Since age 6, Bryan and James Williams, twins, have been able to read each other’s minds — to an extent.

Bryan, sophomore in agricultural education, said if asked to choose a number between one and 10, his brother will guess it correctly every time.

In addition to this, he said when his twin is struggling, he can sense it.

“If he’s ever in a bad situation, I can feel something,” he said.

James, a sophomore in chemical engineering, agreed and said he gets a “weird feeling” when his brother is in trouble, but nothing as specific as sudden knowledge of a certain injury.

This perception of his brother’s thoughts may fall into the category of extrasensory perception, which is a field of parapsychology researchers have studied for decades.

However, it may be a dying subject, as prominent laboratories dedicated to the study of ESP close.

The New York Times reported last month that Princeton University shut down its lab, which has been used to study ESP since 1979.

Douglas Gillan, the psychology department head at N.C. State, said the department focuses on “normal everyday perception” in its research and instruction, and said he is not an expert in the field of parapsychology.

Gillan said he can neither validate nor discredit research done in the field.

“I wouldn’t discount the possibility [of ESP] — from what I know, the research is still an open question,” he said. “I wouldn’t discount it, but I wouldn’t support it either.”

In the 1920s, at neighboring Duke University, J.B. Rhine, a professor of psychology, began completing thousands of experiments to test hypotheses relating to parapsychology.

In his 1957 book, Parapsychology cowritten by J.G. Pratt, Rhine compiles his results and discusses both ESP and PK, or psychokinesis.

“In ESP and PK, then,” Rhine writes, “the subject interacts with the objective environment in a way for which there is no physical explanation and no acceptable physical hypothesis.”

Rhine explains in his writing that a person demonstrates ESP when he or she responds to or shows some degree of knowledge of an external event. PK, however, involves mental exertion upon some part of the physical environment, i.e. a person mentally makes an object move.

Gillan said in the past, he has seen streetlights go out around him as he drives, as if there is an field of energy surrounding his car.

Jennifer Blue, a freshman in First Year College, said she has experienced something similar to this on two occasions.

“I was walking back at night from parking my car and the streetlight just went out over my head,” she said.

Blue said this also occurred on a different night, but concluded that both incidences were “weird coincidences.”

According to Gillan, humans by nature tend to ascribe causes to events they see happen and assume personal responsibility for them.

“We’re good at coming up with stories to explain the world around us — to explain our role in those events,” he said.

He said human perception is “fantastic as it is” and cited brain activities such as the ability to identify “tens of thousands” of objects immediately without a conscious awareness of the process.

“I think it’s much more valuable to study the basic kinds of perception we experience everyday,” he said.

From a philosophical standpoint, Michael Pendlebury, head of the University’s philosophy and religion department, said he would guess that most faculty in the department would be skeptical about the validity of ESP.

“There have been respectable philosophers in the twentieth century that have been very interested in the subject matter,” he said.

But, he said contemporary philosophers have not maintained that interest.

Many of Rhine’s experiments in the 20th century testing of ESP consisted of sets of cards. In Rhine’s book, entitled Extrasensory Perception , he describes a series of participants who attempt to guess which card the experiment moderator is holding, which either depicted one in a series of shapes or numbers.

Rhine and his team used the statistics of “hits,” or instances in which the person guessed the card correctly, to determine what level, or if at any, of ESP the person possessed.

Gillan said he read about a study in which physicists had particles moving at random and asked participants to mentally attempt to make the particle move a certain direction.

But he said the flaw of the experiment was the participant’s option to terminate the experiment at any point.

He said participants could have stopped once they were statistically above the average rate of chance.

“Every time there is evidence for ESP in research — just like any claim — look carefully at how the research is done,” Gillan said.

Lee Salter, the director of the University Counseling Center, said he has not heard much about ESP research since his college days.

And, in his 27 years as director of the Counseling Center, he has not come in contact with a student who claimed to have ESP.

“People do experience hallucinations or things being unreal around them,” he said.

He said in those cases, a psychiatrist would evaluate these occurrences to diagnose the cause.

“We do take seriously students who say they hear things or see things,” he said.

According to Salter, these occurrences would commonly fall under disorders such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Salter said the Counseling Center and Health Services try to provide help if students experience this.

Despite scientific opinions fluctuating about the validity of ESP, experiences like James’s and Bryan’s are a testimony to the possibility of ESP’s existence.