Word: esp.
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...many a U. S. psychologist the letters "ESP" have the effect of a red rag on a bull. "ESP" means extrasensory perception, i.e., telepathy and clairvoyance. Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University believes that his card-guessing experiments (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934) prove the existence of ESP. The various criticisms aimed at him boil down to the charge that he has not maintained the rigorous objectivity and experimental control demanded of serious research...
Since then he became activity interested in Dr. Rhine's mental telepathy experiments at Duke and has encouraged all work in ESP, extra-sensory perception...
Last year, when Duke University's Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine published his telepathy theories, "ExtraSensory Perception" (ESP) became the brief rage of women's clubs all over the U. S. Commander Eugene Francis McDonald Jr., energetic president of Zenith Radio Corp. and long a believer in thought transference, saw a chance to prove his belief in a big way by putting ESP on the air. Zenith sponsored network radio experiments in the Rhine technique, put the tests in the scientific hands of Northwestern University's Psychologists Drs. Louis Deal Goodfellow and Robert Harvey Gault...
...prove the existence of ESP, it would be necessary to exclude with scientific rigor the possibility of other reasons for the results. Rhine's opponents do not feel that he has excluded possible collusion, sensory cues or clerical mistakes in tabulation. It has been shown that under certain lighting conditions the ESP symbols show through the backs of the cards, and in some of the Rhine experiments the cards have not been screened from the view of the observer. Some scientists have criticized Dr. Rhine's probability mathematics; others declare that he has withheld some of his results...
Most U. S. psychologists consider Rhine's findings worthless. The arguments against him do not, of course, prove that ESP does not exist; but it is also impossible, by scientific means, as one psychologist cogently points out, to prove that witches and fairies do not exist...