Extrasensory perception (ESP) – specifically the ability to perceive without using the ordinary senses – has inspired both educational programs and scientific inquiry worldwide. One particular ESP skill, sometimes called “extra-ocular vision” (EOV) or blindfold vision, involves training children to see, read and navigate while blindfolded. Below is a comprehensive overview of notable programs, practitioners, and scientists involved in ESP and blindfold-vision training across the globe, along with relevant studies and early-stage research findings.
ESP and Blindfold-Vision Training Programs Around the World
- United Kingdom (ICU Academy – Nicola Farmer): In Essex, England, the Inspiring Children Universally (ICU) Academy founded by Nicola Farmer teaches children to perform everyday tasks entirely blindfolded, treating this as an innate ability that can be awakened. Children (typically ages 5–12) in the ICU program learn to read books, identify colors, ride bicycles, and play games while wearing eye masks. Farmer’s method uses fun, meditation, and “right-brain” exercises to gently encourage expanded awareness. The kids consider it not a “superpower” but an ability anyone can learn with practice. ICU’s success has been featured in documentaries (e.g. Superhuman on Netflix/Gaia) and has attracted families from over 40 countries. The Academy also trains instructors to spread the technique, emphasizing a heart-centered, playful approach to activating children’s “extraordinary senses”.
- Germany (Sehen Ohne Augen – Evelyn Ohly & Axel Kimmel): “Sehen ohne Augen” (German for “Seeing Without Eyes”) is a program and intensive seminar developed by Evelyn Ohly and Axel Kimmel. It is described as a holistic training for the mind that enables visual perception without using the eyes, thereby expanding one’s consciousness and inner perception. In practice, participants (including children and even blind individuals) learn to perceive colors, shapes, and even read text with eyes completely covered. The training is typically delivered in a 5-day intensive format, including special children’s seminars. Sehen ohne Augen has gained recognition in German-speaking countries – a German Naturopathy journal describes it as training that allows visual perceptions similar to actual eyesight, despite blindfolds. Testimonials – from scientists to public figures – have attested that seeing without eyes is real after attending Ohly and Kimmel’s seminars. This German program is one of the best-known European instances of formal blindfold-vision training.
- Russia & Post-Soviet States (Bronnikov Method & Others): In Russia, the Bronnikov Method, created by Vyacheslav Bronnikov in the 1990s, became famous for teaching children “direct vision.” Bronnikov’s students, some as young as preschool age, reportedly develop an “inner screen” in the mind’s eye that can display visual information without using the physical eyes. Children trained by this method have been said to read books by simply holding them and mentally “flipping” through pages on this inner screen. Bronnikov’s schools spread through Russia and Ukraine in the early 2000s, touting rapid development of intuition and even photographic memory. This method is referenced as a salient chapter in EOV history, alongside earlier cases like Rosa Kuleshova (a Soviet girl in the 1960s who could discern colors with her fingertips). Today the Bronnikov Center still offers multi-level training (including online classes) in “neurovision” and energy development for both children and adults. Another Russian-born practitioner, Mark Komissarov, developed the “InfoVision” Direct Mind Sight program. Originally from Russia but now based in the US, Komissarov (with co-trainer Mihaela Istrati) teaches students globally to perceive without eyes. His method gained enough attention to be featured on media (even tested – skeptically – by Time magazine). In the Onet.pl article on ESP for children, Komissarov is specifically cited as a leading figure alongside the German and Latin American methods. These Russian-origin methods typically involve blindfold exercises and visualization training to activate the “third eye.” (Note: Such methods have also drawn skepticism, with critics suggesting that children could peek under blindfolds or that results are due to subtle sensory cues. Nonetheless, many parents and instructors report genuine success when the techniques are properly applied.)
- United States & Canada: In North America, interest in children’s ESP training is growing. Mark Komissarov’s InfoVision courses have been offered in the U.S., and “seeing without eyes” gained public attention through the 2020 documentary Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible (directed by Caroline Cory), which showcased children in blindfold successfully reading and doing other tasks. Following such exposure, a number of practitioners have started offering blindfold-vision classes. For example, Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan (a holistic medicine practitioner in California) runs a program called “Luminous Kids” which teaches blindfold reading as a tool for consciousness development. Dr. Chan reports that with training, children as young as 5–7 can learn to read books, solve puzzles, even navigate obstacle courses while blindfolded, often after just a few sessions – and she has demonstrated these abilities live on stage with her students. In some cases, American instructors have been certified by the Mexican or European founders – for instance, Vibravision (in Utah) is an offshoot of an Indonesian martial-arts-based method that teaches blindfolded navigation to the visually impaired. Additionally, various “midbrain activation” franchises that swept across Asia (see below) have also made their way to the U.S. on a smaller scale. While the U.S. has no large-scale school system for ESP, there are independent workshops and summer camps that introduce blindfold sensing games to children, often framing it as a way to boost intuition and self-confidence.
- Mexico and Latin America (VEO Method – Noé Esperón): A pioneering Latin American approach is the Extra-Ocular Vision (EOV) method of Noé Esperón in Mexico. Developed ~20 years ago, Esperón’s program trains children to perceive the visual world blindfolded through a series of meditation-based exercises. He discovered this ability by accident – after practicing meditation techniques with his own children, he found one could see colors and objects while blindfolded. Realizing it was an innate human sense that could be awakened, he refined the method into a 10-session course for kids. Children start with identifying colors and shapes in session one, progress to reading text blindfolded by session two, and later advance to dynamic games (like Jenga, ball games, even soccer) without eyesight. The courses involve the whole family – parents reinforce exercises at home – and emphasize that the goal is not only blindfold vision but also developing the child into a more responsible, loving, and confident person. Esperón founded the organization “Viendo por México” and later VEO A.C. (Visión ExtraOcular) to train instructors internationally and reach children worldwide. His Mexican method has spread to other Spanish-speaking countries, inspiring “Visión Extra-Ocular” training centers in places like Peru and Bolivia (often led by certified instructors from VEO). The Polish press specifically cites a “Mexican method” and a “Peruvian method” as well-known approaches abroad for developing ESP in kids. These Latin American programs often share a common root in Esperón’s techniques, focusing on meditation and “third-eye” activation.
- Poland (PAPP – Natali Reisner): In Poland, interest in children’s ESP has recently taken off. Natali Reisner founded the Polish Academy of Extra-Sensory Perception (Polska Akademia Postrzegania Pozazmysłowego, PAPP) in 2023 under the Remedium Foundation. It is currently Poland’s only organization professionally teaching ESP to children. PAPP conducts free classes for kids (funded by a foundation) where children play games blindfolded to develop “sensytywność” (sensitivity) – a term encompassing clairvoyant vision, telepathy, precognition, and even intuitive healing. The Academy’s main focus is “widzenie pozazmysłowe” (extra-sensory sight). In practice, Polish children wearing eye covers engage in playful tasks like sorting colored blocks or reading flashcards without using their eyes. As they advance, select students also train precognition and telepathy in special workshops. Uniquely, PAPP uses a peer-teaching model – more advanced “sensitives” (some as young as 8–12 years old) help instruct the newer students. The Polish Academy has rapidly grown, “activating” dozens of children’s abilities, and there is increasing demand for certified instructors across Poland. Media reports note that Polish parents are seeking out ESP development as a potential future skill for their children, seeing it as an “ultimate” ability that could give them an advantage. The Polish program was directly inspired by the successes of other countries: it references the German “Sehen Ohne Augen” institute, the Mexican and Peruvian methods, and Mark Komissarov’s system as precedents. The key difference is that PAPP offers the training free of charge to be accessible to all talented kids, not just those who can pay (in contrast to some expensive courses abroad).
- India, Southeast Asia and Others: In India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China, “midbrain activation” courses became a popular trend in the 2010s. These programs – often run by private academies – claimed to unleash children’s “super IQ” and intuition by balancing the brain hemispheres. A hallmark of many such courses was blindfold reading demonstrations, similar to the ESP practices elsewhere. For instance, in Malaysia, the Bright Kids franchise included a “Super ESP” curriculum where children ages 3–12 were taught blindfolded reading as evidence of right-brain activation. The rationale given was that once the child’s brain potential is unlocked, blindfolded vision appears along with other abilities (speed learning, perfect pitch, photographic memory, etc.). In India, several entrepreneurs offered weekend workshops promising to produce “midbrain-activated superkids” who could identify colors or read while blindfolded – though these claims stirred controversy and were labeled a scam by skeptics when improperly run. In China, during the “Qigong fever” (1970s–90s), there were widely reported cases of children demonstrating “Ear Reading” or perception through other skin areas. Many such cases were initially celebrated as proof of qigong/ESP abilities, though later investigations exposed some as fraud or exaggerated claims. Nonetheless, legends of blindfolded child prodigies persist in Asia. In Indonesia, the martial arts group Merpati Putih developed “Vibravision,” a technique allowing blind or blindfolded individuals to sense their surroundings via refined kinesthetic and auditory cues – effectively a form of echolocation or energy sensing. This technique, while not exactly “sight,” has been taught to blind students to navigate and even read simple text by sensing vibrations. Overall, across Asia there is a mix of genuine research, anecdotal successes, and skeptical challenges around these midbrain/third-eye activation schools. The common thread is that hundreds of children in these countries have undergone some form of ESP activation training, with many exciting demonstration videos online – but a need for rigorous scientific validation remains.
Scientists and Academic Research on ESP in Children
While practitioners forge ahead in training “psychic kids,” a number of scientists and researchers are examining ESP and blindfold vision under controlled conditions. This research is still in early stages, but it is growing:
- Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín (Neuroscientist, Spain): Dr. Gómez-Marín is a theoretical physicist-turned-neuroscientist who leads a lab at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante. He is one of the few mainstream scientists openly studying phenomena “beyond the five senses”. In 2023, Dr. Gómez-Marín won the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) Research Prize for his proposal “Seeing Without Eyes,” which aims to test the EOV concept rigorously. In his pilot studies, he worked with both congenitally blind people and sighted people under blindfolds to see if they could perceive visual information via other means. Remarkably, some participants were able to accurately read sentences, identify colors, and even describe objects that the researcher held behind their back – all while blind or blindfolded. For example, one blindfolded subject correctly stated a drawing was “a car” within seconds of a picture being silently shown. Dr. Gómez-Marín notes that in some cases this “sight” seemed to have 360-degree perception, analogous to what some near-death experience (NDE) accounts describe. His ongoing research (done in collaboration with IONS) uses careful protocols to rule out cheating or sensory leakage, and draws on neuroscience tools to understand what brain activity might correlate with the EOV ability. Gómez-Marín’s interest also bridges into evolutionary biology – he points out that extra-ocular photoreception exists in certain animals (e.g. some blind starfish can sense light and form images via skin cells), suggesting nature may have analogues to human ESP. By framing human ESP as part of a broader biological continuum, he hopes to “ground” these phenomena in science. Dr. Gómez-Marín has become a prominent voice in “trans-materialist” science, advocating that such fringe topics be explored with open-minded rigor rather than dismissed.
- Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum (Neurophysiologist, Mexico): A notable early scientific study of “seeing without eyes” was carried out by Dr. Jacobo Grinberg in Mexico. Exactly 40 years ago (1983), Grinberg reported experimental evidence that some children can see without using their eyes or any external aids. In controlled tests, these children could describe images and read text with blindfolds on, and Grinberg concluded that extra-ocular vision obeys the same optical laws (perspective, color contrast, motion parallax) as normal vision. This implied the phenomenon was not fantasy – the kids were perceiving real visuals, though by an unknown sensory channel. Grinberg’s work, published in Spanish, was mostly ignored by mainstream science at the time, and he mysteriously disappeared in the 1990s, cutting short further research. However, his pioneering experiments are often cited by today’s researchers as proof that serious study of blindfold vision has a precedent. Grinberg’s efforts in Mexico laid groundwork suggesting that some faculty of consciousness can acquire visual information without retina or eyes – a radical idea that modern experiments are revisiting with better technology.
- Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan (Holistic Doctor, USA): While primarily a practitioner, Dr. Chan is also spearheading empirical research on blindfold vision in children. After personally “activating” the ability in over 100 kids through her Luminous Kids classes, she launched a study in 2025 titled “Blindfold Perception in Children: An Empirical Investigation into the Activation and Development”. This project (which received crowdfunding on ResearchHub) seeks to document how children progress from zero ability to reliably reading blindfolded. Her early observations suggest that the skill emerges “not through force or rote training, but via play, imagination, and trust.” Although full results are not yet published, Dr. Chan has reported that a high percentage of kids in her trials achieve blindfold vision after several weeks, and that this correlates with improvements in their memory, confidence, and intuition (qualitative benefits echoed by other trainers). By formally tracking these cases, she hopes to convince educators and psychologists that this is a real trainable perceptual phenomenon, not mere parlor trick. Dr. Chan often shares video demonstrations – e.g. children solving Rubik’s Cubes or reading worksheets blindfolded – to raise awareness. Her work represents the emerging citizen-science approach to ESP: rigorous in method, but driven by passionate individuals outside major research institutions.
- Other Researchers and Notable Figures: The quest to understand “eyeless sight” has a long, colorful history. In 1920, French philosopher Jules Romains wrote “Vision Sans Yeux” documenting anecdotal cases of people perceiving light with skin and claiming a sixth sense. During the Cold War, Soviet researchers investigated “dermo-optical perception” after the case of Rosa Kuleshova, a blind girl who could read print by running her fingertips over the text. In the 1960s, psychologist Lloyd Hopkins in the U.S. tested children for “finger vision” and reported modest successes, though results were inconsistent. In the 1980s, Chinese researchers, amid a flurry of psi phenomena, studied kids who could identify colors with their ears or armpits (often debunked later). Ken Ring, a psychologist, explored NDE accounts of blind people who could see during out-of-body episodes – indirectly suggesting a non-ocular form of vision. More recently, vision scientists like Dr. Tania Agostino Agorrenta and Dr. Jordi Imbert in Spain have tested blindfolded vision in adults, and engineers in Japan have experimented with devices to stimulate the brain’s visual cortex through other senses (a kind of sensory substitution). The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), founded by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, is actively interested in these topics – not only did they award Dr. Gómez-Marín’s project, but they also hosted a “Seeing Without Eyes” proposal competition to spur research. A 2023 summary by IONS notes that while anecdotes abound, no one yet knows the mechanism of EOV and “studies are needed to learn more”. Neuroscientists speculate it could involve unused brain pathways, a form of synesthesia, or a quantum mind effect – but nothing is confirmed. Skeptics, on the other hand, often attribute positive results to clever cheating or the ideomotor effect, and demand tighter controls (double-blind protocols, etc.) in experiments.
In summary, ESP training in children – particularly blindfold vision – has moved from a fringe curiosity to an international movement. Schools and workshops in the UK, Germany, Russia, Poland, Mexico, India, and beyond are actively teaching hundreds of kids to perceive without sight, with many astonishing demonstrations reported. At the same time, scientific research is cautiously catching up: a handful of dedicated researchers are devising experiments to validate and understand these abilities under controlled conditions. The field is young, and much of the evidence so far is anecdotal or preliminary. But the convergence of grassroots practitioners and open-minded scientists is creating momentum. Should robust research confirm the claims, it could revolutionize our understanding of human perception. For now, the global network of ESP educators and investigators continues to grow – from Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín’s lab in Spain to the blindfolded kids in a Polish playroom – all exploring the tantalizing possibility that “we can see much more than meets the eye.”
Sources:
Bronnikov Center website – testimonials about children’s direct vision (“inner screen” reading entire books without eyes).
Onet.pl news – “Coraz większe zapotrzebowanie na instruktorów postrzegania pozazmysłowego” (Feb 2025) – Polish article describing ESP training for kids, mentions foreign programs (Sehen Ohne Augen, Mexican/Peruvian method, Mark Komissarov, US) and the Polish Academy (PAPP).
ICU Academy (UK) – Peta Morton, “Raising a New Generation of Super-Children” – overview of Nicola Farmer’s blindfold training course and its outcomes.
AIM2Flourish interview – “Close Your Eyes and You Will See!” – profile of Noé Esperón’s Extra-Ocular Vision (VEO) method in Mexico (history, methodology, goals).
Akademia Postrzegania Pozazmysłowego (Poland) – Foundation document “O Akademii PP” – explains the Polish program’s approach (blindfold games, free training, etc.).
Flourish Kinesiology blog (Australia) – Kaylee’s post “Seeing without your eyes” – discusses the Superhuman documentary and learning blindfold vision with an Australian trainer.
Dr. Àlex Gómez-Marín – IONS Prize Announcement (WTF Podcast Ep.67 transcript) – details of his “Seeing Without Eyes” study results (blind participants reading & identifying colors via ESP).
Institute of Noetic Sciences – “Seeing Without Eyes” proposal PDF – background on EOV in science (citing Jacobo Grinberg 1983 study that children see without eyes) and historical cases (Rosa Kuleshova, Bronnikov method, etc.).
ResearchHub project – Blindfold Perception in Children (Dr. Edith Chan, 2025) – initiative to empirically study blindfold vision in over 100 children. (Funding page, author info).