The Duke Building Which Housed the Lab

I love doing then and now shots, but the Duke University Campus is so unchanged! This was the West Duke Building which housed the lab then:

westdukebldg

And this is the building now:

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A view from the other side then, where they always took their yearly group shots:

1946

And the other side now (I know, the shots aren’t really comparable):

dukenow1

Finally, here is a shot of the building they into moved across the street on Buchanan Boulevard, after Rhine retired and Duke closed the lab. I can’t find my now shot! But I assure you it’s pretty unchanged as well.

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The Original Duke Psychology Department

I was excited to find this picture when I went back down to Durham. From left to right: J. B. Rhine, (head of the Duke Parapsychology Lab) Don Adams (psychology professor, tried to sabotage the lab, but felt remorse about it later) Karl Zener, (psychology professor, designed the ESP cards that the lab made famous, and joined in Adams in trying to bring down the lab) William Stern, (psychology professor, invented the concept of IQ) I don’t know who this guy was, and Helge Lundholm, (psychology professor who, with Adams and Zener, tried to get William McDougall, the head of the psychology department, to do something drastic about J. B. Rhine and his Parapsychology Laboratory).

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Parapsychology Foundation Lecture Tonight

leshan
I wish I had thought of posting this before, but I’m going to this lecture tonight that is part of the Parapsychology Foundation’s Perspectives Lecture series.

Dr. Lawrence LeShan will be launching his New Book, A New Science of the Paranormal: The Promise of Psychical Research and the PF will be launching the Helix Press Reprint of Allan Angoff’s Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses (which I used in my research of Eileen Garrett).

The details:  

Tonight, June 4th, 7 – 9pm, at Baruch College Newman Conference Center in Room H763 on the 7th Floor at 151 East 25th Street in Manhattan.

Telepathy From DARPA’s Point of View

Previously I posted that while physicist Michio Kaku has written that telepathy is theoretically possible, how Kaku imagines telepathy is very different from how they saw it at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.

A few recent articles in WIRED about research into telepathy being conducted at DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and elsewhere describe a direction similar to what Kaku described in his book Physics of the Impossible (if I’m remembering what I read correctly).  The main difference is J. B. Rhine and the scientists at the lab thought telepathy was non-physical, and the scientists conducting the research in these articles believe it’s a product of the brain.  I think Rhine would say what they’re looking at is not telepathy but can perhaps mimic it to some extent.  (Just a guess on my part.)

The articles I’m talking about are Pentagon Preps Soldier Telepathy Push, and Darpa: Heat + Energy = Brains. Now Make Us Some.

The picture below is another ESP machine built at the Parapsychology Laboratory.

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Edgar Cayce

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I’ve been asked in interviews about J B. Rhine’s opinion of psychic Edgar Cayce. I didn’t really research this a lot. But I did learn that at one point Upton Sinclair had suggested that the lab study Edgar Cayce. Rhine was less than enthusiastic.

They’d gone to Virginia Beach once  to test Cayce, Rhine told Sinclair, and Cayce charged them $25 per trial (and he missed), plus $40 for medicines only Cayce’s supply housed. Nonetheless, Rhine said they were planning another test when Cayce died.

When I went back to Duke in March I came across a March 3, 1966 letter where Rhine made a statement about Cayce.

“There is no reliable information, so far as I know, of any other source for the late Mr. Edgar Cayce’s statements, made in what is claimed to have been an unconscious state, than Mr. Cayce’s mind itself.  I would not want to put any confidence in the claims that this information came from other sources.  To determine that it did would require a much more carefully controlled study than was made during Mr. Cayce’s life time.

“Our own researches has led us to the working hypothesis that everyone has some potential psi (psychic)  ability such as has been claimed for Mr. Cayce, but that Mr. Cayce had more than the average person has, as I have said,  not been satisfactorily proved so far as I know.

“Naturally I cannot and would not want to say that Mr Cayce did not possess unusual psi ability, but I would insist with strong emphasis that it is not responsible to make a cult out of belief in these powers in an individual without the careful scientific study of the claims that were available throughout Mr. Cayce’s lifetime.”