Starting
in the 1950s, Louisa Rhine, wife of the "father" of modern parapsychology,
J.B.Rhine, began a case collection herself, and issued a number of articles and books
analyzing these. Contrary to the earlier collections, such as that of the SPR, Rhine was
not looking to her cases to prove the reality of psi. Her true interest was in the
patterns and themes common to people's experiences. By analyzing the specifics of reported
cases, she sought to discover clues about how psi operates in everyday life and use these
clues to generate hypotheses for experimental verification. For example, she found that in
over half of the 1600 reports she had accumulated by the 1950s, the percipient had an
immediate, "gut" feeling that the experience they were undergoing was not just
"in their head," but was referring to a real event - contemporary or future.
Another interesting pattern: by the early 60s, with a collection of over 7000 cases, she
found that 65% of reported spontaneous ESP emerged in dreams.
The relative merits of these two different approaches - one "proof' oriented, the
other oriented towards the discovery of common patterns - were hotly debated by various
psi researchers. Recently, the Dutch parapsychologist Sybo Schouten published a study in
which he used computer techniques to compare the collections of the British SPR, of Louisa
Rhine, and of a German collection undertaken at the university of Freiburg. By coding
hundreds of representative cases from each collection on a number of different variables -
age and sex of the people involved, type of experience, seriousness of the event, etc. -
he was able to conduct hundreds of comparative analyses. Although based on the populations
of three different countries and spanning the course of a century, there was a remarkable
degree of consistency between the reported experiences; the patterns observed in the
best-attested SPR cases were also found in the American and German collections. These
commonalties suggest that the more permissive case collections were indeed tapping into
genuine psi experiences - and that psi experiences may ultimately transcend our
psychological and cultural differences. |
