More than half the UK population believe that extra-sensory perception (ESP) is real, and a quarter claim to have had a telepathic experience. When Uri Geller bent spoons on television, he inspired around the country a host of “mini-Gellers” - children who claimed they too could bend spoons by mind-power, and certainly left the kitchen drawers crammed with contorted cutlery.

This, then, is an area of great interest. Can we latch on to the interest, and bring science to bear on the subject? If so, pupils might actually want to use scientific ideas in their investigations, and so gain motivation to find out about science.

Paranormal ideas are usually presented as an argument, often between two people quoted in a newspaper or sitting in the studio. “This amazing psychic power enables me to find goldoiltrue love!” “Oh no it doesn’t!” “Oh yes it does!” You, the reader or viewer, may be impressed by the claims, but you are not swayed by the argument - it’s much easier to go on believing what you believed before. What’s more, you are not engaged actively by the ideas.

A few years ago I wrote a book called Scientific Eye, which introduced some basic ideas of science to 11-year-old children. The book spawned a successful television series of some 50 programmes. One of the successful aims of Scientific Eye was actively to engage the reader and the viewer. We did this mainly by asking lots of questions at critical points, and not providing answers, so that viewers had to think for themselves. We called this “active television”.

So with the allegedly psychic powers. Rather than simply laying out claims and counter-claims, why not hand over to the consumers, and invite them to do their own experiments? Dowsing is simple. Most people know that dowsers walk about with forked twigs or bits of bent coat-hanger, and claim to get a reaction when they walk over water. This happened in Arthur Ransome’s Pigeon Post, so it must be true: “The stick seemed to leap in her hands. The ends of it pressed against her thumbs, while the point of the fork dipped towards the ground, bending the branches, twisting her hands round with them, and at last almost springing out of her fingers.”

You can leave it at that, but why not try it out for yourself? Manipulate your own coat hanger or cut your own dowsing twig, and see whether you get a dowsing reaction over a bucket of water. Many people do - perhaps even the majority, when the water is visible in the bucket.

All dowsing instruments are unstable mechanical amplifiers, and turn minute tremors of the hands into large movements of the pointers. How can you tell whether the dowsing reaction comes from the rods, from your hands, or from your mind? The next stage is also simple: take three identical buckets, put water in one, and cover them up. Do you still get a twitch?

Now for the tough test. Get someone else to switch the bucket, so you genuinely don’t know which one has water in. If you can still find it, you may have some unusual skill. If you don’t, then what was going on before? Were you deliberately cheating, or was there some tiny unconscious connection between your seeing the water and the twitches of the muscles in your hands? This connection must teach us something about psychology.

The same type of tests can be applied to telepathy, dreams, premonitions, crystals, hand-reading, and even astrology. How many people unthinkingly look at their stars every morning? Finding out whether there is anything real in it is not hard; you can do it as a party game, or a serious scientific test.

Suppose you do such a test in class - cut out the horoscopes from last month’s magazine, stick them in random places on a board, and then see how many of the class can correctly identify their own - the pupils may perhaps be startled into thinking about their horoscopes in a different and more objective way.

When I began thinking about all this, I had some qualms: “Hang on a sec. This all sounds like a load of rubbish.” Some of it probably is, but there is no reason why the science you apply to it should not be rigorous. Even Michael Faraday did some elegant and serious experiments on table-tipping.

I know science teachers are in a bit of a red-queen situation; they have to run as fast as they can to keep in step with the national curriculum. But perhaps a lesson or two spent applying scientific methods to star signs and hand-reading might be a sound investment. Maybe some of those wavering pupils would be that much more inclined to think there is something for them in science, if it seemed to have a bearing on the things they are interested in. For many people, Taurus and Gemini are a whole lot more important than co-efficients of friction.

There is an added bonus, too. Psychology teachers often have trouble finding good simple experiments for their pupils. The strange land of parapsychology provides many tests that are ideal and easily adapted for use in class.

Perhaps I am wasting my time, but if I were a teacher I should love to see my pupils using scientific tests, not to demonstrate some well-known fact in physics, but in a genuinely experimental way, to get a little closer to the truth - in an area that really fascinates them.

Test Your Psychic Powers by Susan Blackmore and Adam Hart-Davis explains both how to cut and use dowsing rods, record dreams etc, and also how to set up the scientific tests that will find out whether the supposed powers are real, or all in the mind. Published by Thorsons (Harper Collins) at Pounds 5.99.

The first episode of Adam Hart-Davis’s new television series, Local Heroes, on the pioneers of science and technology, will be broadcast on BBC2, January 2, 7.30 pm