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Clairvoyance

and Telepathy

Joseph Rhine & Louisa Rhine

            Let us jump back rather far in time for a moment and discuss parapsychology’s good friend, Joseph B. Rhine. 

            J.B. Rhine, a Pennsylvania native, studied botany in the early 1920s. His interests began to shift in 1922 after he attended a lecture on psychic phenomena given by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Although he began his exploration of psychic phenomena as a skeptic, J.B. Rhine was ultimately called to action by works such as Oliver Lodge’s (1) and William McDougall’s (2). Per Mayer’s Extraordinary Knowing, Rhine “pronounced it ‘unpardonable for the scientific world today to overlook evidences of the supernormal in the world–if there are such.’”

           

            Rhine sought out McDougall, and McDougall, impressed by both J.B. and Louisa Rhine, selected the couple to accompany him to Duke University, where he had been granted the opportunity to establish a psychology department.

            The joint lab established under both Rhines was situated in the field of (what later came to be known as) parapsychology. In Extraordinary Knowing, Mayer defines the lab’s “three essential principles”: One, “the use of experimental subjects claiming no unusual abilities,” two, “simple, easily controlled restricted-choice procedures,” and three, “rigorous statistical evaluation of results.” These principles reflect the deliberate care and thought inherent in work coming out of the Rhine lab–this level of meticulousness is mirrored across the various fields of study in western science. 

            Now, let us turn to the experiments designed by J.B Rhine and described in his journal article, “Some selected experiments in extra-sensory perception.” The article summarizes selected experiments across approximately six years of research and hundreds of thousands of experimental trials. 

            These experimental trials fall into two categories: one, clairvoyant card-calling and two, telepathic thought transmission. The American Heritage Dictionary defines clairvoyance as “the supposed power to see objects or events that cannot be perceived by the senses” and telepathy as “the supposed process of communicating through means other than the senses, as by the direct exchange of thoughts.” The Parapsychological Association defines these terms with a bit more specificity: Clairvoyance is the “paranormal acquisition of information concerning an object or contemporary physical event; in contrast to telepathy, the information is assumed to derive directly from an external physical source…and not from the mind of another person.” Telepathy, then, is “the paranormal acquisition of information concerning the thoughts, feelings or activity of another conscious being.”

            Rhine’s clairvoyant card-calling trials required a pack of twenty-five cards displaying five possible symbols. Five cards in the pack displayed a star, five displayed a plus, five displayed a wave, five displayed a rectangle, and five displayed a circle. The stamping process was conducted so as to prevent the addition of tactile sensory cues to the cards. The drawing and calling of each card represented a single experimental trial, and each run was comprised of twenty-five trials, or twenty-five cards. 

            The first series of clairvoyant card-calling trials centered around a single subject, Hubert E. Pearce Jr. (named HP in Rhine’s journal article). HP was a divinity student and an unusually talented subject among a large cohort of subjects including ordinary college students and other volunteers.

            For this set of HP-centered trials, twenty-five decks of twenty-five cards were newly printed–the subject had never before seen or touched the cards. At the beginning of each run, the observer (usually J.B. Rhine) handed one full pack of cards, face-down, to HP. HP shuffled the cards and the observer cut the pack and placed it before HP. HP called the card at the top of the deck, meaning he either perceived or guessed the symbol on the face of the top card. He then picked up the card, keeping it face-down, and moved it to a “discard” pile. This process was repeated twenty-four more times to complete the run. Neither the subject nor the observer knew which figures were on which cards until the end of the run. 

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*Zener cards

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*Zener card experiment 1 (see above)

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*Zener card experiment 2 (see below) 

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*Zener card experiment 3 (see below) 

            Each correct card-call (or each successful trial) was termed a “hit.” During data analysis, scores from multiple runs were totaled and the mean chance expectation for that number of trials was found using a complex set of statistical calculations. After 1650 trials (sixty-six runs), the odds of the results being due to chance were calculated. Per Rhine, these odds would “require a number of 70 digits.” Additionally, shuffling bias was disproved, as the first twenty-five runs were performed with newly printed decks, and these runs presented the same hit rate as the later runs with the twenty-five decks (approximately nine hits per run of twenty-five cards). 

            The second series of clairvoyant card-calling trials centered around the same subject: HP. This series of 1625 trials (or sixty-five runs) was conducted in the same way as the previously described trials with one exception: the card calls were made before the deck was touched (i.e., shuffled and cut). The call-record was checked against the order of the cards after the deck was shuffled and cut; the probability of the results having occurred purely due to chance were on the order of 10^20. 

            The third and final series of clairvoyant card-calling trials described in Rhine’s article centered again around HP but were performed with Dr. J.G. Pratt as the observer. In these trials, the subject and the observer were located in two different buildings on campus. They synchronized their watches prior to the experimental trials. At a predetermined time, Dr. Pratt took the top card off of the shuffled deck and, without looking at it, laid it face down on the table. Thirty seconds later, HP called the card and recorded his call. Another thirty seconds passed before Pratt replaced the first card on the table with a second card, moving the first card to a “discard” pile. This was repeated until all twenty-five cards were called; following the runs performed during each sitting, the records were sealed. In this series of trials, as in the last two series described, the results were statistically significant. 

            A note: the use of a mechanical shuffler in later studies did not impact the hit rate.

          Rhine’s telepathic thought-transmission trials, unlike the clairvoyant card-calling trials, did not require a deck of twenty-five cards. They required the same five symbols (star, plus, wave, rectangle, circle), this time to be potentially transferred from the observer to the subject through thought alone. In these experiments, the imagining of one symbol counted as one trial. Like the card-calling experiments, twenty-five symbols, or trials, comprised a run. 

            The first series of telepathic thought-transmission trials centered around a single percipient, George Zirkle (GZ). Like HP, GZ was discovered to be an unusually talented subject among a large cohort of subjects. Sara Ownbey served as the observer in these trials–both she and GZ were graduate students in Duke’s Psychology department. 

            For each trial, Ownbey randomly chose one of the five symbols to imagine and to “send” to the percipient. Ownbey was practiced in varying the order of her symbol choices–statistical analysis (3) on the part of Rhine proved that her order was, indeed, random. It should also be noted that a fan was turned on during each run to eliminate the potential for whispering. 

            The percipient–GZ–called out the symbol he had perceived or guessed, and the observer recorded it before “sending” another symbol. This process was repeated twenty-five times per run and across varying distances for different runs–the hit rate did not decrease with increasing distance. No statistical computation was performed because the hit rates were so high (this is quite unusual): The lowest hit rate of the first twelve runs was fourteen and the highest was twenty-three. One of the 950 runs yielded a hit rate of twenty-five–a perfect score.

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*Telepathy experiment

           The second series of telepathic thought-transmission trials centered around the percipient May Frances Turner (MFT). Sara Ownbey, again, served as the observer. Like HP and GZ, MFT was discovered to be an unusually talented subject among a large cohort of subjects. Although there is not much information regarding who Turner is, it seems that she was also a student as Duke University at the time of the experimental trials. 

            In these trials, the percipient and the observer were 250 miles apart. Prior to each run, the two participants would synchronize their watches. One call was performed either every five or every three minutes, depending on the run. MFT’s call records were sent immediately to J.B. Rhine for analysis. Across eight runs, the average hit rate was 10.1 out of twenty-five. Again, these results were very significant, as a hit rate due to chance should be around only 5 hits per twenty-five cards. 

            J.B. Rhine summarized the outcome of these experiments eloquently:“If these are sound, they open up such large possibilities for the study of mind and its place in nature that we need to go all the more slowly to determine the evidential grounds upon which they rest.”

            Although these experiments suggest that only certain individuals can experience clairvoyance or telepathy (HP, GZ, and MFT), the fact that these effects can be observed at all is worthy of attention. Perhaps every human has an innate capacity to experience psi, but only some have mastered (or at least obtained voluntary control of) these abilities. At the very least, these phenomena and effects deserve further exploration.

  1. British physicist whose work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was pivotal to the invention of the radio.  

  2. British psychologist who helped to popularize the study of social behavior. He ultimately came to work at Duke University in 1927 and was involved in parapsychology research. (Note: It seems that J.B. Rhine was inspired by McDougall’s work prior to his potentially interacting with him on Duke University’s campus.) 

  3. This involved the cross-comparison of Ownbey’s consecutive selection records across 650 trials. 

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