Anyone for Telepathy?

Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, professor of psychology at Duke University and head of its Parapsychology Laboratory, faced newsmen in his campus office last week and told them the story of the homing cat. A family moving 1.500 miles from California to Oklahoma had left behind its pet cat, which had never been out of its home state. Many long months later, guided by some occult power, the cat had turned up at the family's new home.' How could he be sure that this was the same cat? Easy: the animal had a deformed hip. said Dr. Rhine, and he had checked relatives and friends of the family at both ends of the line.

Around the semicircle of Rhine's audience there was evident disbelief. The professor, who has spent 26 of his 58 years studying just such phenomena, shook his shock of greying hair and shrugged. "You see what a fix I'm in?" he asked. "Here you have a line of incredibility, and I'm just beyond it. That's why this work is so interesting." Then he added: "I don't know that I believe it myself."

The case of the homing California cat was much like others cited in his New World of the Mind, just published (Sloane; $3.75). And the newsmen's reaction was typical of both lay and professional response to his work.

Just as Rhine's laboratory is furnished with gadgets for testing subjects with trick playing cards, dice cages and colored marbles in a golden ball, so his world of the mind is full of futuristic furnishings. There is the overall term ESP (for extrasensory perception) for what used to be called clairvoyance and telepathy. This. says -- Rhine, might be the explanation for the case of the California cat. Then there is PK (psychokinesis), for the alleged power to influence events by nonphysical means--e.g., a crapshooter "willing" the fall of the dice. And there is precognition, or ability to foretell events.

All these depend, according to Rhine, upon the "psi" factor, which is noticeable in about one person in five. For some who do not show it, he invokes a "psi-missing" factor to explain why their clairvoyance is below par. For the brute creation, Rhine now postulates "anpsi" (animal psi), which may or may not be the same as human psi.

Dr. Rhine reproaches scientists in general and psychologists in particular for their refusal, by & large, to accept the evidence of their extrasenses. He compares them with those who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. He assails the materialist bias of the times for creating a climate hostile to his theories, though he admits that he cannot yet "prove" them by conventional standards.

If Dr. Rhine had more PK, he might be able to compel others to think as he does. Or if he had more precognition, he might not be in the fix that he says he is in now.

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