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shelf behind our subject. As I prepared to speak I inadvertently took the book into my hand.
    “You have a book in your hand.” This came from our hypnotized subject. Then he told me the name of the book.
    Bill and I stared at each other, wondering who had asked himand—what was more important—who was giving him the answers. Since, however, the books had been in view before the subject had been hypnotized, I tried something else, something he could not have seen.
    “What do I have in my hand now?”
    “Newspaper,” he answered.
    “What’s the name of it?” I asked. I was standing behind him; his eyes, of course, were closed, and there was little possibility that he had seen this paper before the session or on any previous visits, With little hesitation he answered, “
Wall Street Journal.
”
    I looked at Bill across the room as I said to our subject, “Bill will hold up a certain number of fingers on his right hand; tell me how many fingers he is holding up.” Taking the cue, Bill put up his right hand (out of the subject’s sight). He held up four fingers.
    “Four!” shouted our subject.
    After a few more striking demonstrations he abruptly announced, “That’s all I know!”
    When I inquired as to what he meant, he explained that when he knew something he simply knew it. “Then all of a sudden I don’t know and it’s all over,” he said.
    Bill and I relentlessly closed in; we wanted to get at the mechanics of this thing. What sort of signal tells you that you do know? Describe what takes place. Can you actually “see” these things, or are you picking up our thoughts? By what method can the mind be trained to do what you have just done? What is the sensation when this ability leaves you? We wanted any possible clue that we could extract.
    But our subject’s parlor performance was finished for that night. And during the few sessions we had with him at later dates, he was never again able to duplicate it. “When I know, I just know. Then all of a sudden it’s all over.”
    Even after putting all these incidents together I could not be positive that they added up to anything. On the other hand, no genius was required to realize that here, at the very least, was a matter worthy of investigation.
    Indeed, if these phenomena are real, regardless of how rare or how difficult to classify they may be, then they can change our entire concept of human nature. If these are realities which have been overlooked or omitted simply because they do not fit into thepicture which modern science has painted, then we had better take another look at that picture. Maybe the picture’s frame has been so dazzling as to have blurred our vision.
    At any rate, I decided to stop being a blind skeptic. True science, after all, tests hypotheses; it is not supposed to cast aside any ideas which do not, at first glance, appear to fit our modern scheme of things.
    Besides, it was clear that science, while solving the mystery of everything from the shape of our planet to the splitting of the atom, is still confounded by one of the most baffling of all puzzles: What is the human mind?
    And so the bell rang for round number two. First had been hypnosis. Now came extrasensory perception, a term which refers to the ability to perceive things without using the senses.
    I started with two questions: Were there any investigators seriously examining this problem? If so, what had they found?
    At this point I recalled that one of my college instructors, back in the days when I was a freshman, had told us briefly about a fellow at Duke University who was performing experiments with a number of students in order to determine whether there was any scientific evidence in favor of telepathy. According to my instructor, this man was using specially designed cards and, in strict accordance with scientific method, was testing the ability of students to identify these cards without actually seeing them in any way. “The results seem to indicate,”