Science: Unconscious Whispering

The late Thomas Welton Stanford, brother of Leland Stanford, was a firm believer in “psychic phenomena,” endowed a chair of psychic research at California’s Stanford University. First occupant was a distinguished psychologist, the late John Edgar Coover. Second and present occupant is a black-haired, tenacious young man named John Kennedy. Both Coover and Kennedy have used the research funds provided by Thomas Welton Stanford to try to expose the phenomena in which the donor believed.

Young Dr. Kennedy has set himself the job of exploding the claims of Duke University’s Joseph Banks Rhine, inventor of the card-guessing experiments which he claims prove Extra-Sensory Perception (“ESP”), a Rhine-ism for telepathy and clairvoyance. Last week, Dr. Kennedy reported an ingenious series of counter-experiments which many of Rhine’s many critics will regard as the final nail in ESP’s coffin.

Dr. Kennedy had an idea that “unconscious whispering” might help explain the high percentage of correct guesses recorded by Rhine. A person trying to convey telepathically one of the five symbols on the ESP cards to another person’s mind might imagine that he was shouting the symbol at the top of his lungs, and so might unconsciously move his lips or alter his breathing. These slight sounds might furnish valuable cues to a person with acute hearing, or to a half-hypnotized person whose normal hearing was sharpened. Dr. Kennedy used blindfolded subjects who were not told the purpose of his experiment. Near the “sender” but unknown to him was installed a six-foot parabolic reflector to project any unconscious whispering toward the “receiver.” The receiver had a similar reflector to focus any such sounds on his ears. When the sender was instructed to imagine that he was shouting the symbol, there were enough sound cues to swell the receiver’s average of correct guesses far above the chance expectation. But when the sender was not instructed to indulge in “mental shouting,” the percentage of correct guesses dropped to the chance level. Dr. Kennedy felt that these results proved his point with crushing finality.

To prove the existence of ESP, it would be necessary to exclude with scientific rigor the possibility of other reasons for the results. Rhine’s opponents do not feel that he has excluded possible collusion, sensory cues or clerical mistakes in tabulation. It has been shown that under certain lighting conditions the ESP symbols show through the backs of the cards, and in some of the Rhine experiments the cards have not been screened from the view of the observer. Some scientists have criticized Dr. Rhine’s probability mathematics; others declare that he has withheld some of his results from publication. Still others have tried to duplicate his experiments under rigid laboratory control —with unfavorable results.

Most U. S. psychologists consider Rhine’s findings worthless. The arguments against him do not, of course, prove that ESP does not exist; but it is also impossible, by scientific means, as one psychologist cogently points out, to prove that witches and fairies do not exist.