This clear and reasonable account of all aspects of extrasensory perception and related abilities gives a vivid picture of the research that established them in terms of both life experiences and laboratory experiments. For more than thirty years, Louisa E. Rhine and her husband, J. B. Rhine, have been the world's leading authorities on extrasensory perception, and the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University has been the center of research and the headquarters for co-workers from all over the world. Mrs. Rhine has written her book in the hope of reaching "that more general audience which is made up of intelligent, thoughtful, open-minded persons who want to be informed on all topics and who realize something of the seriousness of current cultural trends."
Basically, ESP means the reception in the mind of information that is not obtained through the senses. Its main types are telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. The forms of ESP fall into four major intuitions, realistic dreams, unrealistic dreams, and, more rarely, hallucinations. Mrs. Rhine illustrates each of these forms with dramatic case histories described in letters from and interviews with private individuals--cases that are typical in import but different in specific detail (10,066 of these four forms of cases were classified in her collection at the last count, in 1963). Along with these personal accounts, she shows the development of the research in typical laboratory experiments under controlled conditions, emphasizing the complications, difficulties, and rare triumphs that accompany research in such a pioneer area. Her book also deals with a separate but related extrasensory phenomenon, psychokinesis (known as PK)--the ability of the mind to influence matter directly--and gives specific examples.
The Rhines' research initially was extremely controversial, but acceptance has increased over the years as ESP has been proved to exist, probably in all of us, and indubitably in some of us. The human potential to which it points is practically boundless. As Mrs. Rhine says in "Parapsychological abilities may someday be put to work, and if they are, the result can benefit mankind very greatly. But whether or not they are, the very fact that they exist opens up a new window for man's outlook. It tells him he need not consider himself relegated to the confines of mechanism. He will remain not the computer, but the man who made it, with values and aspirations his machines can never know."