Parapsychology

"Extrasensory perception" is a far better known phrase today than it was a few years ago. It means perception of matter or of images in another person's mind without the aid of the ordinary senses--in other words, clairvoyance and telepathy. The fact that extrasensory perception is an increasingly familiar concept among people who pay no attention to crystal-gazers and swamis is largely due to the rigorously controlled, long-continued experiments at Duke University of Psychologist Joseph Banks Rhine (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934). Lately Dr. Rhine has felt the need of a word of wider scope to designate not only telepathy and clairvoyance but any other "unusual capacities of mind that do not fit into the recognized order of things." He chose the word parapsychology, an importation from the German.

From the Duke University presses last week appeared Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Journal of Parapsychology, first publication in this field ever sponsored by a reputable university. Well-printed, with a plain, pleasing cover in blue on rag paper, the journal will appear quarterly. Annual subscription: $3. Editors are Dr. Rhine and famed, contentious old Psychologist William McDougall, who raised the eyebrows of orthodox science by dabbling in parapsychology even before the Rhine experiments at Duke got under way.

Dr. Rhine's experiments are more impressive for bulk than for complexity. He uses a pack of 25 cards bearing five designs--a circle, a star, a plus sign, a rectangle, a band of three wavy lines--and there are five cards of each design in the pack. For clairvoyance, the pack is thoroughly shuffled, laid face down on a table, and the subject is required to call them off in order from top to bottom. In telepathy, he is required to guess the card visualized in the mind of an agent. Since at every step there is a choice of one among five, the subject should make an average of five hits in a run of 25, if nothing but luck or chance entered the situation. There is nothing in the law of averages to prevent him from making ten hits, or 15, or even 20 once in a long while. But if he maintains an average consistently higher than the normal expectancy, the results become significant. Thus, according to Dr. Rhine's mathematics, the odds against making an average of 7.5 hits per 25 tries through 40 runs of 25 each are ten-thousand-billion-billion-billion-billion to 1. In his complete dossier of 100,000 tries he has longer runs and higher averages than this, which would seem to rule out chance with devastating finality.

The Rhine evidence for extrasensory perception was greeted with widespread skepticism and objections in academic psychological circles. One effect, however, was to start experimenters elsewhere to work trying to duplicate or disprove the Rhine results. It was to accommodate reports of this growing body of research that the Journal of Parapsychology was set on foot.

In Vol. 1, No. 1, Psychologist C. R. Carpenter and Mathematician H. R. Phalen of Columbia University say they started their experiments with proper skepticism, using 24 subjects. Two of these made significantly high averages. When they tried 30 subjects on colored cards, instead of Rhine's ESP (ExtraSensory Perception) cards, four of the 30 made impressive scores.

J. L. Woodruff and R. W. George of Tarkio (Mo.) College reported affirmative results with ESP cards. When a screen was interposed between cards and performer, two subjects grew worse but one improved.

Dr. Hans Bender of Bonn University found that when subjects tried to read cards in a dim light they made about the same scores as in parapsychologic perception.

In a recapitulation of results obtained years ago by England's Psychic Investigator G. N. Tyrrell, it appeared that one subject, guessing which one of five lights in closed boxes was shining, frequently chose the right box before the light was turned on.

Dr. Lucien Warner of White Plains, and his assistant Mildred Raible, found that when subjects were asked to say which of two very slightly different weights was the heavier, scores were better when the person who presented the weights knew the answer, indicating telepathy.

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