ICambridge, 1882
On 20 February 1882 a group of Cambridge scholars and London Spiritualists founded the Society for Psychical Research, to examine "without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognised hypothesis." Its first president was Henry Sidgwick, the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy; its driving spirits were Frederic Myers, a classical scholar and poet, and Edmund Gurney, a psychologist. Over the next decades its presidents included William James, Henri Bergson, the physicist William Crookes, the future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and the physiologist Charles Richet, who later won the Nobel Prize. It is still running.
Myers coined the word telepathy in the Society's first year. Richet later coined ectoplasm. The Society's first great publication, Phantasms of the Living by Gurney, Myers and Frank Podmore in 1886, collected seven hundred and one cases of apparitions coinciding with a death or crisis of the person seen, with the witnesses cross-examined by post. The Census of Hallucinations of 1894 asked seventeen thousand people whether they had ever seen or heard something no one else did, and found the rate of apparitions of the dying well above what chance coincidence should produce. Myers's Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published after his death in 1903, is its theoretical monument.
The Society was also, from the beginning, the most effective exposer of fraud in the field. Its investigations of Blavatsky, of the slate-writer William Eglinton and of Palladino did more damage to fraudulent mediums than any sceptical society ever managed, and that dual role, taking the phenomena seriously and taking fraud more seriously, is its enduring achievement.
IIWilliam James and the White Crow
William James, the founder of American psychology and author of the Principles of Psychology, sat with the Boston trance medium Leonora Piper from 1885 and helped found the American Society for Psychical Research the same year. He never became a Spiritualist and never stopped investigating. In his presidential address to the SPR in 1896 he said that to upset the law that all crows are black it is enough to prove one single white crow, and that his own white crow was Mrs Piper, in whose trances he believed there was knowledge she had never gained through her ordinary senses. After twenty-five years he wrote that he was theoretically no further than at the beginning.
IIIDurham, North Carolina: Rhine
The move from the séance room to the statistics of the laboratory was made by Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife Louisa, botanists who came to Duke University in 1927 to work with the psychologist William McDougall. Rhine named the field parapsychology in its modern sense, adopted the term extra-sensory perception, and in 1934 published a monograph of that name reporting thousands of trials in which subjects guessed the order of shuffled cards bearing five symbols designed by his colleague Karl Zener: circle, cross, waves, square and star. With five symbols chance gives one hit in five, and some of Rhine's subjects, notably the divinity student Hubert Pearce, scored far above it.
The results caused a sensation and an immediate scientific counter-attack. Critics identified sensory leakage in the early procedures, the possibility of recording errors by experimenters who knew the targets, and the failure of other laboratories to replicate the high scores. Rhine tightened his methods and founded the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937. The subsequent history of the field has been a long cycle of the same pattern: a striking result, a methodological criticism, a tighter protocol, a smaller effect.
The field also suffered its most damaging fraud. The English mathematician Samuel Soal reported in the 1940s card-guessing results so strong that they were long considered the best evidence for ESP. In 1978 the computer scientist Betty Markwick showed that Soal had manipulated the target sequences. The Society published her paper.
IVThe Ganzfeld and the Joint Communiqué
From the 1970s the parapsychologist Charles Honorton developed the ganzfeld procedure, in which a receiver in mild sensory deprivation, halved ping-pong balls over the eyes under red light and white noise in headphones, reports imagery while a sender in a distant room concentrates on one of four pictures; afterwards the receiver ranks the four, and chance is twenty-five per cent. A meta-analysis of the early studies suggested hit rates near thirty-five per cent. The sceptic Ray Hyman identified flaws in randomisation and security, and in 1986 Hyman and Honorton published a joint communiqué agreeing on the standards future studies should meet.
The automated studies that followed were reported by Daryl Bem and Honorton in Psychological Bulletin in 1994 with a hit rate of about thirty-two per cent. A later meta-analysis by Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman found no significant effect in the studies that came after. Subsequent meta-analyses have disagreed, principally about which studies belong in the pool. The honest summary is that the matter is not settled.
VRemote Viewing and Stargate
In 1972 the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute began experiments in what they called remote viewing, in which subjects including the artist Ingo Swann and the former police commissioner Pat Price described distant locations visited by a beacon team or specified only by map coordinates. Funded by the CIA and later the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Army, the programme passed through a series of code names, Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, Sun Streak, and ended as Stargate.
In 1995 the CIA commissioned an evaluation by the American Institutes for Research from two reviewers. The statistician Jessica Utts concluded that the laboratory effect was statistically established. The psychologist Ray Hyman concluded that it was not, and that the operational results were in any case useless for intelligence. The programme was terminated the same year, and its documents were declassified.
VIPEAR and the Replication Crisis
At Princeton, Robert Jahn, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, founded the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory in 1979 to test whether human intention could influence electronic random event generators. Over twenty-eight years and millions of trials it reported a very small but persistent deviation in the direction of the operators' intention. A large three-laboratory replication published in 2000 did not reproduce the effect at the reported size. The laboratory closed in 2007.
In 2011 the eminent social psychologist Daryl Bem published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most selective journals in the field, nine experiments reporting that participants' responses were influenced by stimuli presented after the response, a paper he called Feeling the Future. Independent replications, including one by Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French, failed. The fact that the standard statistical practice of mainstream psychology had produced a significant result for precognition became one of the triggers of the replication crisis, the discovery that a large share of published findings in psychology do not replicate. Parapsychology, in the end, did not overturn psychology. It revealed that psychology's methods could not tell a real effect from an artefact, which may be its most important scientific contribution.
VIIThe Instruments
Every stage of this history had its apparatus: Hare's lettered disk and spring balance, Crookes's caged accordion, Rhine's card-shuffling machines, the thermographic and infrared cameras of the physical séance, the random event generator. What each measures, and what it cannot measure, is the subject of an entire house below, and Hare's own instruments of 1855, the first built to take the medium's hands off the mechanism, have been reconstructed at another.