Word: esp.
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Young Dr. Kennedy has set himself the job of exploding the claims of Duke University's Joseph Banks Rhine, inventor of the card-guessing experiments which he claims prove Extra-Sensory Perception ("ESP"), a Rhine-ism for telepathy and clairvoyance. Last week, Dr. Kennedy reported an ingenious series of counter-experiments which many of Rhine's many critics will regard as the final nail in ESP's coffin...
...Kennedy had an idea that "unconscious whispering" might help explain the high percentage of correct guesses recorded by Rhine. A person trying to convey telepathically one of the five symbols on the ESP cards to another person's mind might imagine that he was shouting the symbol at the top of his lungs, and so might unconsciously move his lips or alter his breathing. These slight sounds might furnish valuable cues to a person with acute hearing, or to a half-hypnotized person whose normal hearing was sharpened. Dr. Kennedy used blindfolded subjects who were not told the purpose...
...small herd of psychologists, mathematicians and graduate students at North Carolina's Duke University, headed by Dr., Joseph Banks Rhine, believe they have proved the existence of Extra-Sensory Perception ("ESP"), which means telepathy and clairvoyance, by a long series of card-matching experiments. A great number of psychologists and mathematicians elsewhere do not consider that the Duke experiments prove ESP at all.So the dead cats hurled into the Duke camp have been many and pungent...
...even six hits over a long run, Rhine claims that these scores are high enough to rule out chance. Some of his opponents have claimed that he does not know the mathematics of probability well enough to make such a statement. Perhaps, they hint, if two enormous stacks of ESP cards were matched against each other, one card after another, an average of six or seven hits out of 25 might come...
...this reason, such men as Rogosin [TIME, April 11] are becoming desperate. . . . The attacks against the commercial ESP cards, based on the fact that a careless printer used too much ink causing warp, invalidate none of the Duke University experiments where the old hand-stamped cards were used...