How do clairvoyants know things??

[Homer2]

I have never believed in this, I saw one once just for fun at my aunties house and she wasn’t great. She did say a few things that were accurate, but I put this down to being guesses or general vague things that would be relevant to the majority of people.

However, recently my friend went to one. She recently lost her dad and her partner. Without telling the clairvoyant anything, she knew how her partner died and what his name was. She mentioned my friends dad blowing kisses in a weird way, with the palm of his hand instead of his fingers, which is something he did used to do. How would she know these things??? I don’t honestly believe in it, but can’t understand how she’d know such specific things

Boy or girl is 50/50, and guessing that a woman in her fertile years is pregnant, while insensitive, is hardly evidence of precognition. I’ve certainly had that once without it being true, and a slim friend who has a rounded stomach says she was tired of telling people telling her she was carrying a boy/girl that she wasn’t pregnant, just had a stomach that looked as if she was. Not only was she not pregnant at the time the6 assured her she was carrying a boy or girl, she’s never been pregnant, and is happily childfree at 50.

You can see Derren Brown doing cold readings on YouTube. He tells the astonished subject that it’s a technique, not psychic ability.

Though he does also have a story about a reading that he had, that he can’t explain

I've had tarot reading once. She fed me a lot of generic cues which I didn't pick up and got visibly more annoyed as it went on when she wasn't getting the feedback she needed.

Eg 'an older man who's an important guiding figure in your life'- well most 30 something women will have a dad, grandfather, father in-law, uncle etc.
As it happens my grandad is dead and my father is absent from my life. When she kept pressing about this man I told her this, and she pivoted to ah I can see you had a traumatic childhood. Clearly riffing off of the absent father...actually my childhood was perfectly fine!
Then it was someone from the past has re-entered your life recently, no, well they will soon, or they might be thinking about you and you're unaware and so on.

Pure and simple guesswork and looking for clues to inform their next move from whatever reaction they get.

At the end she told me it had been a difficult reading because I was 'withholding', if she had innate abilities she shouldn't have needed my input so that's as good as an admission of cold reading to me.

Reminded me of this 😂

Confirmation bias. We think of our partners or mums or a significant person a lot. Sometimes those thought coincide with a phone call. We remember those times . We forget the times they don’t.

This is classic confirmation bias except for what you describe with your daughter which is simply you being very attuned to each others cues and tells which many parents will share with their children.

You don’t remember all the times you’ve texted your mum and she hasn’t been texting you simultaneously or the times you’ve had a tune in your head and your DH hasn’t sung it, - this latter phenomenon is probably often triggered by that song having been on in the background very recently but neither of you were consciously aware of it.

Before their first significant bereavement people will have walked past white feathers countless times without registering them but those who believe in it as a sign or who are told to watch out for them will suddenly see them “everywhere”. Much more prosaically when I was thinking about possible first cars for DD we’d similarly start seeing the models we were thinking about at that moment everywhere having not noticed many before. Obviously there was nothing supernatural about it nor had hundreds of thousands of people bought Fiat 500s overnight; it’s just we only register things our brain views as significant or we’d be constantly overwhelmed with information.

Couple of strange experiences of mine include driving along and all of a sudden strong thoughts of my nana came into my head. This was just as 11am news came on radio. A couple of hours later my dad called me to say Nana had died at 11am ( call from care home and she hadn't been ill)

Another one was when I was pregnant with my eldest. I had a dream I went into a room with 2 on the door and there was a baby with lots of dark hair on scales weighing 6lb 10.

My daughter was born in delivery room 2, shock of dark hair and weighed 6lb 10

Very strange

By what physical process is telepathy possible?

If there isn't a part of the human body capable of doing it, then is isn't physical possible. Just like flight, or lazer eyes, or turning invisible.

If you're suggesting that telepathy is possible due to a part of our physiology that we don't yet understand, how can you claim that the same doesn't hold true for flying?

Because it happens to me all the time

No, you chose to interpret things as telepathy all the time.