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Page 91
Card-Guessing Experiments and the Search for Perfect Psi
In the summer of 1933 at Duke University, Dr. J.B. Rhine, who is considered "the father" of laboratory psychical research, began a card-guessing experiment that he considered definitive in demonstrating the existence of ESP. General ESP (GESP) includes telepathy, which is a mind-to-mind connection, as well as clairvoyance, in which a person appears to make direct contact with an object unknown at that time to any person. Rhine went on to do many years of highly successful pioneering research involving the psychokinetic (mind affecting movement of matter) control of dice, as well as card guessing. He thought that ESP was a naturally occurring ability that a person either did or did not have. When Rhine came to visit the Palo Alto-based Parapsychology Research Group, which Charles Tart and I had founded, he told us that he thought we were on the wrong track in trying to build an ESP-teaching machine. In his experience, psi performance flourished in people's lives, but always declined in the laboratory, and he did not think that we would be able to teach people to improve their psi ability. (In actuality, Charley and I were both able to help people measurably improve their scores with our various ESP-teaching machines.) Rhine also told us that he believed that psi was part of man's spiritual nature, and that he did not expect to find a physical description of its mechanisms.
In Rhine's experiments, a special deck of cards was used for testing subjects in the laboratory. These decks, called Zener cards, were of 25 cards each, and consisted of 5 types of symbols: Printed on each card was either a square, a circle, a cross, a star, or three wavy lines. After the deck was shuffled, the subject was asked to identify which symbol was on each card, shown to him facedown. With 5 different symbols, a subject would be expected to get 5 out of 25 correct by chance alone.
In Rhine's lab, experiments were carried out to determine the existence of telepathy as distinct from clairvoyance. In these series, the sender would sometimes look at the card that she was trying to send to the receiver, and at other times the card would simply be removed from the top of the deck,

 
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