Parapsychology

Extra-Sensory Perception: Part III. Explanation and Discussion: Chapter 13. E.S.P. From the Viewpoint of General Parapsychology

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This is a chapter from J.B. Rhine's landmark 1934 experimental parapsychology monograph, written in the tradition of empirical laboratory science and presenting card-guessing trials as quantitative evidence for extrasensory perception. Rhine's central argument is that telepathy (perceiving another person's thoughts) and clairvoyance (perceiving physical objects directly) are not two distinct faculties but a single underlying perceptual process he terms ESP — distinguished only by whether the "object" perceived exists in ink or in a mind. His evidence comes from thousands of trials with seven subjects, who consistently scored at nearly identical above-chance rates under both conditions (averaging 8.1 hits per 25 for clairvoyance versus 7.9 for telepathy, against a chance baseline of 5), with day-to-day performance fluctuations rising and falling in tandem across both modes. Crucially, Rhine shows that every variable that affects one condition affects the other identically: sedatives (sodium amytal) suppressed both, stimulants (caffeine) raised both, illness and fatigue degraded both, and physical distance did not differentially impair either. The chapter's most distinctive claim is methodological — Rhine argues that prior European parapsychology (French researchers emphasizing clairvoyance, English researchers emphasizing telepathy) failed to test the relationship between the two, and that his controlled, separation-of-conditions design is the first to do so experimentally. A reader interested in the historical foundations of parapsychology as a would-be experimental science, or in early 20th-century debates about the nature of anomalous cognition, would find this essential primary source material.

Extra-Sensory Perception: Part III. Explanation and Discussion: Chapter 13. E.S.P. From the Viewpoint of General Parapsychology

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