using a deck of cards, the subject has to correctly guess the suit and number on the card.  As with the Zener Cards, you run into the potential of the examiner giving subtle visual clues so using a physical barrier between the two people is best.  Additionally, the experimenter must be careful about the deck of cards used.  There are decks where the back of the cards have a pattern which can be determined to have a top and bottom.  If the subject prints in their own deck, you run the risk of having a stacked deck.  Additionally, seven cards can be used as a “pointer card” because of the placement of the seventh marking as the marking is always on one side or the other of the median line.

Using a book as a psychic test can be a little more tricky.  A standard test involves an experimenter, a participant (usually a randomly selected volunteer) and a subject.  The experimenter gives a book to the participant and asks that person to open the book to any page and choose a word.  They are then instructed to concentrate on this word without any kind of communication.  The subject must be able to identify the chose word to pass the test.  This particular psychic test is used to test precognition and telepathy.  Testing for telepathy is far more common on this test, as a subject claiming to have precognition could just guess the answer.  Books are used because they are a convenient way of finding a random word and the test is easily repeated.  If a participant were simply asked to think of a word, the experimenter can run into cultural and gender biases.  For example, females of a certain culture may be more likely to pick a certain set of words so someone who always tested with Chinese men could potentially have a greater success rate than someone who tested with a wide range of participants.