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continued the instructor, “that we ordinary human beings actually have telepathic powers. Interesting.”
    Now, about fourteen years later, I was beginning to agree with my old teacher. It was interesting, all right. But I figured that this man at Duke had probably made a one-shot test merely to satisfy his curiosity, or to gather material for a magazine article. The odds were heavily against the possibility, it seemed to me, that this investigator would still be concerned with the same problem.
    Just the same, I started inquiring about the “man with the cards” who had done telepathic experiments back in the thirties. I drew blanks until I came to my young medical friend.
    “Oh! You must mean Dr. J. B. Rhine,” he answered.
    That was the first time that I had ever heard the name. But from that moment Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine became one of the most important names in my personal file.
    “He’s still at Duke University,” added the doctor.
    “But I suppose that, after all these years, he’s no longer concerned with extrasensory perception,” I said.
    “Your guess is 100 percent wrong,” corrected the doctor. “Rhine has devoted his whole life to those studies; he’s probably recognized as the world’s number one authority ou the subject, and his last book,
Reach of the Mind
, is generally regarded as a classic in this field. And Rhine is not the only one; there are scientists all over the world dedicating themselves exclusively to research in extrasensory perception.”
    And so I learned that there were indeed, both here and abroad, scientists keenly interested in these matters. As early as 1882, in a lonely protest against general indifference, a group of scholars in England had formed the English Society for Psychical Research for the purpose of investigating telepathy, telesthesia (clairvoyance), hypnotism, spiritualism—odd and unexpected phenomena which they felt it their duty to explain or to abandon as inane absurdities. This organization, fostering scholarly methods, is more active today than ever before, and has piled up an imposing record of experimental studies.
    Following the lead of the British society, other scientists and explorers decided to tackle the same problem. And in 1930, together with three other members of the Duke University Psychology Department, the man who now appears to be the undisputed leader in this arena, J. B. Rhine, launched a full-scale attack. It was the first time in history that a group of university staff members had given so much attention to this subject.
    Meanwhile literature in this field was beginning to build up. Books and reports were being contributed by the researchers of several nations. So off I went on another book binge, reading everything I could find on extrasensory perception.
    It was interesting to note that in expanding my interest from hypnotism to extrasensory perception I had plenty of company. Indeed, there is a definite historical relationship between the two phenomena. 1 So close, in fact, was their relationship that for many years extrasensory perception was considered a by-product of hypnosis. Dr. Mesmer himself, the grandfather of modern hypnosis,once wrote that deeply hypnotized subjects can sometimes distinctly see the past and the future.
    And so, historically at least, it is clear that hypnosis has been closely related to telepathy and clairvoyance. But since those early days, when hypnotists encountered extrasensory phenomena quite by chance, the investigation has come a long way, and some sort of digest is in order, because this is a matter with which we are all vitally concerned—and about which we shall be hearing more and more in the days to come.
    In my own case I first became familiar with the terms that appear frequently in this work:
    E SP : merely the abbreviation for extrasensory perception, which refers to the perception of an external event without the use of any known senses.
    T ELEPATHY : the transference of a thought from