Creative Technology in the Testing Lab

“This book is about a very real kind of human experience, but one which is usually ignored or scoffed at, its meaning denied or debated. It is the kind of occurrence in which knowledge seems to come without the use of the senses. People generally keep in touch with the world around them by sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. But occasionally a person says he became aware of something when none of these channels operated, and then the argument begins. How did he know or did he actually know? Such debatable occurrences could be instances of extrasensory perception, or ESP. They are the subject matter of this book.” — Louisa Rhine, Hidden Channels of the Mind, 1961

A 2003 study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion reveals that almost two-thirds of Americans believe in psi phenomena — and that better educated individuals are more likely to believe in ESP. Similarly, a 2023 Spirituality Among Americans study by the Pew Research Center shows that 74 percent of Americans say there are some things that science cannot explain. As a culture, Americans seem readily capable believe that there is more out there than what we know through our senses — the sixth sense is hardly controversial for most of us. We go with our guts, trust our instincts, follow our inner voice — some of us do it multiple times in a single day. And yet don’t we wonder from where such feelings derive? Of course we do, or at least a good many of us humans do, which leads back to the Rhine.

We go with our guts, trust our instincts, follow our inner voice — some of us do it multiple times in a single day. And yet don’t we wonder from where such feelings derive?

Today the Rhine Research Center is led by executive director John G. Kruth, a professional researcher with a background in computer science whose work explores healing methodologies and the energy behind psychokinesis, poltergeist activity, and other unconscious effects on electronics. Kruth is also the founder and director of the Rhine Education Center, which offers online courses and public events at the Center, which also maintains a publicly accessible archive and library whose holdings span the entire history of parapsychology. Perhaps most importantly, the Center is a repository and space of community for people who have psychic experiences or are simply interested in such phenomena. Just as Louisa Rhine spent much of her time classifying and responding to “spontaneous case reports” submitted to the Parapsychology Lab in letters from individuals who had undergone an extraordinary experience, so too the modern Rhine allows people to submit their experiences online, the reports of which are anonymously added to their collections. 

Along with documenting such experiences, Rhine researchers also respond to them — answering calls for help from people who are puzzled, or even afraid, of what is happening around them. When I met with Kruth for an interview, he shared one such situation about a boy who was brought to his attention by a doctor in Western North Carolina. The child was a patient of the doctor’s and had been brought in to see the doctor because his family said he was affecting all the technology in their home— the telephones, the washing machine, the TV set. All would stop working or act erratically when he entered the room. 

“In the history of parapsychology, when we see this sort of thing happening, one of the first things people want to determine is ‘is it real?’ And then to figure out what the mechanism is behind it,” says Kruth. “But my first instinct is I need to help these people and then we can figure out the mechanism.” 

After traveling to the child’s home and experiencing some of the strange phenomena firsthand —feedback on phones whenever the boy held them, the printer of the computer going berserk when he tried to use it, the unplugged toaster oven warming up when he simply walked by it — Kruth and his colleague used gear they’d brought to make measurements of the magnetic and electrical static field around the boy. Nothing registered as unusual but the phenomena, which Kruth deemed poltergeist effects, continued. Whatever was causing these technological breakdowns was less important than the stress they were causing the child and his family, so Kruth used some tools he’d learned from other cases to teach the child how to control what he terms this unconscious effect.” The first step was noticing what triggers the events to occur — what was the boy thinking or feeling? Then Kruth offered him relaxation techniques and breathing exercises to help him calm his body when he felt these feelings coming up. They worked. 

The mechanism behind what was happening to the boy? Still unclear. But the problem: solved. And for this case, that was enough. “If we’re having unconscious effects on different objects around us, that’s how we explain poltergeist in the first place,” says Kruth, “Nowadays, it’s more likely to surface in electronics.”

The question of how to study a subject that exists outside of humans’ known sensory abilities seems like a losing proposition: how can we perceive and study what cannot be known through the usual methods of perception? Acknowledging that there might be something unknown doesn’t make the process of inquiry any easier — especially when all we have to use are the tools of materialist science. As the first scientific laboratory to study the paranormal — ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis—the Rhines and their colleagues had to not only develop the tests and experiments, but also any technology they needed for testing. Innovation, improvisation and tinkering with available tools was key to making discoveries. From designing the Zener cards to building card shuffling and dice tossing machines, research into the unknown demanded creating new tools to solve new problems. 

The prototypes of many of these tools can be found on display in the library of the Rhine Research Center — they are charming in their metallic heft, the retro-obsolescence of their aesthetic inspires a feeling of time travel, back to an era when devices turned on with levers, switches and dials rather than swipes and push buttons. Some, like the Zener cards, are brilliant in their simplicity, others, I don’t even know what they are — complicated pieces of steel with levers and blubs that alight. Carl Sagan’s famous proclamation that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” is oft cited in stories about parapsychology, suggesting that the science behind such research must be extraordinary as well. Certainly, the tools parapsychologists created to address their unique questions and used to test for the purpose of their research shows an extraordinary level of thought and creativity. 

What ways of knowing reach beyond the senses? Or occur outside of them? How to find the immaterial when all one has is material? These are big problems to solve. But they are exactly what parapsychology probes — and the processes researchers come up with to test immaterial phenomena like ESP, thought transference, and precognition are, in the original meaning of the word: wonderful, as in “full of wonder.” To look around at the shelves in the Rhine library and behold both the archival photographs of psychic testing and see nearby the decades-old devices that were utilized is like entering both an art museum and a hallowed hall of science: how can humans can be so creative? I found myself wondering and feeling delight that we, as a species, can confront what seems impossible to clarify with a steady methodology of inquiry, determination and innovation. The researchers, scientists, and lay folk behind the Rhine have been rolling up their sleeves and diving into the unknown for so many decades, it’s now almost a century. 

Today, the technology in use at the Rhine is much more sophisticated than a pack of playing cards or a dice-rolling machine. On my tour, Kruth shows me the Center’s bioenergy lab, which measures biophoton emissions from subjects who claim to be psychic healers, PK agents or spiritual mediums. The work there involves creating a testing space devoid of all light and uses photomultipliers to measure emissions in various conditions. Similarly, there’s a soundproof room next door used to test remote viewing. There are also devices like the Egely Wheel around, which you can order online that claims to measure “life energy,” but Kruth says there are far better — and more accurate — ways to measure energy from the biofield. The Rhine is a repository for all kinds of tech — the outdated and the new. 

One of the best known and most documented variables in the early ESP exams done at the Duke lab became known as the sheep-goat effect: the more a subject believes ESP is possible, the better their results are. People termed “sheep” are psi believers and “goats” are non-believers. Belief tends to be a predictor of psi outcomes — which is also something John Kruth sees when the Rhine Research Center hosts its lively “psi games” events, inviting the public to participate in a series of games meant to test ESP or PK abilities. Though they do it somewhat cheekily, one of these group exercises is the process of bending spoons. Kruth, or whoever is facilitating the event, passes out spoons to the participants, who sit in groups at different tables in the Center’s library. Each individual receives a normal, fully intact metal spoon. They hold the spoon in one hand, rub the handle and focus their mental intention on bending the spoon. Kruth relays that the more skeptical a person is, the less likely their table is to have anyone bend a spoon. But also that when one participant in the room bends a spoon, it often catches on like wildfire, moving from one table to the next. The Center keeps a cauldron in the library full of bent spoons, remainders participants have left behind after their successful attempts. 

Jung’s Exploding Knife

I think very highly of the importance of parapsychology. Besides the psychology of the unconscious it is certainly the most fascinating aspect of psychical activity. For the time being, however, it is still a mere object of theoretical science and we are still far from any practical use of the said phenomena, except police somnambules and water diviners. Yet such applications do not help us very much further in the understanding of the phenomena. In this letter I shall not try to answer your very profound questions. I must have a quiet time when I can think over these matters at leisure, in order to realize all the splinters of thoughts which are hovering about. — C.G. Jung to J.B. Rhine in a letter from April 1946, Parapsychology Laboratory Records

Duke University’s Rubenstein Library houses the archives of the Parapsychology Laboratory, which also includes the personal papers of many members of staff, including J.B. Rhine, Luisa Rhine, and J.G. Pratt. According to the library, more than half the collection is made of correspondences, both personal and professional, and one-third of the archive is research files. The glut of letters to and from the lab proves one thing: people from around the world wanted to talk about the work that was being done there. Some of these people were famous — prominent figures in many different fields were interested the Rhines’ work, including the writers Upton Sinclair and Aldous Huxley, as well as anthropologist Margaret Mead and actor Charlie Chaplin. 

One of the people J.B. Rhine kept a decades long correspondence with was psychologist Carl Jung, whose work on intuition, archetypes, and synchronicity shares some of the same terrain as Rhine’s research into unexplained phenomena. Interestingly, both men originally aspired to be ministers before finding their chosen fields.

In a letter from 1932, Jung shares an anecdote that captivates Rhine, who refers back to it in successive replies. Jung’s story was about a time, nearly four decades prior: in 1898 he was out in the garden, his mother in the house, and a servant in the kitchen when a knife that had been in a bread basket locked in the drawer of a sideboard suddenly exploded. It sounded like “an exploding pistol” and the knife was found to be broken into four parts, lying scattered inside the basket. The basket itself was unmarked. A few days later, the same sound occurred and a 90-year-old table was torn three-fourths of the way through its surface. Jung relays that these two odd happenings were perhaps connected to his making a new acquaintance around the same time — a woman with “marked mediumistic faculties” with whom he’d experimented with in a series of seances. Though she hadn’t been anywhere near his house when the explosions occurred, she later relayed that she had thought of the seances back when the explosions happened. Jung supplies no details other than the facts, leaving one to wonder what exactly he’s getting at—precognition? Trance telepathy? Some kind of PK power on the part of the medium? 

The knife incident excites J.B. Rhine so much that in a letter written 12 years later he asks Jung if he can have the knife for exhibit in the Laboratory (“I doubt if there is any place in the world where your breadknife would be more appreciated or made better use of.”). After all, he’s already hung the photo Jung sent him of the knife up in the lab. Jung’s measured response to this request feels like an exercise in tact: he refuses to send the knife, saying that he would ask even that Rhine take the photograph down “but since North Carolina is very far away from Europe, so far away, indeed, that probably very few are even aware of the existence of a Duke University, I shall not object.” Rhine can keep the image of the broken knife up, but only because no one Jung knows or cares about will see it—making it a bit of a one-sided secret.

What can we learn from this correspondence on Jung’s bread knife? First, that the rupture of the knife is a story worth repeating—two great thinkers puzzled over these knife pieces and the artifact acted as a string, decades long, connecting the men and their work (a tangled web of connections—or rather correspondences—for sure) to a shared appreciation of the unknown. They might call it different things—psi, the unconscious—but the knife served as a rally call, a Jungian totem even, a question to be explored and a symbol of what the men devoted their lives to studying.

The broken bread knife is a problem for the scientific world and while Carl Jung would like to keep such a disruption discreet, J.B. Rhine would rather exhibit it for all to see. Here are two men who both know the stakes and have created bodies of work that inspired controversy—they have been on the sidelines of the hard sciences. Rhine, ever eager to pushing the boundaries, or unafraid to because he has been situated, at least for a time, in the center of academia (far-off academic for Europeans like Jung), is ready to call attention to the knife, whereas Jung’s response is measured caution. 

Jung asks for a quiet time to think about these matters at leisure. He wants to mull things over, time to think about paranormal experiences before sharing them or offering his support to Rhine’s research. Rhine moves fast and Jung wants to go slow—their tempos don’t harmonize. Jung writes he wants to “realize all the splinters of thoughts which are hovering about.” The verb choice feels important: to realize is to bring into concrete existence; to realize is also to make fully awake, or to illuminate those thoughts which for Jung are hovering about.

Thoughts. Ideas. Spirits. Ghosts. Hawks. Birds. Helicopters, even: all things that hover, that hang in the wind.

Thoughts are fluctuating things, moving to and fro through the psyche, traveling in ways we are just beginning to realize through our bodies (the gut-brain axis again!). Somatics asks “where do you feel that in your body?” and one tries to situate the sensation, to find the place of origin for a feeling. Hovering about is to stay in a state of uncertainty, irresolution or suspense. We don’t know what happened to Jung’s bread knife, just as, even after all of the Rhine Research Center’s experiments and the work of the Parapsychology Lab, humans haven’t pinpointed the exact mechanism behind ESP. But we have a broken bread knife, a cauldron of bend spoons, and almost a century of research from one particular place that has had several names: the Rhine Research Center. Perhaps, following Jung, to study the unknown is to enter into spaces of hovering. In a society that looks to science for certainty, what does it look like when inquiry is allowed stay hovering about? 

Maybe it looks like the moment before you draw a tarot card, when the hand hovers above all the options but then, somehow, through some unknown process, your fingers settle and select just that one. Playing with Zener cards, there’s a similar sort of hovering about, a probe of the unconscious of which I am mostly unconscious, but then I speak what card I “see” in the language of symbols: a circle, a cross, a square, a star, or a wave. Where did that choice come from? Somewhere in my body or outside of it? I don’t know exactly what mechanism led me to say that card; did I call it forth or did it speak to me? And what of the great, focused intention I’m using to identify the card? Doesn’t that have a different energy? I would call it this kind of concentration something other than just thinking, because it’s not knowing in the traditional way. I didn’t read and learn this. It’s intuitive, a hunch, the right answer I feel somewhere — maybe my gut? It’s selecting out of the air. Maybe it’s hovering —collecting all the splinters of thoughts hovering around, and then narrowing that down to a single point: an answer. 

Can hovering thoughts bend a spoon? The only way to know is to try.