Leslie Zelasko, age    10, of Palatine, I11., for his question:

HOW DOES ESP WORK?

One of the top ESP researchers in the United States is J.B. Rhine, a man who headed the Parapsychological Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, N.C., for many years. He and many other investigators, especially a number of them in England, claim that it has been clearly proven beyond question that ESP does indeed exist among a great number of people.

ESP is the abbreviated name for extrasensory perception.  It is a type of communicating or of being aware of something in a way that does not use the known sense organs.  In other words, a person with ESP will have an awareness of another person's thoughts without using sight, hearing, taste, touch or smell.

Although there are many ESP occurrences on record, called parapsychological phenomena by backers, there is no clear evidence for the existence of extrasensory perception.

So how does ESP work? If it does indeed exist, the way it works is unknown. A great many scientists now say that it is perhaps best to think of ESP as something that might be true but that has not as yet been proved.

There are four types of extrasensory perception: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis.

Telepathy is a way of sending knowledge, thoughts or feelings from one person to another in some unknown way. Clairvoyance is an awareness of events, persons or objects without the use of the known senses and without the telepathic help of another person. With precognition, a person will show knowledge of a future event, and with psychokinesis he will be able to control physical objects, such as influencing the way dice fall by concentration.

ESP abilities, according to the experts, appear to come and then go. A subject may show a high degree of extrasensory perception in a first series of tests, and then score low when the tests are repeated later.

Since the 1940s belief among scientists in the existence of ESP has been slowly increasing. At the present time roughly 10 percent of all psychologists believe that ESP does indeed exist while another 10 percent reject the phenomenon as an impossibility. The other 80 percent believe that the ESP question is one still open to question and definitely subject to further needed investigation.

Much ESP research in the past was conducted by using an experiment that involved guessing cards. A sender would concentrate on a card while a receiver, in another room, would attempt to name the card. Chance would produce five correct answers out of 25, and a person being able to name seven or eight would be considered to have some ESP ability. Today, however, many scientists feel further work should be done with more complicated and meaningful experiments.