We are fascinated by stories of unusual things that we think of as supernatural or paranormal, ghosts, contact with deceased loved ones, direct awareness of people’s thoughts, glimpses of the future, and the like. Many of us who view ourselves as normal, thoughtful individuals have had unusual experiences of this kind that we can’t explain. Belief in unusual events and phenomena that don’t fit the way we expect the everyday world to work has been around as long people have been able report their experiences. Although science over the last 400 years has very carefully examined almost every conceivable aspect of what we think of as the natural world and has concluded these unusual phenomena do not exist as part of reality, large numbers of people continue to believe that they do.
A 2005 Gallop poll found about three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief. Forty-one percent believe in extrasensory perception (ESP), 37 percent in haunted houses, 32 percent that ghosts or spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations, 21 percent that people can communicate mentally with someone who has died, and 20 percent in the rebirth of the soul in a new body after death (reincarnation). This same poll showed no statistically significant differences among people by age, gender, education, race, and region of the country.
The finding that degree of education doesn’t separate nonbelievers from believers may surprise those who see the latter as naïve and gullible. A poll of nearly 500 college students, reported in the January-February 2006 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, found that college seniors and graduate students were more likely to believe in paranormal events than freshmen. Why this is so is particularly intriguing and perhaps alarming to educators since colleges almost universally attempt to convey the impression that the existence of possible psi has been ruled out by science.
The experiences of psychic phenomena often involve another type of nonmaterial phenomena typically referred to as spiritual. I have chosen to discuss the two separately as I think of them as different although closely related and sometimes overlapping forms of experience. Psi involves nonordinary events and processes that occur in the real world but don’t obey natural-world laws. Spiritual phenomena have these qualities but also have to do with some aspect of a transcendent or divine realm including conscious nonmaterial entities or spirits.
The term commonly used for the serious investigation of psychic phenomena is parapsychology. Parapsychology is the scientific, usually laboratory based, study of four types of psi or psychic phenomena: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, (collectively known as extrasensory perception or ESP), and psychokinesis (mind over matter). There is an older, broader term, psychical research, first used by early investigators, who, while interested in ESP and psychokinesis (PK), were primarily interested in phenomena related to the possibility of surviving physical death suggested by such things as communication from deceased individuals through mediums, hauntings, apparitions (ghosts), poltergeists, and the like.
Psychic research began as a formal field of investigation at the same time as psychology, the study of the mind, first emerged as a separate discipline in science some 130 years ago. From the outset the early pioneers were faced by very strong criticism from those in the established sciences. This criticism was and remains rooted in the conviction that its subject matter, psychic phenomena or psi, are not real.
Following the death in 1910 of William James, a leading psychical researcher among his other achievements, scientific interest in paranormal phenomena began to die out. However, thanks largely to William McDougall, a physician and psychologist from England, the tide turned. In 1920 he was offered the chair in psychology at Harvard that had been vacated since James’s death
At Duke McDougall was given the freedom to design his own psychology program which he envisioned would include research into anomalous mental capacities, an endeavor that he labeled parapsychology. As he set about selecting faculty, he invited a young scholar, Joseph B. Rhine and his wife Louisa to join. They proposed the establishment of a parapsychology laboratory dedicated to the study of anomalous mental capacities which would be based on the following essential principles. First, they proposed studying ordinary people using thoroughly conventional scientific methods and procedures. Second, their procedures would involve simple, easily controlled restricted choices. And third, this would yield data that would be readily quantifiable and easily subject to objective measurement as well as formal statistical analysis. The overall goal was to discover whether by experiments completely in accord with all standards of the accepted scientific method, they could show that anomalous mental capacities actually exist.
Initially they ran experiments asking whether a subject could identify with statistical accuracy a specific card from a series preselected from a standard deck by someone having no sensory contact with the subject. To improve their experimental design the Rhines asked a colleague, Karl Zener, to design a deck specifically for the simple guessing tasks their experiments required. Zener developed a deck of 25 cards, each depicting one of five simple geometric designs: a star, a square, wavy lines, a circle, and a plus sign. These became known as the Zener cards.
The Rhines conducted tests of two kinds of ability with these cards, telepathy, in which subjects were asked to name a card that another person was thinking of, and clairvoyance, in which subjects were asked to name a card selected but not observed by another person. On average a subject could be expected to guess five of the 25 cards correctly by chance alone. The question was, could more than five correct guesses be achieved with enough consistency to suggest that something beyond chance was operating.
In deciding how to characterize the abilities that appeared to be confirmed in his research, Rhine wanted a label that would distance them from spiritualism or the occult. He settled on the term extra-sensory perception which placed the work firmly within the study of perception, a well- established subfield in psychology. Extra-sensory perception or ESP, Rhine believed, only differed from ordinary perception in terms of being generated by another yet unknown sensory modality, one beyond the familiar five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
In an early series of studies known as the Pearce-Pratt experiments involving 1850 trials 558 correct guesses were achieved compared with 370 expected on the basis of chance. The statistical odds against this were an inconceivable 22 billion to one. Although these astronomical numbers were not obtained in subsequent studies, remarkable successes continued to be achieved.
Rhine published a monograph in 1934 describing the lab’s findings with the simple title, Extra-Sensory Perception. Even though it was an academic treatise, the book soon attracted a great deal of popular attention. The New York Times, Scientific American, and a number of other major newspapers and magazines gave it major coverage. As the first publication of sober systematic experiments on anomalous mental capacities, Rhine’s findings also generated no small amount of controversy in the scientific community. Some viewed it as “epoch-making,” while others unleashed a series of assaults that ranged from respectful methodological critiques to vicious attacks on his character.
Laboratories similar to Rhine’s were soon established at other universities, professional associations were formed with peer-reviewed journals and annual conferences, and a mushrooming literature developed, all concerned with anomalous mental capacities. However, beyond an occasional flurry of public and scientific attention, most of this activity was to go on outside both the public eye and everyday scientific and academic life.
In the meantime the Rhines, as good researchers, carefully considered those criticisms of their work that seemed valid and took measures to improve their procedures. They completely isolated subjects from the experimenters on the very slight chance the latter in some unwitting way provided cues as to the cards. To eliminate any patterns in the card shuffling they employed a machine to accomplish this. They also instituted additional steps for checking and double checking their results. To meet a barrage of questions and criticism concerning their use of statistics, they invited the American Institute of Mathematics to look at their procedures. The resulting full validation pretty much quieted this major source of criticism.
In 1937 Rhine published a book on ESP for the general public,” New Frontiers of the Mind”, which became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and attracted wide attention. In that same year Rhine and fellow ESP investigators were able to establish their own scientific publication, The Journal of Parapsychology. In 1940 the Rhines published another book containing a highly detailed report of all the experiments undertaken at their lab since its inception along with an enumeration of and response to every major criticism leveled against them. “Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years” proved as highly popular as their earlier book and, much to the Rhines’ astonishment, even became required reading for introductory psychology classes at Harvard.
For a time it seemed that anomalous mental abilities might finally gain the respectability to be considered worthy of study by mainstream science. However, soon strong voices arose denouncing ESP as pseudoscience.
Pseudoscience is defined in Wikipedia as: “a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status. Pseudoscience is often characterized by the use of vague, exaggerated or unprovable claims, an over-reliance on confirmation rather than rigorous attempts at refutation, a lack of openness to evaluation by other experts, and a general absence of systematic processes to rationally develop theories.”
The book vanished from Harvard’s assigned reading list, and mainstream professional scientific organizations stopped discussing it. The Rhines’ laboratory sank into scientific obscurity, although experimental results were regularly published in The Journal of Parapsychology, which, however, was read only by a small group of dedicated subscribers.
Mayer, E. (2007). Extraordinary Knowing