ESP In Life and Lab - Louisa E Rhine

This clear and readable account of all aspects of extrasensory perception and related abilities gives a vivid picture of the research that established them in terms of both life experiences and laboratory experiments.

For more than thirty years, Louisa E. Rhine and her husband, J. B. Rhine, have been the world's leading authorities on extrasensory perception, and the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University has been the center of research and the headquarters for co-workers from all over the world. Mrs. Rhine has written her book in the hope of reaching "that more general audience which is made up of intelligent, thoughtful, open-minded persons who want to be informed on all topics and who realize something of the seriousness of current cultural trends." Basically, ESP means the reception in the mind of information that is not obtained through the senses. Its main types are telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition.

The forms of ESP fall into four major classifications: intuitions, realistic dreams, unrealistic dreams, and, more rarely, hallucinations. Mrs. Rhine illustrates each of these forms with dramatic case histories described in letters from and interviews with private individuals - cases that are typical in import but different in specific detail (10,066 of these four forms of cases were classified in her collection at last count in 1963).

Along with these personal accounts, she shows the development of the research in typical laboratory experiments under controlled conditions, emphasizing the complications, difficulties, and rare triumphs that accompany research in such a pioneer area. Her book also deals with a separate but related extrasensory phenomenon, psychokinesis (known as PK) - the ability of the mine to influence matter directly - and gives specific examples.