THERE ARE a few general points of interest that do not belong to the more
special departments of the preceding chapters and they justify, I think, a brief
one of their own.
One of the questions of some importance not yet considered is that of family
strains and ESP. Does the ability 'run in the family' - is it heritable? This is
a difficult matter to answer, but an impression may be of interest. This
impression cannot yet be clearly supported by adequate evidence, though we have
some data in its favour. It is also in line with the popular notion, so far as
there is one. My impression is that there is some heritable basis for marked ESP
ability. When I learned that the mother of a certain individual had possessed
mediumistic ability, I rather expected to find a good subject in him and this
judgment proved to be correct. All my major subjects, except one, have a parent
or aunt, and often both, who are reported to have had at least one definitely
parapsychological experience. And the one exception states that his mother is
'very intuitional', which, as she used it, means 'clairvoyant' in small daily
things. In five of the other seven cases, there is more than one relative that
has been parapsychic. These are all (with one exception) on the same side of the
family, too (that is, always blood relations), but are of both sexes. The reader
may better judge in how far these are applicable to the general rank and file of
humanity if some of the details are given. Since some of these details are
confidential, I shall give the subjects arbitrary numbers and refer to them all
as masculine. No. 1 states that his mother and her uncle were both parapsychic.
The phenomena consisted of premonitions, mind reading and character reading.
Instances have been related to me. No. 2 had a parapsychological family on the
father's side, with only a minor experience by the mother, and this was
coincident with the father's experience. The joint case was of a prophetic
dream, experienced on two successive nights by both father and
mother, of an unexpected event. The other experiences, by the father's side
only, consisted of detailed prophetic dreams and monitional experiences
connected with death. The father's father, too, was reported to have been
parapsychic. No. 3 has a very parapsychic mother, who had strong clairvoyant
power, believed she was in touch with spirit agencies and that through them she
could give parapsycho-physical manifestations. The subject testifies to having
witnessed these himself, under good full light conditions, and remains convinced
that they occurred, although doubtful about the explanation given. Brothers of
the sensitive also possessed some ability of the sort; on these, however, there
are no further details given. No. 4 states that his uncle has experienced
different parapsychical occurrences, chiefly of clairvoyant and previsionary
character, and has had, in general, much the same sort of experience as he,
himself. His own have included hearing a deceased relative's familiar footsteps,
hauntings of hallucinatory sounds that did not disturb others, previsionary
clairvoyance, etc. He and his uncle are said to be much alike in personality. At
least four members of the family have been awakened by apparent 'haunting'
phenomena. No. 5 says his mother has had many premonitional dreams and monitions
of the death of friends. She occasionally warns the children of a coining danger
and often knows of their unexpected danger when they are at a distance. She is
generally clairvoyant but it is a casual sort of thing with her. No. 6 informs
us that his mother had one veridical spontaneous psychic experience, a visual
hallucination of a brother being wounded in France and carried off the field,
with close time and fact coincidence. Her sister was given, in life, to
veridical dreams concerning relatives particularly. Although No. 7 himself has
had an hallucinatory experience of his deceased grandfather's voice, he can
credit his mother only with being unusually 'intuitional'; the mother says
playfully that she is clairvoyant. No striking experiences can be related,
however. No. 8 has an aunt and grandparent on the mother's side who have had
parapsychic experiences in connection with religious experiences. The mother
herself is very intuitive, especially on character judgment. It must be
emphasized strongly that these subjects are all normal, healthy, intelligent
young men and women, not peculiar in any way and without pathological heredity,
so far as they know.
More of the subjects have parapsychic relatives, apparently, than do people in
general, but a general questionnaire and statistical study would be needed to
evaluate these cases. It will be better, however, to do this when the number of
subjects becomes larger, since an extensive study would be required for final
decision. There is, then, only the general impression that there is perhaps some
inheritance of a general parapsychological sensitivity which is represented by
the ESP we are measuring. Casual inquiry among friends who may or may not have
marked ESP ability does not reveal the high percentage of psychic family
connections given in these eight subjects. The four of the poor ESP subjects who
have been asked have not been able to claim any parapsychic relatives; of
course, this number is not regarded as large enough for a basis of judgment.
The very biological question of the comparative range of the ESP capacity among
the species does not enter into the work here reported, directly. This
interesting question has, however, already its own literature. Our own work with
the filly, reported in 1929,[1] has convinced us of the ESP capacity in at least
one horse and the work of Bechterew on telepathy in dogs seems quite
satisfactory as reported. Further than this, I feel disinclined to venture.
There are claims for telepathy in the more social animal species but there is
not the rigid experimental proof required for so important a conclusion. The
point was made in Chapter xi that the drug and fatigue data seemed to indicate
that ESP may be a higher, more complex development than sensory perception and,
the suggestion follows logically, is probably a later development in mental and
cerebral evolution. This is unfavourable to the view held by some without even
this amount of facts to support it, that ESP, in man, is an atavism.
[1] See Chapter II, page 28.
The extent and level of ESP in our own species constitute points of importance.
We cannot say how large a percentage of people are capable of ESP until we have
tried larger numbers under good conditions. There is no ground for a decision,
as we now can see, in a few tests given in a classroom, or under any other
conditions preventing abstraction. Even our best subjects cannot succeed under
such conditions after months of experience at the work. Negative results are
never final. It is impossible, with our present knowledge, to know if the
conditions are adequate for judgment. But some small notion of the number of
good ESP subjects existing[2] may be gained from the facts about our own
departmental students. Of the 14 graduate students in psychology present in the
last two years, six have shown ESP ability that is statistically significant.
One other has been reported to have done work appreciably significant but I have
not got his results. There are seven others remaining. These have never been
tested, to my knowledge. But even allowing for no ability in the remaining half,
we have 50%. Will someone say that psychology students are a select lot?
Estabrooks said he found them singularly poor as subjects; they were too
introspective.
[2] I now have more subjects than I can
myself work with; the experimentation needs institutionalizing, i.e. needs
special endowment and special assistants. No one individual can manage it
adequately.
Very few subjects have run very long without scoring above chance, to some
extent. Of course, initial failure soon discourages many. And about them we
never really know. With persistence, they might succeed! My impression is, on
this, that most people can run at least a little above chance, with patient
persistence and interest, under favourable conditions of quiet, isolation and
abstraction. Stuart's work, and that of Dr Lundholm and myself, carried out with
all the subjects who came (a total of 77 subjects), all back this up. Then, too,
whether the poorer are really weak in ESP or whether there are merely obstacles
in its way, we cannot yet determine. The better subjects may simply be better
able to abstract or they may be better able to retain patient interest. For
aught that may be said to the contrary, ESP may be as widely distributed a
natural capacity in the species as is that highest mode of cognition, reasoning.
Even this requires conditions for success-purpose, degree of integration of
effort, not too much distraction to permit attention. Very possibly the delicate
nature of ESP and the complex conditions required may conceal it from our tests
- even without preventing its functioning in the freer circumstances of daily
life.
Among the better subjects there is what may well be a kind of 'species level'.
They mostly score on an average of between 8 and 11 per 25, both P.T.* and P.C.**,
if conditions are good. See column 3 of Table XLII. All eight subjects do this,
except when a disturbing factor enters, as illness, drugs or a decline of ESP
capacity (as with Linzmayer and Stuart). If we take the total normal scores of
the eight major subjects (before they began to decline in the cases of Linzmayer
and Stuart) and leave out drug, illness, D.T.*** and other special data that do not
represent the regular function of ESP, we get only one exception. This is Zirkle,
who is unusually high on P.T. and not significantly above chance on P.C. If we
include the P.T. work done during his long, mild illness (2,700 trials), his
score average drops within the range indicated, 10.7, but this would, of course,
not be justifiable.
* P.T.: Pure Telepathy.
** P.C.: Pure Clairvoyance.
*** D.T.: Clairvoyance card calling, with the cut pack of cards remaining
unopened until after the 25 calls are made. Calling 'down through', without
removing the card called until the end of the run of 25.
TABLE XLII
Normal ESP averages of major subjects |
Name |
Trials |
Av. per 25 |
Remarks |
Linzmayer
Stuart
Pearce
Miss Ownbey
Zirkle
Miss Bailey
Cooper
Miss Turner |
600
500
7,800
11,250
1,075
1,300
5,000
2,800
4,850
4,575 |
9.9
9.0
9.4
8.9
10.3
14.8
10.7
8.6
8.2
9.0 |
1st 600
trials before decline
1st 500 trial before decline
All BT trials up to iv. 1. 33
All ESP trials to iv. 1. 33; no decline
BT and PT trials; no decline
PT only; health good; no decline
Includes his illness data
BT and PT; no decline
BT and PT; no decline
BT and PT; no decline |
The averages shown in Table XLII run remarkably close together, in view of the
wide range of differences to be expected in such a group or any other delicate
or complex mental endowment. Any complicated task we could propose might be
expected. to show greater differences, I think. These eight subjects represent,
by the very fact that we have worked with them so much, the more successful
subjects. But in most mental tasks the more one selects the better subjects, the
greater the diversity and peculiarity between them. It is not common to find a
'species wall' as a limitation. Yet here such a limit is suggested. And this
makes ESP capacity appear more like native species endowment perhaps, since we
should not expect acquired abilities to stop thus in their development, at a
common level; that is, this appears somewhat more like an innately given
perceptual range, like the species range of sound or light perception. This is,
of course, speculative analogy, representing a beginning of inquiry rather than
a conclusion. The subjects can all 'jump' this 'species wall' for short periods,
as in the occasional very high scores, even ascending to 25 consecutive
successes, but for the averages and the long runs, the 'species range' of from 8
to 11 seems to be (excepting Zirkle) the natural level. Of the two conditions,
the P.C. remains the more stable. P.T. varies more widely; it has two human
variables and two ESP elements probably at work.
We have yet to explain the curious decline of Linzmayer and Stuart, or, as more
experienced parapsychology students would put it, the curious failure to decline
on the part of the others. It has been the great misfortune of so many workers
to find that their telepathic subjects have lost their ability after a period of
very good results. From the Creery sisters, on down to Van Dam (in Brugmanns'
laboratory) and Lady, the filly, in our own experience, this disappointment has
been an all too common one. (It may explain the tendencies of some subjects in
the past to have recourse to deception in their later work, when they have
achieved a reputation that has to be maintained-as they see it-at all costs. Or
it may well be that they have 'rationalized' the earlier telepathic results from
a later viewpoint of incapacity and have decided they must have been cleverly
deceiving, without realizing it perhaps; this would make it 'reasonable', at
least, and might be the only way for them to make it so.)
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Graph No. 6. Decline of ESP ability in
Linzmayer. The curve represents scoring rate for 4 major periods of
work. |
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The decline of Linzmayer began in June, 1931, with my urging him to work against
his obvious wish to leave. He ran below chance then, as I had expected and hoped
he would do. This was, however, a great strain for him, and perhaps the
ruthlessness of the method permanently injured his capacity for ESP by inducing
strained or unwholesome memories and attitudes. He is still interested, but I
think that possibly he can never really feel the same towards the experimenter
and his plans; he has also a strong negativism of which he is hardly conscious
(but which is apparent in hypnotic tests), which may be activated to cause a
certain conflict and oppose the abstraction necessary for high scoring. Failure
is very discouraging to Linzmayer, and he has become more and more chagrined by
his inability to return to his original level. This makes it still harder for
him to 'concentrate' and so the 'vicious circle' of decline goes on. His
'decline curve' is given in Graph No. 6, representing the four periods of work
he has gone through, omitting the purposively planned low-scoring period
mentioned. For the fuller data see Table XII in Chapter V. The averages per 25,
trials dropped as follows: 9.9, 6.9, 6.8, 5.8.
Stuart declined slowly over a long period of about a year, rose again and, a few
months later then, he declined once more - this time much more promptly, in less
than two months. The first 500 trials were within the 8-to-11 range, which I
have come to think may be typical of most normal ESP subjects at their best over
long periods. But, while this first 500 gave an average per 25 of 9.0, the next
500 dropped to 6.6 and the next still lower. The decline, as shown by dividing
the 7,500 into 5 groups of 1,500 runs each, is as follows, in averages per 25
trials: 7.1, 6.1, 5.7, 5.9, 5.4. See Graph No. 7, A. On the return to scoring,
while the graph shows the B curve starting higher than the A, Stuart really did
not rise in the second period to the level of the original 500. 7.3 was the
highest he made for as many as 400 trials. For about the same number of trials
he held up above 7.0, both times, and then dropped to around 6.0.
The explanation of these declines is not easy and at most a hypothetical
suggestion is offered. Stuart worked alone and thus would he likely to get the
full monotony of the procedure - certainly so in the course of many thousand
trials. He was working without any other motivation than his own interest; at
least, without pay, and without any urging or suggestion on my part. What wonder
if the motivation of his own interest should weaken somewhat after so much work
that is so exhaustive of time and patience! This is my preferred hypothesis - he
lost interest, became a little tired of the business and needed a rest from it.
Let the reader try 7,500 trials, if he doubts the need for a rest and change of
scene. This view may not be correct, but it is both an adequate hypothesis and a
probable situation. At the end of the 7,500, when he complained of low scoring
and I suggested he might be bored with the business, he admitted that he might
need a change. Only a few months later he returned to a level of 7.3 but has not
yet come back to 9.0 in 25.
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Graph No. 7. Decline of ESP ability in Stuart. A, first period, 1931-2. B,
second period, Summer 1932. Average scoring rate is shown for each period, in,
each case subdivided into five parts, by number of trials. |
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While, then, there may be a 'species level' at the top - at least, it is favoured
by the facts so far - there is none at the bottom. Subjects can be made to
decline, either indefinitely, as if by a fixed limitation, or perhaps just until
a rest is had, or a new interest aroused, as illustrated by Linzmayer and
Stuart, respectively. Several of our minor subjects, too (Miss Weckesser and
Pratt, for example), have declined to a 'chance level', how permanently we do
not yet know. But most of the major subjects are holding up very well, with no
serious signs of decline. (Just at the moment of writing this I am informed that
Pearce, who has worked more than any other subject, has scored 11 and 9 in two
runs of P.C. with the cards in one building and himself in another, 250 yards
away. A few days ago he finished a series at 100 yards with 13, 13, 12. He is
evidently not in danger of running down.) This is important not only in its
experimental convenience nor merely as a further fact in the psychology of the
ESP processes, but in the general biology of ESP, with which we are at the
moment most concerned.
For ESP is a biological phenomenon and one that might obviously be of tremendous
value to the species. To the hunter, the warrior, the seaman - in fact, to
nearly all life situations - ESP might serve in many ways to give man an
important margin of advantage over his enemies and his environment in general,
so that the question of its permanence is most serious. Were it
characteristically to flit in and out of functioning, its biological
significance would be reduced almost to nothing. But if it does, as we find,
only relatively rarely decline (if, indeed, it has not merely declined for our
particular experimental situation), we can regard it as having biological
survival value to any species possessing it. In homing, migration, food-seeking,
mating and all the processes where cognition is a primary essential this mode of
perception might be of value, if it exists and functions in the species. The
fact, however, that it has not been more clearly observed in the many
observations made on animals would seem to exclude it from any considerable
importance to animal existence. Or could it be that it has not been seen because
it has not been looked for?
In our own species, however, extra-sensory perception occurs and may be
demonstrated in many normal people in undeniable fashion. In the light of the
foregoing observations, it seems to be a fairly dependable and persistent
capacity, when it is given proper conditions for its functioning. These are
facts which any comprehensive biology must face and study, if it is to treat
faithfully of the natural history of our species.
Note:
The article above was taken from J. B. Rhine's "Extra-Sensory Perception"
(London: Faber & Faber, 1935).
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