Critics of claims of the paranormal, e.g. Deutsch (2001), have declared extrasensory perception (ESP) or other paranormal phenomena to be ‘nonsense’ . Such absolutist positions give little weight to the experimental evidence (Radin 1997) in support of the reality of such processes, and seem naive given the range of imaginative proposals concerning the nature of reality currently being put forward for serious consideration by conventional physicists. One important advance has been the superseding of the so-called Standard Model as a fundamental theory of nature by string theory, where the Standard Model features merely as a subset of the set of permitted possibilities. As Carr (2001, 2003) (whose approach is centred on the alternative Randall-Sundrum picture) has suggested, such a change in perspective opens up new possibilities in science, including the possibility of accommodating paranormal phenomena within physics. In the following a number of concepts are combined, each in essence consistent with accepted ideas, resulting in a qualitative explanation for ESP, with the promise of an eventual clear cut basis for understanding paranormal phenomena in general.

A key assumption we make is one which, while it has no clear connections with experimental physics, does make contact with a position that was advocated by mathematicians such as Gödel (Davis and Hersh 1981, Penrose 1994). This is the idea that some aspects of mentality involve a realm of reality largely, but not completely, disconnected from the phenomena manifested in conventional physics. The idea of a disconnected realm does have precedents, for example in the way two of the fundamental forces (the strong and weak forces) play no role in large areas of physics and chemistry, whilst in other contexts they have a very important part to play. Next note that string theory, involving as it does spaces having more dimensions than the usual three, and also a non-unique vacuum state (and according to Susskind ( 2003a, B ), a very large number of such states), is consistent with there being such a ‘separate realm’, in a way that the Standard Model, with its unique vacuum state contained within a limited number of spatial dimensions, did not.

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