Types of psychic abilities: the list and what research found

Written by Orbitarot · Sources: listed at the end of this guide · Updated October 13, 2026

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Key finding: No claimed psychic ability has produced results that independent laboratories can repeat; the US Army's remote viewing unit (1977 to 1995) was closed after a review found it never gave actionable intelligence for any operation.

What are the types of psychic abilities?

The psychic abilities people most often name are clairvoyance (seeing), clairaudience (hearing), clairsentience (feeling), claircognizance (knowing), telepathy, precognition, psychometry, mediumship, remote viewing and psychokinesis. Parapsychologists call the abilities that gather information extrasensory perception (ESP), and treat psychokinesis, the claimed effect of mind on matter, as a separate kind.

This guide gives a plain definition of each, says where the word comes from when that can be traced to a source, and then sets out what controlled research has found. We run a free psychic test with Zener cards on this site, so we have a reason to be careful about both halves: what people mean by each ability, and what the evidence shows.

The list at a glance

The table below is the short version. The "clair" words come from French: clair means clear, and voyance means vision. Several of the newer terms have no reliable dated origin, and where we could not find one in a dictionary or reference work, the table says so rather than guessing.

The "clair" senses: clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, claircognizance

The four "clair" abilities describe the same claim through different senses: information arriving as an image, a sound, a feeling or a sudden certainty. Only clairvoyance has a long history in research; the other three are mostly labels from modern psychic practice, used to describe how an impression feels from the inside.

Clairvoyance is the one researchers actually tested, usually as a hidden target: a card face down, a drawing in a sealed envelope, a picture chosen at random. A card test like ours is a clairvoyance test in this strict sense, because the target exists (the card is drawn before you guess) and nobody is looking at it.

Clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance are harder to test because they describe experience rather than a task. Many people have had a hunch that turned out right, or "heard" their name called in an empty room. Psychologists explain much of this with ordinary processes: we remember the hunches that came true and forget the ones that did not, and the brain fills gaps in noise with familiar patterns. None of that makes the experience less real as an experience, but it does mean a hit you remember is not evidence on its own.

Telepathy and precognition

Telepathy is the claim that thoughts can pass between minds without any known channel; precognition is the claim that a mind can register an event before it happens. Both were coined or popularized in the late 19th century, and both became the main targets of laboratory parapsychology in the 20th.

The word telepathy was coined in 1882 by Frederic W. H. Myers, the same year the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London to investigate such claims. The experiments that followed asked a "sender" to look at a target while a "receiver" tried to describe it. The best known modern version is the Ganzfeld design, covered below.

Precognition is a much older word, in English since the 17th century, but the most discussed modern test of it is recent: in 2011 the psychologist Daryl Bem reported nine experiments suggesting people could respond to events before they happened. Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French ran three replications of one of Bem's experiments and published the results in PLOS ONE in 2012 under the title "Failing the Future"; they found no effect. The episode became a frequent example in the wider debate about how psychology checks its own findings.

Psychometry and mediumship

Psychometry claims that objects hold traces of the people and events around them, which a sensitive person can read by touch. Mediumship claims that the dead can communicate through a living person. Both grew out of 19th century America, and both have been studied far less under controlled conditions than card guessing or telepathy.

The word psychometry, "measuring the soul", was coined in 1842 by Joseph Rodes Buchanan. Mediumship as a popular practice took off with Spiritualism after 1848, when Kate and Margaret Fox of Hydesville, New York, said they were in contact with a spirit through rapping sounds. The movement spread quickly in the United States and Britain, and with it the séance and the professional medium.

The difficulty with testing either ability is the same: a reading made face to face gives the reader endless cues. Tone of voice, clothing, age, reactions to each guess and the client's own willingness to fit a vague statement to their life can produce a reading that feels precise. This is the same effect behind the 1949 classroom experiment we describe in our guide is tarot accurate?, where students rated one identical personality sketch as highly accurate for each of them.

Remote viewing and psychokinesis

Remote viewing is a protocol for describing a distant target, developed at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and later used by a US Army unit. Psychokinesis is the claim that the mind can move or influence matter. Both are the most "operational" of the abilities on this list, and both have the clearest negative results.

Remote viewing has the most unusual history of any ability here, because a government paid for it. The program later known as Stargate became a US Army unit at Fort Meade in 1977 and ran until 1995. That year, after a review by the American Institutes for Research, the CIA closed and declassified it. The review found that remote viewing had never provided actionable information for any intelligence operation. Its two expert reviewers disagreed about the laboratory data: the statistician Jessica Utts saw evidence of an effect, while the psychologist Ray Hyman judged the claims premature and not independently replicated. The declassified files are in the CIA's online reading room.

Psychokinesis was tested at Duke University with dice: subjects tried to "will" thrown dice to land a certain way, first thrown by hand, then from a cup and finally by machine. Those experiments were not replicated by other scientists. The same goes for later and more famous claims of spoon bending and object moving, none of which has produced a reliable demonstration under controlled conditions.

What has research found about psychic abilities?

After more than a century of testing, no psychic ability has produced a result that independent laboratories can repeat on demand. Some designs, notably the Ganzfeld, have reported hit rates above chance in pooled studies, but other pooled studies found nothing, and critics trace the positive results to method rather than to psychic ability.

Here is the record in the order it happened:

1. Rhine and the Zener cards (1930s). J. B. Rhine and Karl Zener designed a deck of 25 cards with five symbols, and Rhine's book Extra-Sensory Perception (1934) reported scores well above chance. Critics found sensory leakage (marks visible on the backs of cards, the card face reflected in an experimenter's glasses) and poor record keeping. At Princeton in 1936, William S. Cox ran 25,064 trials with 132 people and reported no evidence of ESP.
2. The Ganzfeld (1970s onward). A receiver relaxes with halved ping-pong balls over the eyes and soft noise in the ears, then picks a target picture from four, so chance is 25%. Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton reported a 32% hit rate in a series of automated studies (Psychological Bulletin, 1994). Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman pooled 30 later experiments and found no significant effect (1999). A 2010 meta-analysis counted 483 hits in 1,498 trials, 32.2%; Ray Hyman replied that a meta-analysis on its own cannot establish that an anomaly exists.
3. Stargate (1977 to 1995). Closed after the 1995 review described above.
4. The National Research Council (1988). A US National Research Council committee reviewing techniques for enhancing human performance found no scientific justification, from research conducted over a period of 130 years, for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.
5. The James Randi Educational Foundation challenge (1964 to 2015). A cash prize, which grew to one million dollars, for anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal ability under agreed conditions. More than a thousand people applied; nobody won it before the challenge ended in 2015.

The scientific consensus, as summarized in standard reference works, is that these abilities have not been demonstrated, and that the positive results are better explained by chance, selective reporting, sensory cues and weak controls. Parapsychologists dispute parts of that reading, which is why it is fair to call the subject debated. It is not fair to call any of these abilities proven.

Why do psychic experiences feel so convincing?

Psychic experiences feel convincing because memory keeps the hits and drops the misses, because coincidences are far more common than intuition suggests, and because vague statements fit almost anyone. A run of luck in a card test shows the same thing in numbers: someone always gets the high score.

Our test makes this concrete. Over 25 Zener cards, guessing alone averages 5 hits, yet a score of 10 or more still comes up about once in every 58 runs by luck. If a few hundred people take the test in a day, several will hit 10, and each of them will have a good story. The test result page shows the exact odds for your own score, so you can see where luck ends and something unusual would begin.

How to explore intuition honestly

If you are curious about your own intuition, the honest approach is to treat it as a skill of noticing rather than a channel to the future. Write your hunches down before you know the outcome, check them later, and count the misses as carefully as the hits.

• Test, do not assume. Take the Zener card test several times, decide in advance how many runs to count, and compare your total with one fifth of all cards.
• Use reflection tools for what they are. The yes or no oracle gives a random answer by design; its value is the reaction it shows you, relief or disappointment. A yes or no tarot reading adds a card and a reason to think about.
• Use tarot as a prompt, not a prophecy. A three card reading or a single pick a card draw gives you an image to think with. Cards like the High Priestess and the Moon are traditionally read as intuition and the unclear, which makes them good questions to ask yourself rather than answers about the world.
• Keep a record. Our reading journal keeps your readings and test scores on your own device, so you can look back at what you expected and what happened.

Some questions should never go to a psychic, a card or an oracle: health, legal matters and money decisions belong with qualified people. For everything else, a calm look at the odds and a written record will tell you more about your intuition than any single striking hit. For practical advice on phrasing questions, see our guide on how to ask tarot questions.

Questions

What are the main types of psychic abilities?

The ones named most often are clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, claircognizance, telepathy, precognition, psychometry, mediumship, remote viewing and psychokinesis. Parapsychologists call the ones that gather information extrasensory perception (ESP) and treat psychokinesis, mind over matter, separately.

Has any psychic ability been proven?

No. Over more than a century of testing, no ability has produced results that independent laboratories can repeat on demand. Some pooled Ganzfeld studies report hit rates above chance, but others found nothing, and the debate is about method rather than proof.

What is the most common psychic ability?

People most often describe a hunch or a sense of knowing (what popular writing calls claircognizance or intuition) and dreams that seem to come true. These are common experiences; controlled tests have not shown that they carry information beyond chance.

How can I test my psychic abilities?

Use a test with a hidden target chosen at random, such as a Zener card test, decide in advance how many runs to count, and compare your total hits with what chance predicts. One good run is expected luck; a steady excess over many runs would be the interesting result.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Clairvoyance (etymology; the 1988 National Research Council conclusion): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clairvoyance
• Dictionary.com, clairaudience (first recorded 1860-65): https://www.dictionary.com/browse/clairaudience
• Wikipedia, Telepathy (coined in 1882 by Frederic W. H. Myers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy
• Wikipedia, Precognition (term in English since the 17th century): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precognition
• Wikipedia, Psychometry (Joseph Rodes Buchanan, 1842): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)
• Wikipedia, Spiritualism (the Fox sisters, Hydesville, 1848): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritualism_(movement)
• Wikipedia, Remote viewing (Targ, Puthoff, Swann): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing
• Wikipedia, Stargate Project (1977 unit; 1995 AIR review; Utts and Hyman): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_unit)
• CIA reading room, Stargate collection (declassified files): https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/stargate
• Wikipedia, Joseph Banks Rhine (Extra-Sensory Perception, 1934; dice PK tests; Cox 1936; criticisms): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine
• Wikipedia, Zener cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zener_cards
• Wikipedia, Ganzfeld experiment (Bem and Honorton 1994; Milton and Wiseman 1999; Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio 2010; Hyman 2010): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_experiment
• Ritchie, Wiseman and French (2012). Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's 'Retroactive Facilitation of Recall' Effect. PLOS ONE 7(3): e33423: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0033423
• National Research Council (1988). Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques. National Academies Press: https://doi.org/10.17226/1025
• Wikipedia, James Randi Educational Foundation (the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi_Educational_Foundation
• Zener card odds: our own exact binomial calculation (1 in 5 per card): Computed October 2026

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