Joseph Banks Rhine

We certainly must keep an open mind about these things.

JB Rhine is doing some interesting research in this field," you know? Or else I was high on LSD, in which I'd say, "Well, how do I know that I, as the observer, aren't just creating the whole thing out of whole cloth anyway?" Because at one point when I was taking psychedelics, I had taken a chemical called JB 318, [laughs] and, um, I was sitting in the third floor at Millbrook, and I thought, "Gee, nothing's happening.

What a weird drug." And there was the guy that took it with me was doing cartwheels through the room.

He'd keep passing through the room and the bathroom and back through.

It happens that extrasensory perception means as much to me as history does to you.

I've believed in it ever since I read about Rhine's work when I was a kid.

I worked in ESP for a long time.

Then I had a chance to get a full professorship by coming here, and after I did, I found that I couldn't go on with it because Whitburn's president here, and he's a stupid old bigot with an air-locked mind." "Yes." His anger died down as Fitch spoke.

Something I had never experienced before, it was the sort of perception that might be possessed by a truly disembodied mind, yet I had an odd feeling that it came to me through the voice that had called.

I remember reading of Rhine's famous experiments in parapsychology.

It must have been some phenomenon of what he calls extrasensory perception, independent of nerves and sense organs, even of distance and time, that came to my sleeping brain.

It was a thing of thought alone.

Everybody produces these events.

There was a researcher named J.B. Rhine at Duke University in the '30s, and he was a psychologist, and he had a gambler came into his office one day, and I'm paraphrasing the story.

He said, "Look, Doc, I can make the dice come up, you know, a little bit better odds than, you know, than random chance." So instead of throwing the guy out of his office, he broke out six pairs of dice and a notebook and had the, and had the guy do it.

He said, "Okay, make the number six come up more often than usual." So he did a hundred dice tosses and averaged out.

They're directly related to our psychological states.

Mm-hmm.

Carl Jung saw this, and in his desperation to validate his model, he said, "Yes, this is synchronicity in a laboratory." And then people said, "Well, yeah, but Rhine's saying that human beings are influencing this," and he said, "Uh, uh, no, um, there must be an archetype of hopeful expectancy that, that, you know, makes you do this." It's like, no, it's a really weak explanation.

It's an unnecessary explanation.