I’ve been thinking a lot about the soul lately, not so much about my soul, but about the staying power of the concept. More or less, all the religions from the axial age onwards(basically from the age of Plato, Buddha and Jesus) have some idea of a self that is not corporeal, but nevertheless a part of person. This part, really essence, in most traditions exists on after shedding its mortal coil. Despite the best efforts of modern psychology and biology, popular culture retains the idea that there is some indelible and non-physical force, i. e., there are souls and thus ghosts. This made me think of a piece I wrote for my office blog a while back, entitled “The Ghosts of Duke’s Past”:
I am a child of the 80’s–and the Ghostbusters franchise was my wet-nurse. The movies, the cartoons, the toy proton-packs, all of it. Recently, I came across a line from Ghostbusters II that has not stopped resonating in my mind: “You might want to check those Duke University mean averaging studies on controlled psychokinesis.” Was this a sign? An omen? How had I never caught that my Alma Mater was mentioned? Luckily, author and NPR correspondent Stacy Horn has helped me make sense of my haunting questions with her new book Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy and other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. It not only made sense of the reference (it was a study of human thought on a random-number generator) but also gave me a sense of Duke’s values and history.
The book centers on the eccentric botanist-turned-parapsychologist J.B. Rhine who taught here from 1927-65. From an early age, Rhine had nurtured an interest in the human mind and at Duke that interest spawned almost thirty years of studying the “psychic power” of the human mind. You see, as Horn explains, Rhine didn’t believe in ghosts; rather, he believed that the human mind had more potential and power than standard psychology gave us credit for. So ghosts and mediums were not channeled souls of the dead, but some form of communication or “extra-sensory perception.” Likewise hauntings were not the work of the poltergeists but simply the telekinesis of homes’ inhabitants.
Really I am just as incredulous and skeptical as the next person. But I think there are some lessons here. In 1927, when Rhine came to Duke to study the paranormal, Duke was only three years into its academic endeavor. President Few had been swayed by a Rhine, a recent PhD from UChicago(also a young university) to create a lab investigating the mysteries of the human mind, one similar to the one Stanford (another young university) had already created. Few wanted to be on the cutting edge, and Rhine with his bold proposal might enable that.
So Rhine received Few’s blessings, money and space in the East Duke building to begin his investigations into ESP. Here in Horn’s book things get weird-at least for any Dukie. Horn recounts hundreds of students waiting in line on West Campus to be tested for telepathy while the more timid students were clandestinely studied in their Few quad rooms (obviously it was not Few quad then). A few students seemed promising, so he developed more intricate ways to test them. Duke Psychology professor Karl Zener designed for him simple geometric cards that could be “visualized” telepathically” more easily than a standard 52-deck (These cards make an appearance in Ghostbusters I). Then Rhine began testing the effect of distance on telepathy by placing his subjects across quads (see picture).
The book is littered with names and nooks that any Dukie would know. You run into president Terry Sanford and an unnamed critic (biology professor Peter Klopfer); you move from Rhine’s East Duke lab to the Perkins Library, from his Psych building office, to the Duke Parapsychology Lab off of East Campus (now the Newman Catholic Student Center). Somewhere across the absolutely phantasmagorical and the nostalgic landscape of this book, you find a stubbornly optimistic man with the Sisyphean task of convincing both the world and himself.
In the course of his thousands of individual interviews and studies, Rhine attracted many notable scientists, much press attention, and not to mention research dollars to the university. With visits from authors Timothy Leary and Upton Sinclair, psychologist Carl Jung, and lengthy correspondents with Albert Einstein, Rhine helped placed Duke and Durham on the map-for better or worse. Until his death, he labored to prove the untapped potential of the human mind. Despite his failings, what could epitomize Duke more: zeal for bold and daring ideas, a commitment to detailed research, and faith in the power and possibility of the human mind.
