PSI can be described as a science of knowing something or about somebody without having been told or met or seen. It is a science of extra-sensory powers. Animals are supposed to have been endowed with it but some human beings also have it. And modern science’s attempts to prove the existence of extras-sensory powers have inevitably given birth to extensive research resulting in a few facts but in the process giving rise to much more controversy around it.
How is it possible for two people to have direct mental communication. i.e. Telepathy? What is clairvoyance or second sight, the specific perception of an event or object? And how can some people perceive the future without deducing their occurrence from existing knowledge? These were some of the phenomena which were baffing psychologist. To these investigations, Professor J.B. Rhine added yet another query – the psychokinesis, which was the use of the mind’s powers to effect change in external matter. These four areas are called PSI – a word derived from the 23rd letter of Greek alphabet. This is referred in scientific terms as an unknown quantity.
Rhine wanted to prove these phenomena scientifically. But he also realized that to prove them, it would require accumulating of anecdotes about PSI experiences. But even anecodotes and stories were not devoid of shortcomings. Rhine himself remarked, “there is no way of coming to grip with them. They happen and are gone, leaving nothing but memory, none of the hard reality of a meteorite or a fossil.” So Rhine designed a series of sound, replicable experiments, for example, the card game. There were 25 cards and on each card laws imprinted a star or a circle or a rectangle, a cross or a wary parallel line. During the play, the dealer was told to carefully shuffe the cards and then place the deck behind a small screen. Through this game Rhine was looking for evidence of a strange and remarkable capability which he called extra-sensory perception.
However, as soon as Rhine began to probe the unexplained world of PSI, the crucial factors began to confront him. These crucial factors were – are conventional methods of scientific investigation appropriate in examining paranormal subject matter? Is it not possible that the act of scientific investigation may deform the subject that is being studied?
Rhine, however, was not the first scientist who edeavoured to study PSI phenomenon scientifically. Before him, Charles Richet in Paris, introduced statistical analysis, John Coover at Stanford University and George Estabrooks and William McDougall at Harvard University examined that phenomenon. As early as in 1920’s, the author Upton Sinclair experimented with his wife, Mary. He attempted to show “Mental radio” – Telepathy. The book Sinclairs published described their research including 100 simple drawings that Sinclair had tried to transmit telepathically to his wife. Surprisingly, she had made parallel sketches and comments in response. The preface of the book was written by Albert Einstein. He commented that, “Sinclair’s good faith and dependability should not be doubted.”
However, Rhine was the only researcher who brought devotion to psychic research. To test telepathy and other psychic abilities, he recruited subjects at random. He focused his research through Zenner Cards (named after Karl Zener, a fellow member of the Duke Psychology Faculty). In this experiment, the sender concentrated on the symbol of the card he had turned up and the subjects, maybe in the same building or somewhere else, record his impression of the symbol. While for the clairvoyance experiments, the subjects tried to perceive either the card being turned over or the order of the cards in shuffled deck.
After two years of research, Rhine found eight subjects who scored above the chance elements on the tests for telepathy and clairvoyance. These eight subjects, Rhine said, “underwent a total of 85,724 trials and achieved 24,364 hits. This was 7,219 more hits than might be expected by chance.” Out of these eight subjects, Hubert Pearce, divinity student at the Duke Scholl of Religion was most successful. In 1933-34, Pearce took part in long distance test conducted by J. Gaither Pratt. Out of the 1850 trials, Pearce achieved stupendous success which made even the critics concede that “something besides coincidence seemed to be operating.”
In 1934, Rhine published his results in the book entitled ‘Extra Sensory Perception’. This “little monograph”, as Rhine called it, created widespread interest and controversy. Critics were against it because his result were against the laws of physics. One explanation which critics unanimously voiced was that the Zener cards were shuffed by hand rather than in a scientific way. Another point of disagreement was that subjects might have gained knowledge of the card’s markings through some ordinary sensory means. A British psychologist, C.E.M. Hansel, was one of the most active PSI critics. In his book, ‘ESP: A Scientific Evaluation’, Hansel insisted that cheating could not be ruled out. Surprisingly, when Rhine himself attempted the test so as to shut the critics, he achieved mixed results. Rhine and some other parapsychologists interpreted the failure to replicate due to the elusive, unpredictable prey to the mood of both subject and experiment. To continue the experiment without any interference, Duke established a parapsychology laboratory with Rhine as its director.
Untouched by the criticism, Rhine once again plunged into the PSI research with new researchers. He continued his work with Zener cards. The procedure of Zener cards was tightened up with automatic card-shuffing machine.
Rhine died in 1980 at the age of 84. The half a century preceding his death was full impressive results – millions of trails with ESP cards, random number generators and dozens of other devices had recorded significant scores in telepathy clairvoyance, precognition or psychokinesis. Despite the progress, PSI research remained outside the mainstream of science. In fact, even now scientific journals exclude PSI articles from publications.
The remarkable feat of the PSI researchers is that despite the odds, they continued their research constantly. And they claimed that telepathic senses, clairvoyance and precognition not only existed among human beings but in animals too. Animals can sense dangers before-hand by the sudden change in weather and they could even locate their master at distant places by telepathic abilities.
Despite several successes and failures experienced by the PSI researchers, till now no researcher has come up with a theoretical framework in which all the fragments of PSI research can be appropriately included.
Nonetheless, we can conclude with the remark made by the Nobel Prize winning physiologist Charles Richet about precognition, “I will not say that it is possible. I will only say that it is true”. Some parapsychologists believe that they have successfully proved the existence of PST. But unless such researchers can experimentally demonstrate PSI as one critic opined, “they must develop a plausible theory of PSI operations,” it is difficult to believe them. And till then it is, “a no man’s land between the lunatic fringe on one hand and the academically unorthodox one on the other.”
