Real ESP

Extra Sensory Perception, or ESP, is usually used to refer to telepathy or other paranormal or "psi" capabilities.  The five "standard" human senses are really well suited to allowing us to interact with our environment, but even in the realm of nature they are not the only choices.  Looking around the animal kingdom, we find some animals with senses that are more powerful than, or even just completely different than, our own.

Bees can "see" the polarization of light, which gives them a powerful aid in finding certain kinds of flowers.  Some snakes have the ability to "see" heat in the long-wave infra-red.  This means that they can detect the thermal energy coming off their prey, as well as off potential predators.

It is well known that dogs have an amazing sense of smell, that goes all the way from a massive olfactory sensory surface area back to a much larger portion of their brain dedicated to processing smells.  This means that they literally perceive more of their world through smell than we do.  When you smell soup, they smell every individual ingredient.  Or the other day, I couldn't figure out why Dory, my Golden Retriever, kept jumping on the door to the room where we keep her dog food.  It turns out that I had left the air tight lid off the bin when I got her dinner earlier in the evening, and she could smell the open bin from a room away and through the door, and she wanted at it.

Imagine if we had evolved on a world where hotspots of intense ionizing radiation tended to kill everything that came too close.  It is not hard to believe that animals would have been under strong evolutionary pressure to develop the ability to perceive ionizing radiation.  Maybe we'd "see" it or "hear" it, or maybe we would just get really uncomfortable and itchy as the radiation level rose.  But someone from that world would, to us, seem to have a nearly magical ability to perceive that which we can't.

Or what about a world on which color vision never evolved?  If everyone could see only intensity (black and white), but suddenly someone showed up with color vision, they would have this freakish ability to, for no obvious reason, know the *wavelength* of light coming off of objects, and not just the intensity.  Of course, growing up in a world with no words for color, they would completely lack the vocabulary to even describe the experience.  Or taking this idea one step further, imagine a world on which no vision at all had evolved.  Everyone, and every animal could get some idea of what's around them by their sense of smell (which would probably be superhuman by our standards), and they could hear, and then feel and taste things when they are in contact with them.  But then someone shows up who can seemingly know, as if by magic, what's happening across the room, or can sense things even up wind from them.  They can dodge virtually any attack.  They can attack back at distance with impossible accuracy.  It would be the stuff of comic book super-heroes, or nightmare boogey men.  People would say, "It's like he has some kind of fifth sense!"