Extra-sensory Perception

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30763, 29 May 1965, Page 4

Extra-sensory Perception

How to Make E.S.P. Work For You. By Harold Sherman. Muller. 285 pp.

E.S.P. stands for “extrasensory perception,” a term coined by Professor Rhine of Duke University in the United States who has conducted a long series of studies on phenomena such as telepathy or telekinesis: these are respectively the hypothetical power, to receive thoughts from others without any normal “physical” contacts, and the ability to influence the movement of objects merely by concentrating on those objects and willing things to happen. The author of this book, however, found he could achieve no results on the Rhine tests, which he says lack the emotional quality he needs for telepathic communion.

He is none-the-less convinced that his life is packed with unambiguous evidence for E.S.P., and quotes many examples that seem at first sight most impressive. They do not, unfortunately, stand up to examination. To take one sample, Mr Sherman claims that after willing himself to read the thoughts of the enemies of the State, he had a detailed dream of three people firing shots in the House of Representatives. Consequently, he wrote to a high official in Washington warning of a possible assassination, and some days later three Puerto Ricans did in

fact start shooting in the House. But —and it is a big but the only concrete evidence for the dream, if it still exists, is a letter to an unnamed person warning vaguely against assassination. It is all the same: dreams, experiments with friends or with mediums have no proof beyond Mr Sherman’s word, and without wishing to doubt his good faith it must be said that this is a wonderful field for self-delusion. There were, for instance, many cases of witches who truly believed and boasted that they could fly. talk with their familiars and raise storms by incantation. He does refer to one series of telepathic communications with an Arctic expedition led by Sir Hubert Wilkins in 1937 which sounds as though it should have been convincing, but it is not mentioned in the authoritative “Treatise on Parapsychology" by Rene Sudre. or in the recent presidential address on telepathy to the Society for Psychical Research. Some of the other paranormal phenomena discussed, such as experiences of leaving one’s body and floating in an astral sphere are well known in mental illness as well as in parapsychology, but are hardly relevant to the book.

This, inadequately - documented work is not likely to make E.S.P. “work” for any reader, unless like the author he interprets his fleeting doubts, anxieties and feelings that “I have been here before" all as evidence of paranormal contact with another world.