Parapsychology is the study of mental powers that ordinary science cannot explain — reading other people's thoughts, knowing what will happen before it happens, moving objects without touching them, or contacting the dead. People who work in this field try to test such claims using the methods of real science: experiments, controls, statistics. The word carries an argument inside it. Parapsychologists see themselves as scientists working on a hard, unpopular problem. Most mainstream scientists, on the other hand, regard the whole field as a pseudoscience — a field that wears the clothes of science but has never produced results that hold up when others repeat the experiments. So when you meet the word, look at who is writing. In a believer's book it is a serious research field. In a sceptic's article it is a polite word for nonsense. In neutral writing it is simply the name of the subject, with the disagreement left unspoken. The field had its most respectable period in the twentieth century, when a few universities ran parapsychology laboratories; there are far fewer now. Related words you will meet nearby: ESP (extrasensory perception), telepathy, psychic, the paranormal.

超心理學（研究超感官知覺、預知、通靈那類現象的學問）。台灣一般人講到這些內容比較常說「靈異」「超能力」「特異功能」；「超心理學」是它比較學術的名字。