Learning ESP - Recap

Nimoy recounts the event of where Edgar Mitchell forwarded telepathic thoughts to men on the moon. Then starts a session of ESP with kids to see if kids can display ESP. He explains what ESP is (extrasensory perception) and performs a game of card reading as done by the late Joseph Rhine of Duke University to see if they have ESP abilities. He explains in the beginning that a couple of children might have ESP abilities. The tests are misleading but interesting. The kids tested end up doing both poorly and well on the test. It seems at best that the ESP given is simply a matter of luck as Nimoy declares them to have negative ESP abilities.

Nimoy then gives a general discussion of ESP how it’s been treated and the so-called tests of ESP abilities like spoon bending. He also says that believes in ESP think it can be taught. Numerous footage is shown of people doing ESP tests. Then a professor at UC Davis, Dr. Charles Tart, is interviewed about the subject. He describes as a paradigm but isn’t sold on the fact that people claim it as more as an“energy”. However, he does believe that people can be taught to use ESP abilities. Tart performs an experiment on a student named Karen. The tests he does is simply a game of pushing buttons. The subject is asked to use their ESP abilities to push the right button that Tart has pushed according to a random program. The tests are inconclusive as Karen fails many times and other times is able to guess the right button.

Lastly, a psychic, Karen Gessler arrives on Tiahuanaco, Bolivia to explain the mysterious stones there that supposedly were built by a Pre-Inca civilization. She gives merely her opinion to what happened using “psychic” powers but no evidence. She says the ancients there might who built the stones might have turned on each other. The episode ends with Nimoy saying that hopefully in our culture people with esp abilities won’t do the same.


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