After ten thousand Stanford trials, the verdict on telepathy was pure chance
In 1911 Stanford became the first American university to test telepathy and mind-over-matter in a laboratory. After roughly 10,000 experiments, psychologist John Edgar Coover found nothing beyond chance. More than a century on, parapsychology still has no reproducible evidence, and most scientists call it pseudoscience.
The field studies claimed psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and telekinesis, along with near-death experiences and apparitions. Its papers mostly appear in a few specialist journals rather than mainstream science. The philosopher Max Dessoir coined the German word parapsychologie in 1889, and J. B. Rhine adopted it in the 1930s to signal a shift from old-style psychical research to laboratory experiment. Researchers call the supposed unknown factor psi, after the Greek letter that begins psyche; the biologist Bertold Wiesner coined it, and the psychologist Robert Thouless first used it in print in 1942.
Early investigations stumbled over basic controls. The chemist Robert Hare reported positive results with mediums in 1853, but critics pointed out nothing prevented trickery. Agenor de Gasparin's table-tipping sessions that year credited an ectenic force, yet sitters could have nudged the table with their knees while nobody watched above and below at once. In 1877 the astrophysicist Johann Zöllner tested the medium Henry Slade, widely suspected of fraud.
London's Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, was the first organised scholarly effort. Its members and presidents included William James, Henri Bergson, Lord Rayleigh and Charles Richet, and Eleanor Sidgwick exposed the tricks of spirit photographers such as William Mumler. Its 1894 census of hallucinations surveyed 17,000 people, of whom 1,684 reported seeing an apparition. Richet's hypnotised card-guesser seemed to succeed until tested before scientists at Cambridge, when results fell to chance, and a Harvard study of 36 subjects over 23,384 trials found nothing either.
In 1930 Duke University, under William McDougall with Joseph and Louisa Rhine and Karl Zener, launched statistical ESP experiments with students, cards and dice. Where earlier psychical research sought anecdotes, Duke counted hits and misses, and its testing procedures spread to researchers worldwide. Today the Parapsychological Association labels supposed mind-reading psi-gamma and supposed mind-over-matter psi-kappa, while popular culture has run off with the word.
Source: Parapsychology
