Sixty-four years ago, J.B. Rhine, a pioneer of parapsychology, thought that unexplained phenomena like ESP widened the gap between a human and that which he called an “electronic brain.” Today, living deep in the age of AI, which is reshaping our lives and disrupting our planet in ways we are only beginning to realize, many of us think — or readily confront — the gap between human and artificial intelligence, which AI just told me with its decisive voice via an online search “is narrowing.”

How can we understand our difference or similarity to that which we create (including AI) if we don’t (yet) have a handle on our own abilities as humans?

This piece is not about AI, it is about expansion — the widening of a gap. How can we understand our difference or similarity to that which we create (including AI) if we don’t (yet) have a handle on our own abilities as humans? Are there unexplained laws of nature or powers hidden in our species that we’ve only begun to explore through scientific documentation? Neurologists are making discoveries all the time — neuroplasticity, the gut-brain axis, it seems obvious there is still so much about the human brain to discover. In a world where that which is known is easily and endlessly accessible, what about the unknown? How do we know what we don’t know —and why does it matter?

“Research in ESP has been going on steadily, especially so over the last twenty-five years, and in spite of the many difficulties and the small number of workers, some discoveries have been made that are revolutionary. Why are they revolutionary? Because they show that man is not as simple as the textbooks say. To have a power such as ESP he has to be a much more complicated being, living in a far more intricate universe than conventional science has claimed. This complexity shows that much more still remains to be discovered about him. The gap between a man and an ‘electronic brain’ is enormously widened.” — J.B. Rhine, in his foreword to Louisa Rhine’s Hidden Channels of the Mind, 1961

Exploring that gap, not between man and electronic brain, but between the mapped parts of our brains and the unmapped spaces of our psyche, between knowledge and mystery, reason and instinct, is the work of many disciplines over many centuries. But perhaps these categories — known and unknown — are false oppositions, rather than binaries, maybe they are spectrums, continuums even. What if we occasionally catch a glimpse of the space between sequencing, like something caught out of the corner of your eye or maybe even a knife that explodes with no explanation?

It was the Rhine’s founder and namesake, professor J.B. Rhine, who coined the term extrasensory perception (ESP)

Though there have been name and institutional affiliation changes over the years, the Rhine Research Center, located in a nondescript office building in Durham, North Carolina, has been at the forefront of academic research in parapsychology for nearly a century. In fact, it was the Rhine’s founder and namesake, professor J.B. Rhine, who coined the term extrasensory perception (ESP) and under whose leadership the nascent field of parapsychology grew to clarify its concerns and methodology. From 1927 until 1965, Rhine oversaw experimental research into the paranormal at Duke University, co-founding the university’s Parapsychology Laboratory in 1935 — the first academic research lab in the U.S. devoted to what had previously been termed “psychical research.” Under Rhine’s charismatic direction, the lab at Duke both advanced parapsychology as a systematized field of scientific study and popularized it at the same time. 

While J.B. Rhine was the central figure in these developments and the head of both the Parapsychology Lab and the later Rhine Research Center, he amassed a community of scientists working alongside him whose creativity and dedication were essential. One of his most important colleagues, who worked both in official and unofficial capacities, was his wife, Louisa Rhine, who like J.B. began her career as a botanist after earning a doctorate from the University of Chicago. Their mutual interest in investigating the claims of spiritualist mediums propelled them into a new direction — the study of paranormal activity, postmortem survival, and human consciousness. They brought to this new endeavor the same set of scientific tools they’d used as botanists: a dedication to the scientific method and skills with systems of classification and taxonomy.

Their mutual interest in investigating the claims of spiritualist mediums propelled them into a new direction — the study of paranormal activity, postmortem survival, and human consciousness

Another of Rhine’s important colleagues — and the reason Rhine landed at Duke — was his mentor, Dr. William McDougall, who invited J.B. Rhine to join him in the psychology department in 1927. In 1930, Rhine began research on ESP in Duke’s Psychology Laboratory, developing testing procedures that used Duke students and local Durham residents as research participants (or test subjects, to use outdated parlance). One test to measure ESP ability utilized a set of playing cards, specially designed in the lab and named for the perceptual psychologist, Karl Zener, who created them. Instead of the usual 52 cards bearing suits and faces, a Zener deck contains 25 cards, with one of only five designs on the card face — a circle, cross, square, star, and wavey lines (sometimes called wave). You’ve seen a version of a Zener deck if you’ve ever watched the original Ghostbusters where Bill Murray administers an ESP test and cheats to win the female subject’s approval, while dispensing electric shocks to the male participant to study “the effect of negative reinforcement on ESP ability.” In the test’s simplest form, a researcher would hold up a card from the deck with the back side forward and the subject would say the symbol that they believe appeared on the front of the card. The result of each guess would be recorded. Contrary to Ghostbusters there were never any electric shocks involved, nor any negative reinforcement. 

Rhine and his researchers explored many variations of Zener tests in those early years of the lab, altering the conditions so as to remove as many external factors as possible — to minimize against card counting, a subject’s answers were merely recorded rather than told if they were correct or not (results would be tallied at the end). Shuffling machines were built to eliminate the interference of the researcher in shuffling the deck — no human touch setting up the order of the cards. And finally, to remove the chance of a subject picking up on the researcher’s facial cues, distance was employed, with the researcher and the subject either separated by a barrier or placed in different rooms — in one documented example, the researcher and participant were even situated in different buildings across campus.

The term he coined meant then, as it continues to mean today, “the reception of an unknown form of energy by an unknown mode.”

In 1934, Rhine published his first book, Extra-Sensory Perception, detailing the findings after more than 90,000 tests at the lab. Among his conclusions were that telepathic and clairvoyant powers are demonstrable with daily fluctuations that can function at a conservable distance between the agent and the object. Also, caffeine seemed to improve scores with Zener tests. But Rhine was the first to say that he had no definite hypothesis for the mechanism behind such power — whether it was some sort of energy or an innate quality within humans were simply possibilities that were unproven. Instead, the term he coined — extra-sensory perception — meant then, as it continues to mean today, “the reception of an unknown form of energy by an unknown mode.” 

(An interesting aside: a 1934 article from the New York Times reporting on Rhine’s work quotes him saying that ESP involves “the nervous system quite as much as it does any cognitive process,” a juicy little tidbit that a 2008 study by cognitive neuroscientists at Harvard appears to confirm—using MRIs, they found that ESP activity does not derive from the brain.)

Upon publication both in scholarly journals and in his book, Rhine’s findings met with tremendous enthusiasm both inside and outside of the academy — a book review in the New York Times wrote: “At last Duke University has come boldly forward and backed Dr. Rhine in conducting the most important research of the century in his subjects.” Popular magazines covered Rhine’s work, which he and his team expanded from ESP to include more detailed studies on telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis (PK). 

By 1935, the Parapsychology Laboratory was established as its own independent entity at Duke, with J.B. Rhine as the head. His popularity in non-academic circles only grew when NBC radio debuted a half-hour Sunday-night series called The Zenith Foundation, in 1937, which aimed to investigate psychic phenomena over the airwaves. Rhine was hired as a consultant and Zener decks were mass marketed to be sold in dime stories and passed out by Zenith dealers for free. Each deck was branded on the box and back of the card with a design that featured the Zenith logo atop an image of the bell tower from Duke University’s iconic Chapel building, with the text “Zenith Radio ESP.” Surrounding the image as part of a larger pattern of squiggly circles is the phrase, “Developed in Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University.” Some 150,000 packs were printed and, after the first broadcast of an ESP test aired on the program, Woolworth’s department store sold out of the cards. 

Whether or not you believe in ESP, PK or poltergeists, the prevalence of these phenomena in pop culture proves interest and intrigue on a deep level

Audiences then proved what is still true today: that parapsychology is massively popular. Indeed, today the popular appeal of ESP and other paranormal phenomena is evident almost anywhere you look outside of the scientific community — from books and movies to TV series and video games. I grew up reading Stephen King novels, watching the X-Files, and checking out books from the library from Time Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown series after seeing them advertised on TV. The subjects these pop culture mainstays explore—telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, and other so-called “supernatural” powers—permeate American culture. As entertainment, there’s no doubt that the subjects Rhine’s Parapsychology Lab studied have lasting influence: look at all the modern superhero content alone, all of which are stories of humans with unexplained abilities who also happen to wear outrageous costumes. Whether or not you believe in ESP, PK or poltergeists, the prevalence of these phenomena in pop culture proves interest and intrigue on a deep level. 

This popular interest stands in stark contrast to the skepticism and disavow that has historically met inquiry into paranormal and psychic research. Ever since researchers began formalizing the study of what was then, in the 19th century,  termed “psychical research” and post-Rhine, in the 20th,  called “the paranormal,” such study has been a site of consternation for those inside the academy who wish to patrol the boundaries of the sciences. Scholarly research into human experiences that challenged — and continues to challenge — the known models of whatever science was contemporary of the time has always operated on the margins, with only a few exceptions — Rhine being one. But regardless of whether or not one wants to guard the ivory towers of the material sciences, skeptics enjoy television shows and popular culture  too, so why not study phenomena that so many people are clearly interested in? 

Rhine’s Parapsychology Lab did just that, and people responded accordingly. He and Louisa Rhine wrote and published books on their findings, becoming the preeminent experts in a field — parapsychology — that was quickly growing in acclaim outside the academy. Popular interest in their work, and the plethora of media covering it, led to ESP becoming a household term.

For 35 years, Rhine instigated groundbreaking research at Duke, until he left the university in 1965 to form his own non-profit research center called the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man. In 1995, this organization was renamed the Rhine Research Center and it continues to operate, following the original mission “to produce original research and explore the nature of human consciousness.” Through it all, parapsychology has always been a family affair for the Rhine family — from his earliest days at Duke, Rhine had his children in the lab as test subjects, to the work done there — unofficially and officially — by Louisa Rhine, and finally through their daughter, Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, who not only acted as a subject in her father’s early research at Duke, but later earned a doctorate in Experimental Psychology there and went on to serve as a board member at the Rhine Research Center for many years. She also edited a collection of 1500 of her father’s letters, J.B. Rhine: Letters 1923-1939: ESP and the Foundations of Parapsychology, which provides a wonderful, first-hand read of the drama and challenges Rhine faced as he, his colleagues, and his family, tread into new territories of thought and pushed the barriers of acceptability in the sciences. Exploring ESP and the unknown was not just Rhine’s professional vocation — it was and is a family business whose work continues today. 

The idea of ESP, whether you believe in it as a phenomena happening in our material world or not, ruptures the flow of data in any machine that might mimic human intelligence

More about the current work of the Rhine Research Center and its relation to the center’s history is to come, but we will pause here to reflect on Rhine’s opening quote: it is in fact true that we are living in an intricate universe where there remains much for science to discover about human consciousness. The process of constructing and using AI is illuminating a few of these by showing us the gaps between humans and the “electronic brains” we create. What we do with and in that gulf matters deeply. The idea of ESP, whether you believe in it as a phenomena happening in our material world or not, ruptures the flow of data in any machine that might mimic human intelligence. It is knowledge that currently exists outside of any algorithm, and if Rhine’s research is right, we all possess, in varying levels of aptitude, this ability in our bodies.