People trend to underestimate the historical influence of some subjects in nowadays' fringe science. Many ideas in Sci-Fi and fantasy stories didn't come from n

People trend to underestimate the historical influence of some subjects in nowadays' fringe science. Many ideas in Sci-Fi and fantasy stories didn't come from nowhere, but based on actual history. Parapsychology, as you said, is an interesting example. In the scientific progress and Cold War paranoid of the 1950s, the idea of "mind power", "mind control" were popular. It convinced many people, even those with a scientific background, and only universally rejected by the mainstream in the 1970s. Even the CIA had a program, "Stargate Project", to study the applications of ESP to gather military intelligence, but it seems the CIA never had reliable results (as modern readers expected), and some participants eventually suffered a mental breakdown. (And around the 1960s, the same history repeats. People started to think that psychedelic drugs have great effects on the human mind, the counter-cultural youths did experiments first, and later the CIA also established a program, MKULTRA, and conducted a lot of unethical human experiments.) To illustrate how influential ESP was, just read the paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) by Alan Turing. In the beginning of the paper, it summarized nine arguments against artificial intelligence and the feasibility of Turing Test, the 9th argument was parapsychology. Alan Turing said, > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. [...] How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately, the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. And he pointed out, that some readers may suggest that telepathy can be used to distinguish human intelligence and artificial intelligence, and "this argument is to my mind quite a strong one", and he continued to describe one experiment setup... > A more specific argument based on E.S.P might run as follows: "Let us play the imitation game, using as witnesses a man who is good as a telepathic receiver, and a digital computer. The interrogator can ask such questions as "What suit does the card in my right hand belong to?" The man by telepathy or chairvoyance gives the right answer 130 times out of 400 cards. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps get 104 right. But he also gave an interesting and creative response to this objection, > Suppose the digital computer contains a random number generator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer to give. But then the random number generator will be subject to the psycho-kinetic powers of the interrogator. Perhaps this psycho-kinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a probability calculation. It's pretty much a science fantasy novel. "How did the enemy compromise our unbreakable, formal-verified encryption system?!" "Oh, one attacker used the ESP power to make /dev/random keep outputting 0xAAAAAAAAAAAA..." Edit: This is not a joke, it's actually one of the most common form of psycho-kinesis experiments by proponents (and critics) of parapsychology. I didn't realize until I checked Wikipedia... But I doubt the electronic version of this experiment has been performed before Turing (only widely used after the 80s!), so it can be said that Alan Turing can be credited for this idea... See Psychokinesis on random number generators, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology#Psychokinesis_on_random_number_generators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology#Psychokinesis_o... Finally, Turing finished his counter-argument with a simple conclusion: in the worst case scenario, we can simply lock all participants in ESP-proof rooms and eliminate this problem. > If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. [...] To put the competitors into a "telepathy-proof room" would satisfy all requirements.