Dying Inside

You couldn’t bring yourself to believe in ESP. If it can’t be measured with a voltmeter or recorded on an electroencephalograph, you said, it isn’t real. Be tolerant, I pleaded. There are such things as telepathic powers. I know there are. (Be careful, Duv!) I couldn’t cite EEG readings — I’ve never been near an EEG in my life, have no idea whether my power would register. And I had barred myself from conquering your skepticism by calling in some outsider and doing some party-game mind-reading on him. But I could offer other arguments. Look at Rhine’s results, look at all these series of correct readings of the Zener cards. How can you explain them, if not by ESP? And the evidence for telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance -

You remained skeptical, coolly putting down most of the data I cited. Your reasoning was keen and close; there was nothing fuzzy about your mind when it was on its own home territory, the scientific method. Rhine, you said, fudges his results by testing heterogeneous groups, then selecting for further testing only those subjects who show unusual runs of luck, dropping the others from his surveys. And he publishes only the scores that seem to prove his thesis. It’s a statistical anomaly, not an extrasensory one, that turns up all those correct guesses of the Zener cards, you insisted. Besides, the experimenter is prejudiced in favor of belief in ESP, and that surely leads to all sorts of unconscious errors of procedure, tiny accesses of unintentional bias that inevitably skew the outcome. Cautiously I invited you to try some experiments with me, letting you set up the procedures to suit yourself. You said okay, mainly, I think, because it was something we could do together, and — this was early October — we were already searching selfconsciously for areas of closeness, your literary education having become a strain for both of us.

We agreed — how subtly I made it seem like your own idea! — to concentrate on transmitting images or ideas to one another. And right at the outset we had a cruelly deceptive success. We assembled some packets of pictures and tried to relay them mentally. I still have, here in the archives, our notes on those experiments:

Pictures Seen By Me Your Guess

1. A rowboat 1. Oak Trees

2. Marigolds in a field 2. Bouquet of roses

3. A kangaroo 3. President Kennedy

4. Twin baby girls 4. A statue

5. The Empire State Building 5. The Pentagon

6. A snow-capped mountain 6. ? image unclear

7. Profile of old man’s face 7. A pair of scissors

8. Baseball player at bat 8. A carving knife

9. An elephant 9. A tractor

10. A locomotive 10. An airplane

You had no direct hits. But four out of ten could be considered close associations: marigolds and roses, the Empire State and the Pentagon, elephant and tractor, locomotive and airplane. (Flowers, buildings, heavy-duty equipment, means of transportation.) Enough to give us false hopes of true transmission. Followed by this:

Pictures Seen By You My Guess

1. A butterfly 1. A railway train

2. An octopus 2. Mountains

3. Tropical beach scene 3. Landscape, bright sunlight

4. Young Negro boy 4. An automobile

5. Map of South America 5. Grapevines

6. George Washington Bridge 6. The Washington Monument

7. Bowl of apples and bananas 7. Stock market quotations

8. El Greco’s Toledo 8. A shelf of books

9. A highway at rush hour 9. A beehive

10. An ICBM 10. Cary Grant

No direct hits for me either. But three close associations, of sorts, out of ten: tropical beach and sunny landscape, George Washington Bridge and Washington Monument, highway at rush hour and beehive, the common denominators being sunlight, George Washington, and intense tight-packed activity. At least we deceived ourselves into seeing them as close associations rather than coincidences. I confess I was stabbing in the dark at all times, guessing rather than receiving, and I had little faith even then in the quality of our responses. Nevertheless those probably random collisions of images aroused your curiosity: there’s something in this stuff, maybe, you began to say. And we went onward.