The Upton Sinclair Tests
The experiments of Upton Sinclair (b. 1878), the famous writer and sociologist deserve special notice. In 1930 he issued a report on these experiments, and it makes astonishing reading. Mrs. Sinclair discovered that she could 'transfer' her thoughts to others and a long series of tests was staged. Mrs. Sinclair was always the 'percipient,' and her husband and other persons acted as 'agents.' The lines of the experiments followed more or less those of the Guthrie, Dessoir and Blackburn-Smith tests, which I have already mentioned. Mr. Sinclair, or another agent, would gaze at and think of a crude drawing of something. Mrs. Sinclair, without seeing it, would, in an adjoining room, attempt to visualize the drawing and reproduce it on paper. Considerable concentration was necessary. Apparently distance was no obstacle, as experiments with her brother-in-law, forty miles away, were also successful. An analysis of the results obtained through the whole series shows a high average of successes.
Out of 290 experiments, Mr. Sinclair considers that 23 per cent were successful, 53 per cent were fairly successful, while the remaining 24 per cent were definite failures. It is probable that some of the successes were due to a clairvoyant faculty in addition to a telepathic one. It is to be hoped that the experiments will some day be repeated in the presence of other observers. Other tests carried out in the United States were those staged by the Scientific American in 1933 and 1934, with readers as percipients. Results were negative.
Card Guessing
The easiest, most simple, and cheapest way to test whether a person has ESP is by means of cards - especially playing cards - and for this reason they have been used by experimenters from the very earliest days. Very many tests have been staged by various people, some with striking results, some with poor results. For example, Professor Richet, as early as 1884, made nearly 3,000 tests with people 'guessing' the suits of playing cards. He got poor results On the other hand, Miss Ina Jephson, forty years later, staged a very comprehensive test with about 240 people, with most remarkable results - and an equally remarkable sequel.
The persons selected for the experiment were requested to 'guess' twenty-five cards, in their own homes, using their own cards. Miss Jephson thus obtained 6,000 guesses. For her analysis of these guesses, she used the numerical scoring system for playing-cards computed by Dr. R. A. Fisher, FRS This system allows for successes in colour, suit, number and rank of a card, combined into a single average score. When the guesses were analysed, it was found that forty-six people had sent in results far and away above what chance could account for: in other words, if the guesses were honest ones, they must have been due to clairvoyance on the part of the successful percipients.
Mr. Soal was not satisfied with this report and insisted that the experiments should be repeated with cards enclosed in light-proof envelopes, and so scaled that fraud, if not impossible, would be difficult. The results of this test, statistically analysed by Mr. Soal himself, were remarkable. The 9,000 guesses recorded by more than 300 persons showed not the slightest sign of clairvoyance either on the part of individuals or in the mass; the laws of chance operated in every respect. It was evident that careless recording, experimental error, or conscious or unconscious faking on the part of the subjects or the sending in of only their best results, were responsible for so many 'good' guesses being sent to Miss Jephson.
Dr. Rhine's Bombshell
In 1934 a bombshell was dropped into the camp of the sceptics by Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine when the Boston SPR published his Extra-sensory Perception, a report on his experiments in card guessing carried out at Duke University in the Department of Psychology, of which he is an associate professor. An account of these experiments has been recorded in Chapter III. A further report by Dr. Rhine, New Frontiers of the Mind is a sequel to Extra-sensory Perception and the former book records the progress made since the earlier work was written.
I must here say a few words about ESP technique, and the special Zener cards used in the experiments. In a shuffled pack of twenty-five cards are five sets of five different symbols, and the person to be tested for ESP is invited to 'call' or 'guess' the symbols on the cards which, one by one, are placed before him, backs upwards. If he does not possess ESP, the mean chance expectation of 'good' guesses will, of course, be five. Anything significantly above that average, in a long series of properly conducted tests, will be something more than chance: it will indicate a paranormal faculty - i.e. extra-sensory perception.
The successes with Rhine and his colleagues were phenomenal. For example, a student named Linzmayer, at the first attempt, correctly guessed nine cards in succession out of the shuffled pack of twenty-five - a 2,000,000 to 1 chance. The next day he did the same thing! The odds against a person performing such a feat twice in succession are astronomical. Later, a child of twelve made a 'perfect' score, that is, a run of twenty-five correct guesses. The odds against this last miracle being due to chance are 623,360,743,125,120 to 1! Rhine, in his book, may well raise the query as to whether he and his colleagues at Duke 'have been completely and continuously self-deluded or incompetent' in failing to discover if there is a snag in the wonders they are witnessing.
I have already mentioned the fact that in London Mr. S. G. Seal has been trying to repeat Rhine's good results, without success, except that in the clairvoyance tests, some people appear to be slightly subnormal - i.e. they score fewer than the average five correct guesses (out of the twenty-five cards) which chance should reveal.
Even Rhine's own subjects appear to lose their faculty when they cross the Atlantic. With Mrs. Eileen Garrett at Duke University, Dr. Rhine has recorded some extraordinary results. In the 625 trials at Pure Telepathy she scored 336 correct hits, an average of 131 per twenty-five Zener cards. In a series of more than 100,000 guesses (using a random sequence of cards) Mr. Seal 'obtained only a single set of twenty-five with as many as thirteen guesses correct, and no set with more than thirteen correct - a result which is in accordance with chance expectation'. In the same way with the clairvoyant tests, out of 3,525 calls, the successful ones in America numbered 888; that is, 183 more correct guesses than chance would account for. In many of these tests with Mrs. Garrett cards with unscreened backs were used.
University College Experiments
Mr. Soal was so struck with these results that when Mrs. Garrett, who is British, arrived in London, he arranged (May, 1937) some further tests with her. Most of these were carried out in the Psychological Laboratory at University College with advanced students in the Departments of Psychology and Philosophy as assistants. In all, 12,425 guesses were recorded and nothing paranormal was witnessed. In the concluding remarks of his preliminary report, Mr. Soal, in describing the results of his experiments, says: 'In the case of Mrs. Eileen Garrett we fail to find the slightest confirmation of Dr. J. B. Rhine's remarkable claims relating to her alleged powers of extra-sensory perception. Not only did she fail when I took charge of the experiments, but she failed equally when four other carefully trained experimenters took my place... The more serious question will doubtless arise as to whether Dr. Rhine's other major subjects would fare any better if they crossed the Atlantic.'
Mrs. Garrett also fared badly in the investigation into the physiological changes that were alleged to take place during the trance state of this medium. The psychic Press had been full of stories, emanating from America, that Mrs. Garrett's trance 'controls,' 'Uvani' and 'Abdul Latif' reacted differently, physiologically, from the normal Mrs. Garrett. The implication was, of course, that the medium's controls were separate entities or personalities. Blood counts, coagulation times, respiration, pulse rate, etc., were all stated to be different in the 'controlled' medium from what they were when Mrs. Garrett was out of trance. It was even alleged that the blood of 'Abdul Latif' was the blood of a man in the last stages of diabetes! As Mrs. Garrett happened to be in London, Mrs. K. M. Goldney decided, with the medium's willing co-operation, to test these remarkable statements, and a complete investigation was carried out with the assistance of the following medical specialists: Dr. Geoffrey Bourne, Dr. Cuthbert Dukes, Dr. William Nunan, Dr. V. J. Woolley, and Dr. Helena Wright. The report of this careful inquiry into the alleged paranormal physiological conditions during the trance state of Mrs. Garrett showed that the results were entirely negative. As in the case of the American ESP experiments, there were no miracles in London.
Psychological Factors in ESP
Why is it that Dr. Rhine at Duke, and a few other investigators (principally in America) are obtaining such amazing results in ESP, while we, in England, seem quite unable to find subjects with a paranormal faculty? It is true that one or two people in Great Britain claim successes in this field, but their work has yet to be repeated independently by scientific workers. Mr. G. N. M. Tyrrell, for instance, has been for many years experimenting in ESP and is one of the very few persons in this country who claim to have obtained positive results in telepathic and clairvoyant experiments on quantitative lines. His principal subject is Miss Gertrude Johnson, an intimate friend. As far back as 1921 Miss Johnson was able, according to Tyrrell, to 'guess' the denominations of the first six or eight cards in a shuffled pack placed face downwards on the table. This feat she repeated many times. Later, Mr. Tyrrell devised a piece of apparatus consisting of five small boxes, padded on the inside, into which, at random, he inserted the end of a pointer, the idea being that the medium should guess in which box the pointer was placed. A screen was between the medium and the experimenter. Out of 30,000 trials, the medium was successful 9,364 times (30.2 per cent) against a chance expectation of 20 per cent. These results have been published in a recent work by Mr. Tyrrell, and his apparatus has also been described and illustrated.
Unfortunately, most of the work with the pointer apparatus may be vitiated by the fact that it is possible for an agent to make his pointer selections accord with the general habits of the guesser, perhaps unconsciously. Indeed, Mr. George W. Fisk has recently demonstrated that using this apparatus he was able to cause almost anybody to score either above or below chance at will by merely watching the way the guesser made his choices and then dodging these position preferences adroitly with the pointer.
If Rhine and Tyrrell can get these - apparently paranormal - results, how is it that Soal has failed to detect any trace of ESP in more than 140 subjects (Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks, mediums entranced and normal, etc.) doing 120,000 guesses? The Americans say that we Britishers do not possess the requisite 'psychological make-up' for success. It is alleged that we are either too sceptical, too critical, or too academic; or our approach to the subject is 'unfriendly,' or that we have 'unsuitable personalities.' That the psychological factor in ESP experiments is important is obvious; but seriously to suggest - as has been done - that 140 persons failed to show a trace of ESP because the experimenter (Soal) had an unsuitable personality, is nonsense. Soal has purposely handed over his subjects - and experiments - to others, not all of the academic type, but employing his technique, with identical results: not a trace of ESP.
As a proof that Mr. Soal's methods on this side of the Atlantic are acceptable to at least one person who has experimented with Rhine I can quote Mrs. Garrett's statement to Mrs. Goldney that Soal's conditions are actually preferable. Mrs. Garrett says: 'The conditions at Duke are tense and emotional in comparison with those with Mr. Soal in London. I, personally, prefer the quieter methods, divorced from constant urging and suggestion, that pertain in London with Mr. Soal.' But in spite of these better conditions, Mrs. Garrett failed to get any extra-chance results.
The reason why we fail to get paranormal results in card calling in this country is because, I think, our technique is so much better than the Americans'. Mr. Soal's methods exclude the probability of spurious high scores by making it impossible for normal sensory cues to play any part in the experiments, but I will refer to this question later.
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