Maturing the Science of Parapsychology
Parapsychology, a term encompassing phenomena such as ESP and psychokinesis, may be the most controversial of all academic disciplines. The Rhine Research Center, a nonprofit research center located off of Duke’s East Campus, is a leading center in using scientific methodology to advance this young field. The Center must prove the validity of parapsychology to a highly skeptical scientific community. Supporters feel that parapsychology may someday help to explain one of science’s most tantalizing mysteries: the nature of human consciousness.
by Stefan Kasian
In his critically acclaimed book Parapsychology: A Controversial Science, Dr. Richard Broughton, Director for the Institute for Parapsychology of the Rhine Research Center, writes that before its national renown in medicine, research, or sports, Duke University first achieved worldwide recognition from J.B. Rhine’s work in parapsychology during the late 1920s. Though no longer a part of Duke, the Institute still receives mail misaddressed to “Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.”
Dr. J.B Rhine, for whom the center is named, and his wife Dr. Louisa E. Rhine came to the Department of Psychology with the sponsorship of the Chair, William McDougall, in 1927. Rhine soon became famous for his research under rigorous scientific conditions on the acquisition of information without the use of known senses. To better understand this phenomenon, Rhine created what is now known as the classic ESP Card Deck – a square, star, circle, cross, and wave. He also coined the terms “extrasensory perception” (ESP), the acquisition of information through means other than the known senses, and “psychokinesis” (PK), the interaction of the mind with matter. Rhine later adopted the term “parapsychology” to distinguish phenomena such as ESP and PK from psychology and began to standardize the basic research methods for parapsychology.
Rhine pursued his work at Duke well into the 1950s until he approached mandatory retirement age. To ensure the continuation of his work he formed the nonprofit Foundation for Research into the Nature of Man (now called the Rhine Research Center), which in turn gave birth to the Institute for Parapsychology. The Institute for Parapsychology, adjacent to Duke University’s East Campus, acquired the resources of Duke Parapsychology Laboratory upon Rhine’s retirement in the ‘60s. The Institute continues to grow as an independent research and educational institution which collaborates with leading researchers in laboratories world-wide.
Supporting education as well as research, the Institute for Parapsychology offers the public summer studies programs, referrals to mental health professionals and “consumer protection” against fraud. The Institute also informs scientists through its in-house Journal of Parapsychology about parapsychology and exacting standards for conducting valid research.
The field of parapsychology has progressed far throughout its relatively brief history of nearly 100 years. Formal standards for investigating psi phenomena (the phenomena studied by parapsychology) were established in 1882, when Professor Henry Sidgwick of Cambridge University formed the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Although parapsychology must still confront the inherent difficulties in studying consciousness, significant publications in respectable journals such as The Psychological Bulletin and Journal of Statistical Sciences indicate accelerating progress.
Lack of funding also poses challenges to the field; basic science research grants are already scarce, and parapsychology research funding is decidedly at a disadvantage because of its controversial nature and the more urgent demands on federal resources. However, if parapsychology matures as a science with practical applicability, federal grant money may begin to augment the private funds that have supported the research in the past.
Many scientists and much of the public express skepticism about the validity of parapsychological research. A common criticism is that the field lacks an underlying theory or mechanism that explains the phenomena studied. Parapsychologists would respond to such criticisms by saying that as with any new field of science, sufficient data must be acquired before researchers will commit to any explanations or theories. Although a healthy skepticism, on the other hand, is part of the discipline of science, widespread misinformation dissuades scientists and public from considering the scientific evidence.
“We believe that the replication rates and effect sizes achieved by one particular experimental method, the ganzfeld procedure, are now sufficient to warrant bringing this body of data to the wider psychological community,” stated Dr. Charles Honorton, of the Princeton University Department of Psychology and Dr. Daryl J. Bem of the Department of Psychology at Cornell University of the validity of recently conducted parapsychology research (Bem, 1994).
Ray Hyman, a skeptic who reviewed the research, cautioned against the eagerness of their conclusion. “Tests of their randomization procedures were inadequate, (producing) inconsistencies with previous experiments... We have to wait for independent replications of these experiments before we can conclude..psi (phenomena) has been demonstrated.”
Since parapsychological research is subject to the intense scrutiny of skeptics like Hyman, hyper precautions in methodology must be taken to ensure that results are valid. The Institute for Parapsychology contributes its decades of expertise by collaborating on projects with colleagues from all over the world. The Institute’s two most significant research projects investigate ganzfeld remote viewing and micro-PK phenomena.
Ganzfeld, meaning the “whole field” in German, requires that a subject have complete sensory isolation for uniformity of experimental conditions. The subject relaxes in a comfortable chair, and his eyes are covered with goggles made of ping pong ball halves. The room is lit by a red lamp, and the sounds of ocean surf are played. Relaxing between wakefulness and sleep, the subject is then asked to describe out loud his stream of consciousness via microphone to an experimenter in another room.
Meanwhile, an image chosen randomly by computer is shown in a third room on a television screen. The task of the subject, also known as the “receiver,” is to attempt to describe the image being displayed. Following this description, the experimenter reviews with the subject what he said. The subject is then shown four images, one of which is the displayed image, and asked to rank them in order of certainty about which image was previously displayed. A hit is counted when a subject ranks the correct image as the first choice; otherwise the computer produces a “z”score based on the rank the subject assigned to the correct picture. When the correct image is ranked first or second, positive z score results; when ranked third or fourth, the z score is negative.
Alternatively, a “sender”, most effective if a friend or loved one, sits isolated in the television room and attempts to communicate mentally the image to the receiver. The sender is asked to personalize the image and associate it with the receiver and himself in as many ways as possible.
Broughton describes a successful hit involving a commentator from SEOUL Broadcasting as the subject. During the ganzfeld session the subject reported images of the Big Bang explosions and galaxies. He then correctly identified out of the four possible images the image of Einstein and his hair flared out against the background of the cosmos.
Micro-PK, the other major research area of the Institute, specifically studies the effects of human consciousness on the atomic level of a system, in this case the influence on the output of a true random number generator based on atomic processes. Statistics reveal the probability of the outcome of the number sequence if based on pure chance. Broughton points to a large body of data which shows that consciousness can weakly affect inherently probabilistic systems.
Although research suggests that consciousness affects matter, the underlying mechanisms of this relationship are not known. However, research demonstrates that consciousness has a similar effect on a system regardless of its complexity and it has been postulated that Micro-PK works by altering the probability of events occurring instead of deterministically affecting the events themselves.
Statistical tools such as meta-analysis and effect sizes have contributed to the recent advancement of parapsychology research. Meta-analysis elucidates overall patterns among many experiments whereas effect sizes measure the strength of a certain trait. Psi phenomena tend to be very small; effect sizes can be used to guide future experiments to better articulate the psi phenomena.
Dr. Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist from Harvard University, first applied meta-analysis towards ganzfeld data in the 1970s and concluded that a hit rate of at least 33% would indicate the presence of psi phenomena. Pure chance would give a baseline of 25% (1 out of 4). Interestingly, years later Dr. Honorton published an observed hit rate of approximately 32% in over 300 trials, and the Institute for Parapsychology found a hit rate of 33% in 100 trials. Table 1 details the performance of different sets of subjects in guessing the correct image out of four. The following groups of people participated: first timers (FT1 and FT2), repeaters from previous Ganzfeld (GEN1), and sender-receiver pairs (EC1). In a 1995 study, Broughton and Alexander found that measures of effect sizes and “z” scores contrast with the outcomes that would be due to pure chance. The close correspondence of statistically significant results from experiments conducted at different institutions is a milestone in parapsychology research.
Progress in parapsychology research could lead to the development of advanced technologies. For example, special software could assess and then help develop Micro-PK or other special abilities. Patterns in an altered random number sequence could in turn be used to form a mental fingerprint. Advances from parapsychology could also revolutionize interpersonal communications by breakthroughs in telecommunications or even telepathy.
Psi abilities, like intuition, are sources of additional information that can guide the conscious mind in decision making. For example, psi abilities and intuition can assist people, from the prehistoric hunter to the modern Wall Street executive, in avoiding dangers and acquiring benefits. Broughton argues that there would be an evolutionary basis for the acquisition of addition mental capacities such as these; as traits that would offer survival value, they would be passed on to successive generations.
People with such anomalous abilities have found a place in many cultures throughout human history, including the shamans of the Native Americans, the medicine men of African tribes and the fakirs of India. Although the development of science and technology in the western world has tended to supplant psi activity, science offers the tools to recognize and understand these phenomena.
What does parapsychology ultimately offer to science? Some modern physicists who study unknown phenomena and offer hints to the mechanisms of parapsychology foresee the field expanding science, rather than clashing with its fundamentals. Moreover, traditional techniques of science are precisely what have advanced parapsychology to its present state, and parapsychology has not yet even scratched the surface of the available scientific tools, Broughton suggests. Thus science advances parapsychology, and parapsychology could some day advance science. Through its research into parapsychology, the Institute honors J. B.Rhine by nurturing this young, emerging science.
- [At the time of this publication] Stefan J. Kasian is a Duke Trinity senior at [Duke University] studying computer science and psychology and earning a certificate in Science, Technology, and Human Values.
Acknowledgements:
The author thanks Dr. Richard Broughton, Ph. D., Cheryl Alexander, and the staff of the Rhine Research Center for their invaluable time and assistance.
References:
Bem, Daryl J. and Honorton, Charles (1994). Psychological Bulletin. 115(1): 4-18
Broughton, Richard S. (1991). Parapsychology: A Controversial Science New York: Ballantine Books
Broughton, Richard S. and Alexander, Cheryl. (1995) “Autoganzfeld II: The First 100 Sessions.” Proceedings of Presented papers. 53-61.
Hyman, Ray (1994). “Anomaly or Artifact? Comments on Bem and Honorton.” Psychological Bulletin 115(1): 19-24
