Extrasensory perception paper published in respected journal

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology plans to print "Feeling The Future", by Professor Daryl Bem later this year, which presents what he claims is strong evidence for extrasensory perception (ESP).

Prof Bem, of Cornell University, New York, said the results of nine experiments he had carried out on students over the past decade suggested humans could accurately predict random events.

His peer-reviewed work was described as "pure craziness" and "an embarrassment for the entire field" by scientists who allege it has serious flaws and that ESP is a myth.

In one test, 100 students were presented with a computer screen showing two curtains. They were told an image, which could be erotic, lay behind one curtain and they should guess which.

Prof Bem found students predicted correctly 53 per cent of the time when the picture was erotic, while regular images only elicited a 50 per cent success rate, in line with average chance.

While the three per cent difference was small, Prof Bem said students consistently outperformed the average when predicting the location of erotic images.

Remarkably, Prof Bem told a student newspaper, analysis of the students' brains suggested they made their choices "about 2-3 seconds prior to the appearance of the picture".

In another experiment, students received a surprise memory test after reading a list of 48 nouns. They were then given a random selection of 24 of the nouns, and told to memorise and retype them.

When Prof Bem examined their answers to the first, surprise, test, he found students tended to "remember" words they had later been given at random and deliberately memorised.

"The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words," his paper concluded.

Charles Judd, the editor of the journal, defended the publication of the study, which he said had been reviewed by four "very trusted people".

But Prof Ray Hyman, of the University of Oregon, a long-time critic of ESP research, told the New York Times: "It's craziness, pure craziness. I think it's just an embarrassment for the entire field." Others, including Eric-Jan Wagermakers, of the University of Amsterdam, said it highlighted wider problems with the field of academic literature and the scientific method.

Read more at The Telegraph