Mind Over Matter--Maybe

STRANGE as it seems in the space age, the supposed reality of psychic phenomena continues to fascinate modern men. Although trained in the cold logic of the law before he became a theologian, resigned Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike is convinced that he has had telepathic talks with his dead son. Ever since her forecast of John Kennedy's assassination came true, Soothsayer Jeane Dixon's words and prophecies have been eagerly awaited by a multitude of followers. And despite considerable skepticism, not to say amusement, in the scientific community, a small band of researchers, led by Duke University's J. B. Rhine, 73, is still pursuing the mystery of ESP, or extrasensory perception, and its related phenomenon, PK, or psychokinesis, the power of the mind to control matter.

The parapsychologists, as they call themselves, receive financial support from highly respectable sources. Harvard, if only to prove its open-mindedness, is currently bankrolling the efforts of Physicist Charles Buffler to determine whether there really is something to dousing--looking for water with a forked twig. As yet, he has found no proof. Last summer, the first premonitions lab in the U.S. was opened at Brooklyn's Maimonides Medical Center. So far, the lab has been unable to make a scientific case for the power of premonitions to foretell the future. In Seattle, the Boeing Co. for a time backed the ESP researches of a theoretical physicist on its staff, Dr. Helmut Schmidt. Though ESP contradicts all known physical laws, Schmidt contends that certain gifted psychic subjects have consistently "outguessed" his electronic random number generator, in spite of extraordinary odds against such a feat.

Men and Mice. Parapsychology, in fact, is international. In Britain, Mathematician S. G. Soal has long toyed with basic ESP phenomena.* A respected French biologist, who carries out his parapsychological research under the pseudonym "Andrew Robinson" to avoid professional ridicule, recently claimed that his complicated electronic rigs suggest the possibility of communication between men and mice. Even Russia has its psychic expert: Dr. Leonid L. Vasiliev of the University of Leningrad, whose Mysterious Phenomena of the Human Psyche has become a bestseller in the Soviet Union.

The perseverance and undying confidence of psychic researchers are currently visible in a new book of ESP and PK studies called Parapsychology Today (Citadel Press; $6.00). The volume's 22 essays are short on ghostly tales of otherworldly communications, long on dry data of laboratory probing. But they show how sophisticated psi tests have become since Rhine first took up parapsychology some four decades ago.

His classic experiments were simple tests conducted with dice and psi cards (which are marked, unlike ordinary decks, with circles, squares, crosses, stars and wavy lines). Rhine determined psychic ability by letting subjects guess the fall of the dice or the order of the cards. If they did better than could be expected under the laws of chance, they were assumed to be psi-hitting; if they did worse, they were psi-missing.

Currently, parapsychologists are much more concerned with psi-missing than hitting, partly to answer scoffers who want to know why psychic ability cannot be turned on at will. The reason, parapsychologists suspect, may be psychological. Even promising percipients (test subjects), they contend, display sharply varying powers, depending on their mood, attitude and enthusiasm at the time of the test. Performance apparently also hinges on whether the subject is a "goat" (a skeptic in the jargon of parapsychology) or a "sheep" (a believer). In one experiment, volunteers from the elite Mensa society, whose IQs are in the top 2% of the population, scored persistently below statistical par. The parapsychologists suggested that these intellectuals' doubts may have overwhelmed their psychic prowess.

Electric Flow. Other recent psi researches are equally esoteric. A New York polygraph expert named Cleve Backster spends much of his time trying to prove an idea as scientifically implausible as telepathic communication between plants and lower animals. Dropping brine shrimp into scalding water, he has found, he says, that their agony is instantly recorded on a Rube Goldbergian array of lie-detector equipment attached to nearby flora. Some parapsychologists are even asserting that psi can influence a natural phenomenon like the flow of electricity. Their evidence: electrical contacts that are supposed to open and close completely at random seem to incline more in one direction than another in the presence of a psychically gifted person.

Although parapsychologists claim that psychic powers have now been proved beyond all doubt, their glowing optimism does not impress many other behavioral scientists. These critics offer any number of explanations for the supposedly successful experiments: outright fraud, statistical error, or even the unconscious wishes of the parapsychological researcher. The search for these hidden powers of the mind goes on. Like other dreams in mankind's long history of belief in the preternatural, it may prove futile and frustrating.

-These are: telepathy (mental messages), clairvoyance (discerning events or objects beyond the reach of the senses), and precognition (predicting the future).

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