Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) was a psychic of the 20th century and made many highly publicized predictions.Citation needed (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A psychic is someone who possesses and uses powers and abilities of the mind uncommon to the average human being.

This is my definition and being considered a psychic doesn’t necessarily mean having supernatural powers, uncommon doesn’t mean unreal. If you take a bat for example and compare its way of seeing objects to how we do it the bat seems to have a supernatural ability while in reality we know it just uses a sonar. The common dog is able to perceive sounds like ultrasounds we don’t normally hear and thanks to its superior sense of smell while we perceive the scent of a soup it is instead able to perceive every single ingredient. Compared to ours don’t these seem to be psychic abilities? While they are obviously not.

And what if a gifted human being can do the same and have one or more senses extremely developed? You see, a psychic definition is not that easy to have because it’s not simple to separate what can be a superior normal sense from a supernatural ability.

Take Oscar for example, the cat able to perceive incoming death of patients; does it have a real psychic ability or given that it seems that cats are able to see infrared rays it just sees the emission of the patient it has learned to associate with incoming death? And can this be applied to the whole filed of human auras that is they are seen by psychics being able to perceive infrared emissions? So it’s just again an enhanced but human ability?

Because the world as we know it is not always what is really there as our senses are able to perceive just a part of reality.

And this is good because many of these psychic abilities can be “learned” as many people having became blind develop a sense of perception of the surrounding world much similar to that of a bat. Using Hypnosis or other techniques it is possible to develop some of these abilities. Some humans which are born with them seem to be psychic but in reality they are not, not in the way we think of it.

Some animals can perceive water from miles, for them it’s pretty easy to spot a human being around a corner as almost every dog can do when the owner gets home. There’s nothing psychic. Clearly I know that not everything can be explained this way but if we try to see what we consider supernatural from a different angle and especially looking at the world of nature the psychic definition at the beginning becomes pretty right. Those abilities are uncommon but belong anyway to the real world.

We don’t really know all the powers of the mind and the enormous amount of information it can absorb and use. For example Xenoglossy, the speaking of an unknown language, has long been thought as an example either of demonic possession or of psychic powers but in the great majority of cases there are normal explanations like being exposed while being a child to the language and having absorbed it without knowing it. In particular circumstances this comes out and seems to be a paranormal thing while it is not.

All of those psychic abilities which can be demonstrated, that is they are not just for movies and shows, can be brought back to one or more extremely enhanced human sense or ability like firewalking. Clearly this doesn’t explain everything but it’s a good starting point and I’m always ready to discuss the matter further.

Now, do you have a different psychic definition or do you agree with mine?