Parapsychologist Explains Extra-Sensory Perception

The "peculiar" nature of extra-sensory perception was scrutinized last night at an unusual session of the Law School Forum.

Speaking to a full house in the Ames Courtroom, the popularizer of parapsychology, J. B. Rhine of Duke University, maintained that although the existence of ESP has been "reasonably well established," experts are still far from understanding the causes or even the basic nature of parapsychic behavior.

All the members of the panel seemed to accept this analysis. They did not dispute the reliability of experiments proving the existence of ESJ, although they disagreed on interpretations of the data. Rhine dismissed questions from the audience concerning the accuracy of his experiments, declaring that they would be a subject for discusison before a "fresh audience at another time." By this time, the forum had already dragged on for nearly three hours.

Rhine did, however, list the "many peculiarities" which he had discovered in his study of ESP. The phenomenon, he stated, must be voluntary, or else laboratory experiments could not discover its existence; yet ESP seems to be an unconscious ability.

"The subject really doesn't know what he is doing," Rhine declared. He can score perfectly one day in an ESP test and fall miserably the next without any apparent change in effort or attitude.

Even more "peculiar" is ESP's apparent indifference to time and space. Rhine stated that psychic tests have been conducted in which the subject is separated from his "target" by thousands of miles and months of time without altering his ability to predict.

This feature of ESP, Rhine declared, makes it "quite possible that the phenomenon is of some category other than physical.":

Almost in answer to this statement, Rhine's colleagues on the panel raised philosophical objections to the parapsychologist's explanation of ESP experiments. Ulric R. G. Neisser '50, of the psychology department at Brandeis University, suggested that the data could be described more accurately by discarding customary theories of casuality.