Science: Blind Sight

The Negroes of Durham, N, C. call it “Mr. Duke’s Univussity.” Durham newsfolk who depend on it for frequent stories call it a “three-ring circus.” One ring in the Duke University tent which has something going on all the time is the Department of Psychology. That department is headed by aging, idealistic, contentious Professor William McDougall, emphatic exponent of Lamarckism (inheritance of acquired characteristics); it publishes Character and Personality (“An International Quarterly for Psychodiagnostics and Allied Studies”); and for four years it has nurtured the most significant and apparently the most cold-blooded scientific attack ever made in the U. S. on the problem of extrasensory perception.

Joseph Banks Rhine, 39, started his career in science as a hard-headed plant physiologist. Later he abandoned biology for psychology. He believed that knowledge of psychic phenomena had been impeded on one hand by emotional fervor and on the other by unreasonable skepticism. He knew that to most scientists the very words telepathy and clairvoyance smacked of vaudeville hood-winkery and fat. dark women. But if telepathy and clairvoyance existed, he reasoned, they should be accessible to scientific approach. He went to Duke’s Professor McDougall, got a post at the university and facilities for research.

Dr. Rhine had what he considered the ideally simple tool—a set of five designs printed on cards: a circle, a star, a plus sign, a rectangle, a band of three wavy lines. He started experiments with packs of 25 cards, five cards of each design. For subjects he used mostly students, some of them graduate assistants in his department. To visitors the procedure seemed like a quiet parlor game.

In the tests for clairvoyance, the subject was required at first to name the design on each card as it was removed, face down, from the pack. Later he was asked to name the order of the pack as it lay untouched on a table. In the tests for telepathy he was required to guess the card visualized in the mind of a telepathic agent. Since each guess represented a choice of one design among five, the average expectation under the laws of chance would be five hits in a run of 25 cards. At first Dr. Rhine’s subjects were close to that average. But with practice most of them were soon clearly above average, and as they improved still further the results increased enormously in significance.

To show their full import, Researcher Rhine hauled out the mathematics of probability. A subject practicing clairvoyance gets, for example, 7 or 8 hits out of 25 tries. As a gambler knows, the law of averages does not preclude such a score once in a while although the long-run average will be 5 in 25. But suppose the clairvoyant maintains an average of 7.5 hits per 25 tries through 40 runs of 25 cards each—1,000 trials in all. The odds against such a performance resulting from chances are better than 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.

But Dr. Rhine has close to 100,000 trials to back up his results, and he does not call the averages markedly significant until they are well above 7.5 per 25. The lumped results of five subjects comprising 13,750 trials show an average of 9. The improbability that these results could occur by chance, Dr. Rhine feels, is equal to the improbability suggested by Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, viz., if an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might accidentally write all the books in the British Museum.

Dr. Rhine knows that any sane insurance actuary would agree with him that chance is ruled out. To rule out other factors he has taken elaborate measures. And whenever possible Dr. Rhine had witnesses present—departmental colleagues, skeptical or friendly, frequently Dr. McDougall himself. He even invited Wallace Lee, a professional magician, to observe some tests and explain the scores if he could. Magician Lee came and observed but did not explain.

On the basis of these tests Dr. Rhine has concluded: “The ability to exercise clairvoyant and telepathic perception has been fairly well shown to be a natural capacity of the human species.” He finds that, like manual dexterity, this ability increases with practice, is diminished by illness, fatigue, drowsiness, narcotic drugs. He finds that most persons have the ability in some degree, that at least one person in four has it in marked degree.

Having finished this chapter, for the time being, Dr. Rhine decided to begin systematic investigation of the capacities of “mediums” (whom he calls parasychic sensitives), whose special field is supposed to be perception without help from the five senses. Accordingly he invited Eileen J,. Garrett, a medium well known in Britain, to Durham to take his tests. Last week he published the results of this inquiry in Character and Personality.

Mrs. Garrett was capable of self-induced trance, which to Dr. Rhine seemed to be self-hypnosis. In the trance state she underwent a change of voice, manner, posture and her utterances made it appear that she was invaded by the spirit of a deceased Arab who called himself Uvani. Dr. Rhine was not much concerned with whether “Uvani” was in fact an Oriental ghost, or the alter ego of a Schizoid personality, or a simple hallucination. He wanted to know what Mrs. Garrett in her normal state and in her trance could do with his cards. Findings :

1) In the normal state the medium was not appreciably better than the chance expectation at clairvoyance, averaging 5.6 hits per 25 over a long series. She was also low at first in telepathy but rose to 13.4 (sustained for 625 trials). After that her faculty seemed dulled and she fell off steadily to the chance level.

2) “Uvani,” the trance personality, was temperamental. He expressed reluctance, disclaimed any ability of his own. Like the normal Mrs. Garrett’s his clairvoyance scores were poor. But his first telepathy scores (for four runs) averaged 11 hits per 25. Then they, too, dropped abruptly to below the chance level, averaging only 4 hits over ten runs.

Although Dr. Rhine felt that these results added one more brick to his edifice of proof that extrasensory perception is a reality, he concluded that the medium’s ability was by no means extraordinary. Her best scores in telepathy were high, but had been surpassed by one of Dr. Rhine’s own students, a young man with no pretensions to special psychic equipment. Strengthened was Dr. Rhine’s conviction that sight without seeing is a natural and commonplace faculty, exercised by “the reception of an unknown form of energy in an unknown manner” but nevertheless “an integral part of mental life” and entirely within the orderly processes of Nature.