Printed in the Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch, "The Parapsychology Revolution: The Extraordinary Progress of the “Elusive Science" Quest 111:1, pg 18-27
By Mitch Horowitz
I believe that our culture is poised for an epochal change in how we understand and accept the core findings of parapsychology—that is, acceptance of the empiricism of the extraphysical. Rejectionism tends to harden on the brink of seismic change, and we are seeing pockets of that as well. But the outcome of the present moment is, I believe, the acknowledgment that we possess indelible evidence of an extraphysical component to life.
The formal scientific scrutiny of anomalous phenomena marked its starting point in 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London by scientists including F.W.H. Myers (who coined the term telepathy for mind-to-mind communication) and pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James.
At its inception, parapsychology sought to test mediumistic phenomena under controlled conditions. The early SPR worked with rigor to hold spirit mediums to proof. Researchers such as the strong-willed Hodgson and James himself ventured to the séance table intent on safeguarding against fraud and documenting claimed phenomena, including physical mediumship, after-death communication, and clairvoyance or what is today called channeling. They probed unexplained cases, exposed frauds, and created historical controversies that have lingered until today. But they were working largely within the lace-curtained settings of Victorian parlors. On the whole, SPR researchers were not functioning in clinical environments, so-called white coat lab settings. The American chapter of the SPR, meanwhile, was stymied by factional disputes between members more interested in the after-death survival thesis and those committed to the more conservative direction of documenting mental phenomena.
I do not intend to leave the impression that lab-based study of psychical phenomena was absent. In the 1880s, Nobel laureate and SPR president Charles Richet, one of France’s most highly regarded biologists, studied telepathy with subjects under hypnosis. Richet also introduced the use of statistical analysis in ESP card tests, presaging today’s near-universal use of statistics throughout the psychological and social sciences. In the early 1920s, French engineer René Warcollier conducted a series of experiments on long-distance telepathy. Sigmund Freud himself pondered the possibilities of telepathy, sometimes delaying publication of key statements posthumously to avoid professional fallout. This was the case with Freud’s “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” his earliest paper on the topic written in 1921—but withheld from publication until 1941, two years after his death. (This was likely at the urging of his English biographer Ernest Jones, who found the topic professionally compromising.)
The paranormal burgeoned into an acknowledged, if hotly debated, academic field thanks largely to ESP researcher J.B. Rhine (1895‒1980) and his wife and intellectual partner Louisa Rhine (1891‒1983). In the late 1920s and early ’30s, the Rhines established the research program that became the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, which made paradigmatic advances in the scientific study of ESP.
The Rhines trained as statisticians and botanists at the University of Chicago, where both received doctorates (a considerable rarity for a woman then). In Chicago in 1922, they were inspired by a talk on Spiritualism by English author Arthur Conan Doyle. With his eyes on greater horizons, J.B. soon grew restless in his chosen career. “It would be unpardonable for the scientific world today to overlook evidences of the supernormal in our world,” he told what must have been a mildly surprised audience of scientific agriculturalists at the University of West Virginia.
The Rhines began casting around, venturing to Columbia University and Harvard seeking opportunities to combine their scientific training with their metaphysical interests. Initial progress proved fitful. As often occurs in life, just before they gave up their immense efforts, an extraordinary opportunity appeared. In 1930, with the support of Duke’s first president, William Preston Few, the new chairman of Duke’s psychology department, William McDougall, made J.B. Rhine a formal part of the campus.
Although the founding of Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory is often dated to that year, the program was not christened the Parapsychology Laboratory until 1935, where it remained until 1965. Today the Rhine Research Center continues as an independent lab off campus. It proved a watershed episode in which parapsychology was formally folded into an academic structure and study of the psychical became a profession.
At Duke, J.B. Rhine did not quite originate but popularized the phrase extrasensory perception, or ESP, which soon became a household term. The work begun at Duke’s Parapsychology Lab in the early 1930s has continued among different researchers, labs, and universities to the present day. The effort is to provide impeccably documented evidence that human beings participate in some form of existence that exceeds cognition, motor skill, and commonly observed biological functions—that we participate in trackable, replicable patterns of extra-physicality that permit us, at least sometimes, to communicate and receive information in a manner that surpasses generally acknowledged sensory experience and means of data conveyance. This field of exchange occurs independently of time, space, or mass.
We have also accumulated a body of statistical evidence for psychokinesis (i.e., mind over matter) and precognition or what is sometimes called retrocausality, in which events in the future affect the present. For several years, Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Northern California, has performed and replicated experiments in precognition in which subjects display bodily stressors, such as pupil dilation or increased heart rate, seconds before being shown distressing or emotionally triggering imagery.
These are fleeting references to a handful of recent findings from modern parapsychology. I am going to make a statement, and I am then going to argue for it: we possess heavily scrutinized, replicable statistical evidence for an extraphysical component of the human psyche. For decades, this evidence has appeared in—and been reproduced for—traditional, academically based journals, often juried by scientists without sympathy for its findings. This evidence has been procured and replicated under rigorous clinical conditions. It demonstrates that the individual possesses or participates in a facet of existence that surpasses what is known to us biologically, psychologically, sensorily, and technologically. In short: ESP exists.
The search for greater dimensions of life is as old as humanity itself. But what is new and revolutionary is the advent of science as a method of protocols to identify processes that affirm primordial humanity’s basic instinct for the extraphysical. As noted, this places our generation before a remarkable precipice. It is one that we have not yet been able to cross.
The precipice is the philosophy called materialism, by which Western life has organized itself for nearly 300 years. Philosophical materialism holds that matter creates itself, and that your mind is strictly an epiphenomenon of your brain. Furthermore, thoughts are a localized function of gray matter which, like bubbles in a glass of carbonated water, are gone once the water is gone. And that is the extent of the psyche.
That philosophy is obsolete. Firstly, an enormous amount of data has amassed verifying both the perceptual basis of reality and the extraphysical—gathered through the same methodology that materialism purports to defend. Secondly, we face the progressing realization that materialism is simply a position, a theory, an ideology, of which science is independent.
This does not mean that materialism will fade gently. Its outlook—that matter evinces no calculable reality beyond classical mechanics and that all contrary evidence or implications are false because they contradict its founding premise—will retain influence for decades. The materialist perspective is concretized within key parts of our culture and media. Many opinion-shaping personalities hold to it with conviction.
What evidence exists for my claims of science affirming the infinite? Here I return to Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory in the early 1930s. Rhine’s innovation as a researcher was developing clear, repeatable, and unimpeachable methods, with rigor and without drama or speculation, for testing and statistically mapping evidence for anomalous communication and conveyance. To attempt this, Rhine initially created a series of card-guessing tests that involved a deck called Zener cards designed by psychologist Karl E. Zener. Zener cards are a five-suit deck, generally with twenty-five cards in a pack, with symbols that are easily and immediately recognizable: circle, square, cross, wavy lines, and five-pointed star. After a deck is shuffled, subjects are asked to attempt blind hits on what symbol will turn up.
Probability dictates that if you are operating from random chance over large spreads, you are going to hit 20 percent, or one out of five. But Rhine discovered, across tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of rigorously safeguarded trials (by 1940, the database included nearly a million trials) that certain individuals, rather than scoring 20 percent, would score 25 percent, 26 percent, 27 percent, sometimes 28 percent (and in select cases a great deal higher).
At the time, social scientists commonly withheld negative sets of data on the questionable grounds that something was flawed with the methodology. Rhine reversed this practice early on at his lab and helped lead the overall social sciences to do so. All of the data were reported. Nothing was withheld in the file drawer. No negative sets were excluded.
In Rhine’s work, every precaution was taken against corruption, withholding, or pollution of data, which was also opened to other researchers (and non-research-based critics) for replication, vetting, and review. In a letter of March 15, 1960, to mathematician and foundation executive Warren Weaver, Rhine spoke of the extra lengths to which the parapsychologist ought to go: “Even though the methodology and standards of evidence may compare favorably with other advances of natural science, they have to be superior in parapsychology because of its novelty; and conceivably, too, by making them still better, everything may be gained in overcoming the natural resistance involved.”
The “natural resistance” or partisanship around such findings can be so intense—and sometimes purposefully obfuscating—that lay seekers may come away with the mistaken impression that Rhine’s work, or that of more recent parapsychologists, has proven unrepeatable or compromised.
The parapsychologist Charles Honorton (1946‒92) sought to analyze critical challenges to Rhine’s figures in the years following their publication. He found that “61 percent of the independent replications of the Duke work were statistically significant. This is 60 times the proportion of significant studies we would expect if the significant results were due to chance or error.”
Rhine’s experiments have proven so bulletproof that even close to fifty years later, his most resistant critics were still attempting to explain them by fantastical (and often feckless) fraud theories, including a prominent English skeptic’s nearly vaudevillian supposition that one of the test subjects repeatedly crawled through a ceiling space to peek at cards through a trapdoor over the lab. At such excesses, rationalists fail the test that Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1772) set for validation of miracles: counterclaims must be less likely than reported phenomena. In any case, Rhine’s methods and results have never been upended.
For all that, Rhine may have proved too idealistic regarding what it took to overcome “natural resistance.” Mainstream media sources engage in pushback and even disingenuousness against data from parapsychology. A prime example appears in how polemical skeptics today ride herd over articles on parapsychology on the most-read reference source in history, Wikipedia. As of this writing, Wikipedia’s article on Zener cards states in its opening, “The original series of experiments have been discredited and replication has proven elusive.” This statement is unsourced, something that would get red-flagged on most of the encyclopedia’s articles.
How does this occur on the world’s go-to reference source? Dean Radin of IONS, described to me the problem of an ad hoc group calling itself “Guerilla Skeptics” policing Wiki entries on parapsychology: “While there are lots of anonymous trolls that have worked hard to trash any Wikipedia pages related to psi, including bios of parapsychologists, this group of extreme skeptics is proudly open that they are rewriting history . . . any attempt to edit those pages, even fixing individual words, is blocked or reverted almost instantly.”
Even if parapsychology as a field had ended with Rhine’s initial Duke trials, we would possess evidence of paranormal mechanics in human existence. Those basic (though painstakingly structured) card experiments, those few percentage points of deviation tracked across tens of thousands of trials (90,000 in the database by the 1934 publication of Extra-Sensory Perception), demonstrate an anomalous transfer of information in a laboratory setting and an extraphysical (call it metaphysical), non-Newtonian exchange of information.
But things did not end there. In the decades ahead, extraordinary waves of diversified experiments occurred in the U.S. and other nations growing from the efforts of the scientists at Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory. These efforts demonstrated, again and again, anomalous mental phenomena, including precognition, retrocausality, telepathy, and psychokinesis (PK). Rhine’s lab began studying PK in 1934, an effort that continued until 1941, after which many lab members were summoned to the war effort. During their nine years of investigation, researchers conducted tens of thousands of runs in which individuals would attempt to affect throws of random sets of dice. Devices were soon employed to toss the dice in such a way that ensured randomness, which ought to demonstrate no pattern whatsoever. Again, similar statistical results to the Zener card experiments appeared: among certain individuals, across hundreds of thousands of throws, with every conceivable safeguard, peer review, methodological transparency, and reportage of every set, there appeared a deviation of several percentage points, suggesting a physical effect arising from mental intention.
We have now logged generations of experiments designed to test the effects to which I am referring. Today’s parapsychologists believe, I think with justification, that the basic, foundational science for psychical ability has already been laid. Although parapsychology remains controversial, the field has already moved on from basic testing for ESP, a matter that was more or less settled in the 1940s.
Recent researchers are concerned with questions including telepathy (mind to mind communication); precognition (the ability to foresee or be affected by things that, within our model of the mind, have not yet occurred); retrocausality (the effect of future events on current perceptions or abilities); a biological basis for psi (including biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic field theories); spontaneous psi events, such as premonitions or crisis realizations; dream telepathy; a “global consciousness” effect during periods of mass emotional reaction; and the practice of remote viewing or clairvoyance. The field also investigates other important areas, including out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, after-death survival, and reincarnation.
The scientific study of reincarnation was pioneered as an academic field by the remarkable research psychiatrist Ian Stevenson (1918‒2007), who founded the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. For five decades, this conservative researcher “traveled six continents, accumulating more than 2,500 cases of young children who recounted details of previous lives, which he meticulously verified with witnesses, hospital records, autopsy reports, death certificates, and photographs,” eulogized the Journal of Near-Death Studies in Spring 2007.
One of the most important figures in psychical research died of heart failure in 1992 at the tragically young age of forty-six. I mentioned him earlier: his name is Charles Honorton. Honorton’s passing was a tremendous loss for the field, nearly equivalent to losing Einstein at the dawn of his relativity theories.
It is critical to understand what Honorton accomplished. In the late 1960s and ’70s, he engaged in direct research into dreams and ESP at the innovative Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. Honorton proceeded to assemble possibly the most significant body of data we possess in the parapsychology field. It was through a long-running series of experiments designed with colleagues in the 1970s and ’80s known as ganzfeld experiments. Ganzfeld is German for whole or open field. Honorton had an instinct for the conditions under which ESP or telepathy—mind-to-mind communication—might be heightened, which formed the basis of his studies.
Honorton noted that the classic Rhine experiments were largely focused on subjects believed to have a predilection for ESP. Rhine believed that ESP may be detectable throughout the human population but was readily testable through figures who possess innate abilities. He did not consider ESP something for which you could train or that was necessarily intrinsic to everyone. Rather, he focused on what he considered naturally gifted individuals, who made prime subjects.
Honorton took a different tack. He wondered whether psychical abilities are, in fact, general throughout the population—but perhaps the psychical signal, so to speak, gets jammed or the psyche’s circuitry gets overloaded due to excessive stimuli in daily life.
Honorton pondered what it might reveal to test for ESP among subjects who are placed into conditions of relaxed, comfortable sensory deprivation. He ventured that you may be able to spike the ESP effect if you place a subject into sensory-deprived conditions without noise or bright light—for example, seating the person in a comfortable recliner in a noiseproof, dimly lit room or chamber, fitted with eyeshades, and wearing headphones that emit white noise. These conditions induce the state called hypnagogia, a kind of waking hypnosis.
In fact, you enter into the hypnagogic state twice daily: just before you drift to sleep at night and just as you are coming to in the morning. It is a deeply relaxed, motionless state in which you might experience hallucinatory or morphing images, aural hallucinations, tactile sensations of weightlessness, or even bodily paralysis. Yet you remain functionally awake: you are self-aware and able to direct cognition. The morning state is sometimes called hypnopompia (a term coined by psi research pioneer F.W.H. Myers). Hypnagogia and hypnopompia are similar with some differences; for example, hallucinations occur somewhat more commonly during the nighttime state.
Since this state is an apparently inviting period for self-suggestion—the mind is supple, the body relaxed, and the psyche unclouded by stimuli—Honorton pondered whether these conditions might facilitate heightened psychical activity. To test for telepathy, he placed one subject—called the receiver—into the relaxed conditions of sensory deprivation I have described, while a second subject—called the sender—is seated outside the sensory deprivation tank or in another space. In the classical ganzfeld experiments, the sender attempts to “transmit” a preselected image to the receiver. After the sending period ends, the receiver then chooses among four different images (one target image and three decoys) to identify what was sent.
Like the Zener cards, there is a randomly selected target on each successive trial and, in this case, a one in four or 25 percent chance of guessing right. In meta-analyzed data, subjects on average surpassed the 25 percent guess rate. Depending on the analytic model, the most stringently produced experiments demonstrated an overall hit rate of between 32 percent and 35 percent. Since the mid-1970s, this data has, in varying forms, been replicated by dozens of scientists across different labs in different nations, often under increasingly refined conditions. The ganzfeld experiments not only documented a significant psi effect but also suggested that a detectable ESP or telepathic effect may be more generally distributed among the population. The protocols themselves suggested conditions under which psi phenomena are most likely to appear.
Given its significance, the ganzfeld database attracted intense scrutiny. In a historic first, which has never really been repeated, Honorton in 1986 collaborated on a paper with a prominent psi skeptic, Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. After trading written disputes over the validity of parapsychological experiments, the interlocutors decided to collaborate on a joint study for the Journal of Parapsychology, analyzing the data, highlighting areas of agreement and dispute, and recommending protocols for future experiments. In an arena where arguments often devolve into rhetoric, it proved a signature moment.
“Instead of continuing with another round of our debate on the psi ganzfeld experiments,” they wrote, “we decided to collaborate on a joint communiqué. The Honorton-Hyman debate emphasized the differences in our positions, many of these being technical in nature. But during a recent discussion, we realized that we possessed similar viewpoints on many issues concerning parapsychological research. This communiqué, then, emphasizes these points of agreement.”
In a joint statement—one that ought to serve as a general guardrail in our era of digital attack speech—Honorton and Hyman wrote: “Both critics and parapsychologists want parapsychological research to be conducted according to the best possible standards. The critic can contribute to this need only if his criticisms are informed, relevant, and responsible.”
Beyond laying down general principles and research protocols, the collaborators conducted a joint meta-analysis of key ganzfeld experiments up to that moment.* “The data base analyzed by Hyman and Honorton,” wrote UC Irvine statistician Jessica Utts, “consisted of results taken from 34 reports written by a total of 47 authors. Honorton counted 42 separate experiments described in the reports, of which 28 reported enough information to determine the number of direct hits achieved. Twenty three of the studies (55%) were classified by Honorton as having achieved statistical significance.” The success rate was similar to Honorton’s findings in his 1978 meta-analysis.
Notably, the psychical researcher and the skeptic wrote in their abstract: “We agree that there is an overall significant effect in this data base that cannot be reasonably explained by selective reporting or multiple analysis.” And further: “Although we probably still differ on the magnitude of the biases contributed by multiple testing, retrospective experiments, and the file-drawer problem, we agree that the overall significance observed in these studies cannot reasonably be explained by these selective factors. Something beyond selective reporting or inflated significance levels seems to be producing the nonchance outcomes. Moreover, we agree that the significant outcomes have been produced by a number of different investigators.”
In sum, here was a key psychical researcher and a leading skeptic (Hyman was among the few skeptics who conducted his own research) disagreeing over the general nature of the ESP thesis—a reasonable disagreement—but affirming that the most important psychical data of the period proved unpolluted and that the methodology of the studies in their sample reflected significant improvement from the dawn of the experiments in the early to mid-1970s. But the key data, they wrote, was free from substantial error, corruption, or selective reporting. Hyman agreed that a statistically significant effect appears in the data and justifies further research. That’s all. No concession of belief in ESP. Nor was any needed. Just an informed critique by a parapsychologist and a career-long skeptic, both with significant credentials, concluding that the data and practices are normative and a statistically significant anomaly appears.
It is tragic, both in terms of human pathos and intellectual advancement, that Honorton died six years after that paper was published. He was one of the only parapsychologists able to reach across the nearly unbridgeable partisan divide to a professional skeptic and create progress in dialogue and research. That process has never been repeated. Indeed, as of this writing, Wikipedia’s article on the ganzfeld experiments introduces them as a “pseudoscientific technique,” without sourcing.
It is worth asking why this chasm has remained so wide. Wonderful strides have occurred in parapsychology, but the advances are not what they could be. Statistician Jessica Utts has noted that during the more than 110 years since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, “the total human and financial resources devoted to parapsychology since 1882 is at best equivalent to the expenditures devoted to fewer than two months of research in conventional psychology in the United States.”
For comparison, the American Psychological Association reports that in 2017, $2 billion of the United States’ $66.5 billion in federal research funding went to psychological research.
Think of it: the field of parapsychology has, since its inception worldwide, been funded in adjusted dollars at a rate of less than two months of traditional psychological experiments in the U.S. (experiments which, like much of the work in the social sciences, are routinely overturned to reflect changes or corrections in methodology). That is less than $333,500,000, or a little more than the cost of four fighter jets. This figure compares with trillions that have been spent worldwide during the same period on physics or medical research.
This funding situation reflects, in part, the success of the most vociferous skeptics in disabling the legitimacy of parapsychological data. Most academic researchers steer clear, fearing damage to their reputation and ability to get other projects funded.
Even in this atmosphere, however, some scientists prevail against the tide. A historic episode occurred in 2011, which marked the publication of a paper called “Feeling the Future” by well-known research psychologist Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University. For about ten years, Bem conducted a series of nine experiments involving more than 1,000 participants into precognition or “time reversing” of widely established cognitive or psychological effects, such as memorization of a list or responding to negative or erotic stimuli flashed as images on a screen. Bem’s discoveries demonstrated the capacity of cognition across boundaries of linear time.
Bem, like other researchers including Dean Radin, identified factors that seem to correlate with precognition, such as the body’s response to arousing or disturbing imagery. As Bem wrote of previous experiments: “Most of the pictures were emotionally neutral, but a highly arousing negative or erotic image was displayed on randomly selected trials. As expected, strong emotional arousal occurred when these images appeared on the screen, but the remarkable finding is that the increased arousal was observed to occur a few seconds before the picture appeared, before the computer had even selected the picture to be displayed.”
In one of Bem’s trials, subjects were asked to “guess” at erotic images alternated with benign images. “Across all 100 sessions,” he wrote, “participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1% . . . In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8% . . . This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%.”
The response to either arousing or disturbing imagery is suggestive of the emotional stakes required for the presence of a psi effect. Stakes must exist, and strong emotions must be in play. Passion is critical. In New Frontiers of the Mind, Rhine emphasized the role of spontaneity, confidence, comity, novelty, curiosity, and lack of fatigue. (And, as it happens, caffeine.)
But Bem’s horizons extended further. In the most innovative element of his nine-part study, he set out to discover whether subjects displayed improved recall of lists of words that were to be practice-memorized in the future. In Bem’s words, “whether rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall—even if the rehearsal takes place after the recall test is given.”
Participants were first shown a set of words and given a free recall test of those words. They were then given a set of practice exercises on a randomly selected subset of those words. The psi hypothesis was that the practice exercises would retroactively facilitate the recall of those words, and, hence, participants would recall more of the to-be-practiced words than the unpracticed words.
Bem found a statistically significant improvement of recall on the lists of words studied in the near future: “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words.” In short, future memorization heightened current recall.
Unsurprisingly, Bem’s 2011 paper met with tremendous controversy. Within a year of Bem’s publication, a trio of professional skeptics published a rejoinder. Playing off of Bem’s “Feeling the Future,” their paper sported the media-friendly title, “Failing the Future.” The experimenters reran one of Bem’s experiments. They concluded, “All three replication attempts failed to produce significant effects . . . and thus do not support the existence of psychic ability.”
But the authors omitted a critical detail from their own database. By deadline, they possessed two independent studies that validated Bem’s results. They made no mention of these studies, despite their own ground rules for doing so. Bem wrote in his response: “By the deadline, six studies attempting to replicate the Retroactive Recall effect had been completed, including the three failed replications reported by Ritchie et al. and two other replications, both of which successfully reproduced my original findings at statistically significant levels . . . Even though both successful studies were pre-registered on Wiseman’s registry and their results presumably known to Ritchie et al., they fail to mention them in this article” (emphasis added).
Although there unquestionably exists a significant crisis of replicability and data manipulation—not to mention fraud—in the sciences, no one has tied any of this to Bem or his methods. As of July 2020, Bem’s experiments (including the original trials) proved confirmatory in a meta-analysis encompassing 90 experiments in 33 laboratories in 14 countries, “greatly exceeding” the standard for “‘decisive evidence’ in support of the experimental hypothesis,” as Bem and his coauthors wrote in the abstract of their follow-up paper.
I believe that I am highlighting only the glacial tip of how parapsychological data is misreported within much of mainstream news media and large swaths of academia. The question returns: why? I have difficulty understanding human nature, which is, finally, the crux of the matter. After a certain point of tautological criticism of nearly a century of academic ESP research, it becomes difficult to avoid using a strong word that I prefer not to use and that I do not use lightly: suppression. Not of any centrally organized sort, but of a cultural sort in which prevailing findings run so counter to materialist assumptions that critics—who ironically perceive themselves as arbiters of rationality—assume an “at any cost” stance to dispel contrary data. Winning becomes more important than proving. It is the antithesis of science. This is the irony to which professional skepticism has brought us.
This kind of practice—in which self-perceived rationalists do injustice to truth in pursuit of what they consider a defense of rationalism—has run riot throughout the professional skeptics’ field. Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in addition to his own research into psi phenomena, has proven determined and intrepid in responding to serial problems among professional skeptics and the toll they have taken in reference media and journalism. Sheldrake was named one of the top 100 Global Thought Leaders of the year by Switzerland’s prestigious Duttweiler Institute. Yet today on Wikipedia he is called a purveyor of “pseudoscience” for his theories of biological resonance and psi.
I have already mentioned earlier that the social and natural sciences are experiencing a credibility gap. One study has suggested that fraud rates in biomedical and psychology research are probably at a respective 9 percent and 10 percent.
I consider it defensible to state that parapsychology today may be among the few exceptions to common fraud in the social sciences. When I posted about the matter in late 2021 on social media, parapsychology journalist Craig Weiler put it this way:
Because parapsychology doesn’t convey any honors from successful research, either through social acknowledgment or an improvement in professional status, there is little motivation for cheating. Successful studies also have to run the skeptical gauntlet. So, little incentive . . . Just a personal observation, the field seems to attract uncorruptible people. The people who take it seriously and publicly, have to have a generally reduced fear level and be willing to fight for the importance of truth. That doesn’t describe your average cheater.
Indeed, it is infinitely more important to me as an advocate of parapsychology research that we get it right versus win a debate. I would rather lose ground a hundred times over than proffer an argument that is strictly rhetorical or tactical in nature or that misrepresents key findings when a debate goes against me. That is why I am so flummoxed (perhaps naively) when I encounter self-described skeptics who use deceptive or slippery methods in the interest of promulgating intellectual soundness.
The point is not to win but to search—to honor the basic human question of what lies around the next hill. Our society needs greater academic and intellectual leeway in this area so that parapsychologists need not fear damage to career or reputation. As noted, psi research is inexpensive. Because the skeptics have proven so successful, however, most parapsychologists today must secure independent funding. Anyone who has written grant proposals knows that that process can be the equivalent of a job in itself. But the men and women who populate parapsychology today carry out this labor while also conducting their research and often holding academic or clinical positions to pay the bills. What’s more, they often endure professional insults and calumny.
I recognize that skeptics fear a wave of irrationality will be unleashed on the world if headlines start announcing, “Harvard Study Says ESP Is Real.” Consequently, they strive against that day (although in various forms it has already come and gone), just as in an exchange with Sigmund Freud, his English disciple Ernest Jones protested that acknowledging telepathy “would mean admitting the essential claim of the occultists that mental processes can be independent of the human body.”
The issues I am describing have easily cost us more than a generation of progress in parapsychology. We are at least thirty or forty years behind where we ought to be, dated from when the professional skeptical apparatus began to ramp up in the mid-1970s.
One real challenge for parapsychology—and addressing this is, I think, necessary to the field’s next leap forward—is to arrive at a theory of conveyance. I believe the field needs a persuasive theoretical model that pulls together the effects and posits how information is transferred in a manner unbound by time, space, distance, linearity, and common sensory experience. Researchers have made preliminary steps in this direction. Advances are overdue.
In 1960, Warren Weaver, a highly regarded mathematical engineer and grant-making science foundation executive, uttered a semifamous lament about ESP research at a panel discussion at Dartmouth College: “I find this whole field [parapsychology] intellectually a very painful one. And I find it painful essentially for the following reasons: I cannot reject the evidence and I cannot accept the conclusions.” Weaver caught hell for his statement; some colleagues questioned whether his judgment had slipped; a few others (including Dartmouth’s president) privately thanked him for broaching the topic.
Weaver had toured Rhine’s labs in early 1960. On February 22, he privately wrote Rhine to raise several issues. Near the top of his seven-page, singled-spaced letter, Weaver made this point: “For if you could make substantial progress in analyzing, explaining, and controlling, then the problem of acceptance would be largely solved.” Rhine had long labored to demonstrate effect, Weaver wrote, but he now needed to describe mechanics. His letter continued:
But for three main reasons—or at least so it seems to me—the problem of acceptance remains. First, these phenomena are so strange, so outside the normal framework of scientific understanding, that they are inherently very difficult to accept. Second, the attempts to analyze, understand, and control have not been, as yet, very successful or convincing. And third, unreasonable and stubborn as it doubtless appears to you, very many scientists are not convinced by the evidence which you consider is more than sufficient to establish the reality of the psi phenomena.
Rhine replied:
The three main reasons you give in your analysis are recognizably correct. Had you been inclined at this point to go a step further into the intellectual background for these reasons, this might have been the point to draw upon the judgments of some of the philosophers and other commentators who have dealt with the problem of acceptance. There is an increasingly candid recognition of the difficulty as an essentially metaphysical one. Psi phenomena appear to challenge the assumption of a physicalistic universe.
Rhine was reluctant to draw theoretical conclusions from his findings. As his daughter, Sally Rhine Feather, wrote in a private communication to me: “I have never known him to have gone very far in this direction . . . But he was always so cautious at going beyond the data and had this aversion to philosophers who did so—except for the implications of the nonphysical nature of psi on which he actually speculated extremely broadly at times.” She went on to quote from his book New World of the Mind: “It will be the task of biophysics and psychophysics to find out if there are unknown, imperceptible, extraphysical influences in nature that function in life and mind, influences which can interact with detectable physical processes.”
In his response to Weaver, Rhine was referencing commonly accepted physical laws at the time. For psychical researchers today, studies in quantum theory, retrocausality, extradimensionality, neuroplasticity, string theory, and “morphic fields” that enable communication at the cellular level (the innovation of Rupert Sheldrake) suggest a set of physical laws that surpass the known and may serve as a kind of macroverse within which familiar mechanics are experienced. It was already clear in Rhine’s era that extrasensory transmission could not be explained through a “mental radio” model, since, according to Rhine’s tests and those of others, ESP is unaffected by time, distance, or physical barriers.
This returns us to the question: If the psi effect is real, how does it work? How does mentality exceed the obvious boundaries of sensory transmission?
Perhaps science overvalues theory. Nonetheless, I believe that it falls to each generation to venture a theory of phenomena in which it professes deep interest. That theory can ignite a debate—it can be thrown out and replaced, it can be modified—but I do not believe that researchers and motivated lay inquirers (like me) can eschew the task. For this reason, I attempted a theory of mind causation in the closing chapter of my 2018 book The Miracle Club entitled, “Why It Works.”
Consider this: when you say the word precognition, it strikes many people as fantastical, as though we are entering crystal-ball territory. Why the incredulity? We already know, and have known for generations, that linear time as we experience it is an illusion. Einstein’s theories of relativity, and experiments that have affirmed them, establish that time slows down in conditions of extreme velocity—at or approaching light speed—and in conditions of extreme gravity, like black holes. The individual traveling in a metaphorical spaceship at or near light speed experiences time slowing (not from their perspective but in comparison to those not at that speed), and this is not a mere thought exercise. Space travelers in our era, although they are obviously not approaching anywhere near that velocity, experience minute effects of time reduction.
In short, linear time is a necessary illusion for five-sensory beings to get through life. Time is not an absolute. What’s more, ninety years of work in quantum physics leads us to conclude that we face an infinitude of concurrent realities—not in possibility but in actuality—one of which we will localize or experience within our framework based upon perspective or when we look.
To switch tacks, string theory posits that all of reality is interconnected by vast networks of vibrating strings. Everything, from the tiniest particle to entire universes to other dimensions, is linked by these undulating strings. Hence something that occurs within another dimension not only affects what happens in the reality of the dimension that we occupy but signals an infinitude of events playing out in these other fields of existence, as in ours.
We may even crisscross into these concurrent realities, occupying lives that are infinite in terms of the psyche and variable in dimensional occupancy. Experiencing data or events from other dimensions may also be extrapolated to UFO encounters or other anomalous phenomena.
Perhaps an individual, either because he or she is uniquely sensitive at a given moment or experiences a reduction of sensory data while retaining awareness (as in the ganzfeld experiments), is capable of accessing information—or taking measurements—from other states or dimensions that exist along the theorized bands of strings. We call these measurements precognition, telepathy, ESP, or psychokinesis, the last of which may be a form of preawareness or movement or both. But maybe that is simply what finer measurement looks like. It is possible that measurement not only informs but also (at least in certain cases) actualizes, localizes, and determines. Measurement selects. Perhaps if we gleaned what was actually going on, or exercised fuller capacities of sensation, the experience would prove overwhelming. We would be overcome with data. Hence we may need a linear sense of time and a limited field of information in order to navigate experience.
And yet: given that we understand spacetime as flexible, is it really so strange, so violative of our current body of knowledge, that there exist quantifiable exceptions to ordinary sensory experience? As we document these exceptions, trace their arc, and replicate the conditions under which they occur, perhaps we approach what poet and mystic William Blake foresaw in 1790 in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” And thus ineffable.
* A meta-analysis is a cumulative study of different but similar experiments to test pooled data for statistical significance.
Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian and writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library whose books include Occult America, Uncertain Places, and Daydream Believer, from the last of which this article is abridged. Full footnotes appear in the book.