Chasing PSI: Louisa E. Rhine and the Saga of Parapsychology.

            Sometimes, science goes pfft. 

            A promising line of investigation is begun, resources are marshalled, research is conducted, and at the end of it all, in spite of a mass of cleverness and a wealth of honorable intentions, what you are left with is decades of data that sum to a shrug. Results inconclusive. Better luck next life.

            The question, then, for us as science history enthusiasts, is what to do with the individuals who, through no fault of their own, and following to the letter the rules of scientific inquiry as they knew them in their time, ended up backing the wrong horse. Personally, I find that these blind alleys are not only fascinating, but tell us important things about how science confronts its wrong turns and adjusts its practices and expectations in the face of them, so I will go on giving these stories a critical but sympathetic home, and if there ever were a branch of investigation requiring both criticism and sympathy, it is that of parapsychology as it evolved over the course of the 1930s through 1970s, as overseen by the spousal team of Joseph and Louisa Rhine.

            To say it at the outset, all of the studies we’ll be talking about in what follows have had massive problems with replicability, and some of the figures at the center of our tale were later revealed to be outright charlatans, but there is nothing to suggest that Louisa E. Rhine (1891-1983) was anything but scrupulously honest in her studies and completely genuine in her belief in the reality of the phenomena she was investigating, and the means by which she and her team attempted to separate out and measure different psi phenomena represent a blunderbuss of cleverness no less imposing for being in the service of ideas that turned out to be incorrect.

           Parapsychology as a field of scientific inquiry can traditionally be traced back to the 1870s, and particularly to the efforts of the British National Association of Spiritualists’ Scientific Research Committee, as spearheaded by William Henry Harrison. They sought to bring experimental rigor to the mania for spiritualism which had been sweeping Victorian England, but, as Harrison was to find out, the Spiritualist movement was not always particularly keen to hear results that contradicted its view of the afterlife and our ability to communicate with those who have passed beyond the mortal veil. 

            What was needed was an organization which put research at the center of its efforts to probe the murkier questions of what capacities humans might have beyond the ordinary, and in 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was formed (and remains in operation, in case you want to pop by) to gather information about psychical occurrences, with a particular focus on compiling cases of telepathy, picking a few hundred of the best documented as the core of their 1886 book with the absolutely wonderful title of Phantasms of the Living. 

            As intriguing as the book was, however, it was still fundamentally a collection of stories, easily doubted by those inclined to do so, and soon the Society decided it needed to develop an experimental approach to psychical research that would make evidence for parapsychology something more than an anecdotal affair. The question was, how could one do that? How do you prove the existence of psychic powers in a manner that could stand up to all reasonable scrutiny? The Society made important early contributions to designing experiments with responsible controls that generated data which could determine if psychic phenomena were achieving better-than-chance results, but it was to be at Duke University, as guided by the Rhines, that the intricacies of psychical research were well and truly plumbed.

            Louisa Rhine was born in 1891 in New York, to an orchardist Mennonite father who was likely the source of an early love of plants that saw her studying botany at the University of Chicago in the late 1910s. At this department, she worked with Joseph Banks Rhine, four years her junior, and an acquaintance of hers since his family rented a farm from her father in 1911. The couple shared a love of books, plants, and religious speculation, and after his return from the Marines they married in 1920, remaining at the University of Chicago as Joseph mopped up his Masters (1923) and PhD (1925) in botany there (Louisa had earned those same degrees in 1921 and 1923). The true course of their joint life together, however, came not from a photosynthetic being, but a lecture given in 1922 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the scientific evidence for communication with the dead.

            Mediums were very much in fashion in the United States in the early 1920s, so much so that Harry Houdini devoted much of his career during that era to unmasking the frauds portraying themselves as conduits with The Beyond. In spite of these high profile debunkings, the Rhines remained deeply enthused by the experiments described by Doyle, and those that had been carried out by the SPR and other researchers on the continent. It was not long before Joseph, and through him Louisa, found their way into the orbit of William McDougall, who had been president of the SPR in 1920, and was in that same year recruited to fill William James’s old seat at Harvard’s psychology department. 

The Duke University Parapsychology Department

            In 1927, McDougall went to Duke University, and the Rhines joined him there, to establish in 1930 a university-based department of parapsychological research that would serve for the next three decades as the nerve center of global PSI investigation, receiving its own dedicated building in 1935. It did not take long for the team to realize the magnitude of the task they had undertaken, and here is where things get fun from an experimental design point of view. Let us say, just for now, that you believe in the possibility of Precognition (the ability to see things before they happen), Telepathy (the ability to read somebody’s mind at a distance), and Clairvoyance (the ability to “see” objects at a distance) - how on Earth do you design experiments that disentangle those separate abilities? 

            One of the early challenges Rhine described in one of her many books about Psi described how the team sought to disambiguate telepathy and clairvoyance. One of the ways they developed of testing clairvoyance was something familiar to anybody who has watched Ghostbusters - a researcher draws cards containing one of five symbols from a deck, and asks the test subject to attempt to sense which card was pulled, tallying the results at the end to see if they performed significantly better than chance. And that works great, unless you put Telepathy on the table as a possible influence as well, in which case you don’t know if a subject got the answer right because they remotely viewed the card, or because they read the mind of the researcher who saw the card. Are they clairvoyant or telepathic? But wait, what if they are a precog? What if they received prior information about the event through that ability, and were simply accessing that knowledge? 

            The next decades were dedicated to using an ever refined set of experimental techniques to get at the bottom of just these questions - finding out ways to keep track of randomized cards and lists of words in such a way that they never crossed the path and notice of a human whose mind could be read to establish true clairvoyance, and contrariwise creating systems whereby randomization could be generated in lists kept purely in the memory of the experimenters, never written down, to ensure that a reading was an instance of telepathy and not clairvoyance. 

            My favorite experiment of these years, by the by, was one done by a member of the team before they joined the Lab. He used the decay of a radioactive isotope as the random trigger for a heat lamp, and placed that lamp in a freezing cold barn with the family cat. Over a series of trials, what he found was that the lamp was on a significantly longer time than it should have been from the random triggering of the isotope. The conclusion was, of course, inescapable. The cat, who enjoyed the heat from the lamp on a cold day, unconsciously used its powers of psychokinesis to keep the lamp from shutting off as often as it should have. 

      This experiment was of a piece with the other experiments in animal psychokinesis and precognition carried out by the Duke Lab in the decades to come which summed, with the human experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance, to a conclusion that “Psi” abilities (an umbrella term for all parapsychological events and capacities) are far more commonly distributed than is generally believed, though some possess more reliable powers than others. Louisa’s role in particular centered on the collection of case histories. As the department’s existence became more widely known, individuals the world over inundated it with tales of their own Psi experiences - premonitions, prophetic dreams, Ouija experiences, anything that had happened to them which others wouldn’t believe but which, they hoped, the sympathetic folks at Duke University might. 

The Rhines

            Her goal with this collection wasn’t to minutely check each story for factuality, but to compile them in a search for patterns of reported phenomena that could then be scientifically tested in the department’s laboratory. These stories would also leaven the books she began to author once she and JB established the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in 1962, which contained the Institute of Parapsychology, which carried on the research begun at Duke three decades before. Louisa edited the Journal of Parapsychology and published a series of books for specialists and general readers that became core texts of the field: Hidden Channels of the Mind (1961), Manual for Introductory Experiments in Parapsychology (1966), Psi: What Is It? (1975), and The Invisible Picture (1981). 

            For six decades, then, Louisa Rhine was at the heart of what she and her colleagues believed was a deeply credible endeavor to use scientific principles to investigate the most important question possible: What is the nature of life? Are we purely physical creatures, or is there something beyond all of that? She was the interface of this effort with the larger world, funneling the dizzying variety of reported parapsychological events into a program that could be measured, tested, and analyzed. In 1980, the year JB died, her career came full circle as she assumed the presidency of the very Society for Psychical Research which had first paved the way for psychical investigations a century before. 

            Rhine passed away in 1983. She had weathered much in the last decade of her life. In 1973 James Randi published The Magic of Uri Geller, which revealed the stage magic that one of Rhine’s regular exemplars of psychokinetic abilities employed to pull off his purported psi powers, and in 1982 he struck again with Flim-Flam!, subtitled “The Truth About Unicorns, Parapsychology, and Other Delusions” which put parapsychology front and center of his skeptical inquiry. In the meantime, Psi research continued to have its recurrent problems with reproducibility, and larger problems with more popular forms of New Age belief emerging in the 1980s which damaged the movement by association. Today, things largely remain where they were when the Rhines began their investigations almost a century ago – the Institute they began, now called the Rhine Research Center, soldiers on, as does the Society for Psychical Research, but every year adds another layer of suspicion that, if something tangible and repeatable is to be found, surely it would have been found by now.

            What, then, do we make of Rhine’s legacy, and how do we tell her story? She was motivated by questions as deep and penetrating as any motivating the scientists of the standard pantheon, and in the absence of an established set of guidelines for investigating phenomena that lay potentially vastly outside of those traditionally probed by research, she plotted a sensible course forward based on adaptations of the best practices she had at hand. This was scientific research, and belongs here in the long story of natural investigation, even if it was all doomed to ultimate failure. As that other great traverser of the unknown, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, once said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”

FURTHER READING:

All of Rhine’s books are worth reading for the insight they provide into a fascinating side branch of the scientific story. They read like miniature mysteries, where you as the reader follow along with the researchers as they attempt to determine how to measure things that nobody has ever tried to measure before, while keeping out influences that nobody before had sought to keep out, all spiced by letters from ordinary citizens of the globe tentatively revealing secrets they have kept for years about paranormal things they perceive as having happened to them.