Tag Archives: Winifred Nielsen

My Early Days at the Parapsychology Lab

By the time I was 19 and a sophomore at Duke I had established myself as a common fixture at the Parapsychology Laboratory.  I attended many weekly research meetings, and I had even been given some chores to do when I had the time.  One was to do tours of the lab for some of the frequent drop-ins who came from far and wide to meet J. B. Rhine and see the place.  Often these tours included administering a few runs of card-guessing tests for those who wanted to try their hands at psychic powers.  One morning I did this for a middle-aged woman who had driven up from Florida.  She was reserved and a bit tense.  She wore a dark, tailored suit, a bit too warm for the North Carolina spring day.  Her nose was sharp and her hair was pulled down tightly, and she offered little conversation.  She stiffened some with disappointment when her card tests yielded results at flat chance.  I followed protocol by telling her gently that such results did not mean she could never have ESP ability – no single session of testing could do that.  At the same time, if she had imagined that she had psychic powers, she should take these results as a lesson in humility.

Then later, after a day’s classes, I went to my evening job.  To supplement my scholarship I worked three night shifts each week as an attendant at Meyer Ward, Duke Hospital’s locked inpatient psychiatric facility.  I knew I might want to go on to a career as a clinical psychologist and thought this would be a good way to see if I would like working with mentally ill people.  I changed into my white ducks and entered into the large, open milieu space on the ward.  I was surprised to find there the woman I had tested that morning for ESP.  She was wild-eyed and on the edge of frenzy, in spite of heavy sedation.  Her grey hair stuck out at all angles and her speech was a psychotic jumble, pressured, angry, confusing.  She could have been a Hollywood image of a mad woman.  She did not recognize me.  I learned that late in the morning, after she left me, she had gone to the center of downtown Durham and began railing at passersby about her persecution by Dr. Rhine who had been controlling her for weeks with tiny radios implanted in her jaw.  She had come to tell him that he must stop and she hadn’t even been able to see him.  Her telepathy was so acute that she could not shield her mind from thoughts beaming at her from everyone around her.  Rhine’s radios had unleashed this torment.  For some reason she tore off most of her clothes while ranting this way, and was arrested and brought to the hospital.  Now my former tourist and talent-less test-taker was my patient, unfortunate and ill.

That day I experienced one of the reasons that we tend to be skeptical about the positive findings of parapsychology.  We associate them with delusion.  Do we want to even imagine that such things might be real, and that we might experience them ourselves?  If we do imagine that, are we tempting madness?   If we think we have experiences of ESP or PK sometimes should we keep it secret, or risk being thought to be crazy?  Or might we really be crazy, and just too crazy to know it?

The way some critics speak now about the Parapsychology Lab in those days implies that the place courted delusion, or at least self-deception by pursuing fitful and irreproducible results using poor methods.  This is a terrible distortion.  It took me a while to get my head around the mentality of the lab, it was something new to me.  It was a mixture of passionate interest and ruthless skepticism.  When Rhine discussed the research being done at the lab or elsewhere, he was superficially gentle and polite, but critical phrases dropped easily from his lips.  “A bit credulous,” he would say about some British investigator, or “statistically naïve” about a proposal of a graduate student.  He didn’t like research with popular psychics or mediums because of the notoriety associated with it, the narcissistic purposes of the stars involved, their lack of commitment to real skepticism and rigor, their demands for special treatment.  Not an ounce of that should be tolerated.  If psi exists, Rhine believed, it had to be part of everyone’s normal capacity, so it was regular people who should be studied, and the experimenters had to control the conditions from top to bottom.  He wanted evidence for ESP and precognition and psychokinesis if it could be had, but even more he wanted to avoid mistakes.  When mistakes would inevitably occur anyway, he rooted them out.  His colleagues, Gaither Pratt, Douglas Dean, Winifred Nielson and the others all shared this unusual mixture of motives.  If some critic of the research pointed out a real potential problem the researchers seized upon it like a treasure that could protect them from error, and sometimes laboriously hand-reanalyzed a mountain of data to see if some evidence for the problem could be found.

I saw Rhine think up potential problems that no one else had imagined that touched upon some of his own pet ideas, and feel satisfaction at weakening his own case.  I also saw him turn down a large sum of money for his struggling budget.  He would have had to make an introductory statement about parapsychological research to appear at the beginning of a popular ghost movie.  He would not have had to endorse the movie as the least bit factual, but even the association was not worth any price.  These things made an impression upon me.

Serious parapsychological research had been going on for some time at many laboratories, and the belief at the lab was that the phenomena were real but not very well understood.  Sometimes results would replicate nicely and make a lot of sense, sometimes they would not, or would only replicate partially and show surprising new twists that were hard to understand.

When you learn to think statistically, you come to understand that findings may sometimes appear to show some real effect but actually do not.  They may be flukes due to chance, or artifacts of some unappreciated complication of the experimental methods that you are using.  How can you tell when what you think you are finding is real?  Of course, you try to repeat it, and have others repeat it.  And you criticize the methods six ways from Sunday, hoping to find flaws in your own precious work.  I had never seen before such passionate interest and relentless self-criticism bouncing around between the same pairs of ears.

All of this was not taking place in the kind of dispassionate academic context we might imagine.  No, the context was strident and embattled, for all the gentle, abstract analysis, careful data collection and mathematical reasoning.  Step outside the laboratory and you would find a passionate din of interest and controversy.  People who considered themselves proponents of the research were often emotional believers, overcommitted, impatient with self-doubt.  People who considered themselves critics were often passionately hostile, determined to rip a cancer out of the body of science.  These vigilantes could be uncritically critical, and they did not hesitate to use the most respected platforms of scientific information to proclaim smug and half-baked theories about the stupid misbehavior of the parapsychologists – theories that I knew first-hand weren’t true.  Wow!  I thought at 19.  Welcome to psychology!

Of course this degree of storminess was unusual.  I found it calm enough when I participated in more ordinary kinds of research counting the pecks of pigeons in learning studies, or tricking other undergraduates in social psychology research, or recording the social interactions of pre-schoolers in a developmental study.  Calm, and by contrast, kind of boring.