ESP stands for Extrasensory Perception: a set of hypothetical abilities including telepathy (reading another mind), clairvoyance (perceiving distant objects or events), precognition (sensing future events) and psychokinesis (physically influencing with the mind). The ESP test is a playful tool that evaluates how often your answers match a random option generated by the system, replicating in simplified form the Zener cards J. B. Rhine used in the 1930s.
In the 1930s American parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, working at Duke University, developed a set of 25 cards called "Zener" after colleague Karl Zener: five symbols (circle, cross, wave, square, star) repeated five times each. In an ESP test, the experimenter looks at a card and the subject tries to guess the symbol. By pure chance, you would expect 20% correct (5 symbols of 25): results significantly above this, over many trials, are interpreted as possible ESP capability.
The tool shows a sequence of attempts: for each, you choose between five symbols without seeing them. At the end it compares your answers with the randomly drawn symbols and calculates the score: how many times you guessed, the average expected by chance, by how much you deviated. It also shows a small statistical index (the probability the result is due to chance) as a reading game.
Rhine s research was among the first to bring parapsychology to universities. Later studies have tried to replicate his results with mixed outcomes. Some groups (PEAR at Princeton, work by Daryl Bem) reported statistically significant deviations; others (Susan Blackmore, Ray Hyman, James Randi) showed that many positive effects are attributable to methodological errors, fraud or misinterpretation. The scientific community today does not consider ESP a confirmed phenomenon.
Extrasensory Perception. Includes telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and sometimes psychokinesis.
No. Four out of ten with five symbols means 40%, but in 10 trials the variability is very high: this result is perfectly compatible with chance. Hundreds or thousands of trials would be needed to speak of statistical evidence.
There is no scientific evidence that ESP is a trainable ability. What changes with practice is attention, sensitivity to intuition and relaxation in the decision process.