Alex A. Álvarez

Unidad Parapsicológica de Investigación, Difusión y Enseñanza (UPIDE), Mexico City, Mexico; Centro de Investigación de la Sintergia y la Consciencia (CISC), Mexico City, Mexico

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Introduction: One of the main problems that parapsychology has faced throughout its history is the lack of a proper biological framework. Some efforts have been made to try to shorten the gap between parapsychology and biology, but these are mainly focused on the role of psi in homo sapiens, without giving sufficient weight to the results obtained in the field of animal psi (ANPSI) for more than half a century. If we want to get a better understanding of what we typically call “supernormal abilities”, including their evolutionary history, we need to go beyond the anthropocentric view that widely permeates parapsychology.

My proposal is that, by analyzing different pieces of complementary and concordant evidence from parapsychology and other disciplines through an approach known as consilience of inductions, we can arrive at a scenario in which psi is anything but paranormal and thus be able to establish, relatively in time, its possible origin, and its further evolutionary path. These pieces of evidence are the following:

Psi is not paranormal but natural and normal. Psychic experiences are typically interpreted by conventional science as mere hallucinations, self-delusion, or extraordinary coincidences. However, different surveys applied to different populations reveal that psi experiences are quite ordinary and occur to millions of people worldwide. Besides, accounts of psychic experiences can be found throughout the history of humanity in different cultures and societies.

Psi is quite common in non-human animals. There has been extensive literature for almost a century in which many instances of psychic phenomena in non-human animals have been described. These mainly comprise domestic animals like dogs, but interesting results have also been obtained with chicken, finches, rats, and fish. All of them, as well as humans, belong to the same monophyletic group: vertebrates, which suggests at first glance that vertebrate psi may have had a single, common origin before the divergence of this group into current phyla.

The biological basis of psi must involve common structures for all vertebrates. Although it has not yet been elucidated through which mechanism and what structures psychic function occurs, it is widely acknowledged that, given the similarities of this capacity with different cognitive processes, the brain must be involved. Some candidate structures, given their conservation in all vertebrate groups, could be the cerebellum, the brain stem, basal ganglia, and the amygdala, all of which lie in the inner portion of the brain.

The outer layers of the brain seem to inhibit psi function. Freedman and colleagues have developed a neurobiological model whose central premise is that the frontal lobes are some sort of filter or inhibitor of psychic functioning. This hypothesis has been supported by experimental results in which subjects with left frontal lobe damage usually perform better than control ones in micro-psychokinesis tasks.

Psi confers some degree of evolutionary advantage. The final piece of evidence for this framework has to do with the possible evolutionary advantages conferred by psychic experiences. Two of the most prominent examples are the feeling of being stared at, which provides an obvious advantage in terms of survival, especially for prey animals, and the telepathic connection between mothers and their babies.

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Alex A. Álvarez is a researcher at UPIDE (Unidad Parapsicológica de Investigación, Difusión y Enseñanza) and CISC (Centro de Investigación de la Sintergia y la Consciencia) in Mexico City, focusing on the biological and evolutionary foundations of psi phenomena.

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The Parapsychological Association is an international professional organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the study of psi (or ‘psychic’) experiences, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and precognition. The primary objective of the PA is to achieve a scientific understanding of these experiences.

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Published on March 26, 2026