Clairvoyance & clairaudience

1 · What it is

Clear seeing, clear hearing

Clairvoyance, French for “clear seeing”, is the claim of perceiving an object or an event hidden from the senses: a card face down, the contents of a sealed box, something happening in another place. Clairaudience, “clear hearing”, is the same claim through inner hearing: a voice or a sound rather than an image.

The difference from telepathy is that nobody needs to know the answer. In a clairvoyance test the target is hidden from everyone, so there is no mind for the information to come from.

2 · How people practise it

Cards, objects and readings

The classic practice is guessing hidden cards, one after another, and keeping score. Some people “read” objects, holding a sealed item or a photograph and describing whatever comes.

Mediumship is the claim that the information comes from a person who has died. Mediums describe what they see or hear, and this is where clairaudience is most often claimed: a voice that gives a name or a phrase.

3 · What the labs tested

Zener cards at Duke

In the early 1930s J. B. Rhine at Duke University ran thousands of card-guessing trials with Zener cards: five symbols (circle, cross, wavy lines, square and star), five of each in a pack of 25. Guessing at random gets one card in five, a hit rate of 20%. In his 1934 book Rhine reported some people scoring well above that over long runs.

Recent work has moved to mediumship under blinded conditions. In a 2015 study, mediums read for people who had died without meeting the sitters, and sitters scored readings without knowing which one was meant for them. The authors reported that sitters rated their own readings higher than the decoys.

4 · Where it’s contested

Loose early controls

Rhine’s early card tests were run with looser controls than later work demanded, and the high scores were harder to find as the controls tightened. That pattern, strong early results that shrink under stricter tests, is the centre of the general critique of psi research.

The blinded mediumship results come mostly from a small number of research groups, and independent replication is still thin.

On clairaudience the honest answer is that there is almost no controlled research. It is claimed mostly within mediumship, and studies of mediums test whether the information is accurate, not whether it arrived as a sound.