Newspapers / Zebulon Record (Zebulon, N.C.) / Dec. 31, 1937, edition 1 / Page 9
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UOW THE MAGICIAN READS MINDS'- . AND UOW TUE SCIENTIST DOES IT PIC PIC . > Jte»ii| u J. D. MacFarland and R. W. George of Tarkio College. Tarkio. Mo., conduct experiments in wliirh the pack of cards is untouched until the session is over. Not even • the investigator breaks the pack. HEN you pass your wife the butter before she asks for it or when you ask w’hat she w'ants for her birthday, she w'ill lay W down her fork and peer at you with a quizzical eye. “Mind reading!’’ Then she'll go back to her raspberry tart. Mind reading, of course, is nonsense Ask anyone in show business. Ask a magician, or anyone with common sense. Bunk, they will agree. And we all know hey‘re right. But do we? Along comes science to nterrupt the calm flow of our disbelief. Science has elected to penetrate this phere of the devil, the region of “queer voices” that made Joan of Arcs and Savonarolas, and it comes back with the report, “There's something thar!” Seven years of experiments at Duke University have convinced Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, conductor of the research, that mental telepathy may be a gift of the devil, but it is a gift. In other words, the psychologist believes it is a scientific fact. “I have been driven by the research :t Duke to accept telepathy as definitely •stablished,” he declares. He isn't the only one. He adds, “A number of other psychologists have PIC By Helen Morgan come to this view. Among them are the late William James of Harvard. Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, Professor William McDougall of Duke, Dr. Wil liam Moulton Marston. Professor G H Estabrooks of Colgate and others.” Imagine yourself seated across the table from a young man. There is a screen hiding you from him. You have a pack of cards, 25 in number, each bearing either a circle, a star, a plus mark, rectangle, or three wavy lines. You shuffle them and then, holding them face down, run through the pack The youth on the other side of the screen calls out the symbol on the card The whole thing is done as fast as you can make notes. When it’s all over, the cards are checked against the calls made by the subject. Then you have the score. This test makes use of clairvoyance, pure and simple. You are not holding the thought, for you do not see the cards yourself until the pack is finished. If you took the same position but had no cards at all. telepathy would be called into play. You would imagine a number, and the young man would call it out. Then he is “reading your mind.” The way you wish your boss yould do •■si * m I vT Wn| r 4 \ icot-t when you’re thinking how nice $lO would look added to your weekly check! r I''HESE are the basic forms of the tests going on under Dr. Rhine. They have resulted in a file of 100,000 cases and a highly optimistic attitude toward the endeavor. Elaborate mathematical calculations to determine the law of chance preceded the experiments. The scores were always compared against those probable if chance were respon sible. The experiments open, some believe, a fascinating question of evolution. It is pointed out that senses are getting duller; smell, for instance, is not what it used to be. Look at primitives and animals. All of which leads to the ques tion, “Was evolution just waiting to be written about? Now that it has been discovered, has it ceased to function? Where do we go from here?” The answer would be that we go to the para psychological plane. That, in J mEWßmjuf . jffa ■■■'•••■ X” ttfc, / >.*4kl x \ •• V:#spl&»g| > Youngish, with the shoulders of a halfback, magician Annemann demonstrates his art. case you didn't know (and who does?), is the name now given to psychological experiences we cannot explain. The idea is, less sense and more sensing. Just how far could this higher men tal process—if it exists, for skeptics in sist on the “if”—be developed? That is what Dr Rhine wants to find out. It is what men who make their living by reading minds claim they found out 10 or 20 years ago. The professional mind-readers say. “Everyone is telepathic.” Only they have developed it, they point out. How? “That.” says one, “would be giving away the hen that laid the golden egg.” (It was a goose.) 'T'HERE are three mind-readers in New A York City who work without con federates. These phenomena are Dunninger. Annemann, and Khaldah, and they move like products of magic through the magicians’ world. (Don’t be dis turbed by the names; Dunninger and Annemann are New York products, while Khaldah, being Persian, has a right to a peculiar name.) These men talists get the “Ohs” and “Ahs” of the ermine and top hat crowd. They are suave, handsome fellow's. They started out practicing magic. The sleight of hand gave them the cue to mental dexterity. They switched from magic when they realized mind-reading w'as far more mysterious to the average citizen. They have spent years tailor ing their personalities to be a walking denial that all magicians are illiterate fellow's with rabbits up their sleeves. Annemann, who is youngish and has the shoulders of a halfback, ruffles his hair and frowns. “How do we do it? Well, it is a trick.” He pauses and con tinues quickly. “But the only trick to it is a psychological trick. It's knowine people. How they think. What they are like.”
Zebulon Record (Zebulon, N.C.)
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Dec. 31, 1937, edition 1
9
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