When Joseph B. and Louisa Rhine joined Professor William McDougall at the newly founded Duke University in 1927, the field of investigation into psychic phenomena was known as psychical research. At that time psychical research was mainly concerned with working with mediums in the search for evidence of an afterlife. J.B. Rhine recognized that answering the survival question depended first on investigating the ability of the living to gain psychic or psi information by other than sensory means (telepathy and clairvoyance), an ability for which he used the term extrasensory perception (ESP). Rhine began testing Duke students with specially designed cards to study ESP and later used dice machines to study psychokinesis (PK), the movement of objects by mental intention alone.
By 1935 Rhine’s experiments into the unexplained powers of the mind had shown sufficient promise to justify the creation of a special unit, the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, where under his guidance and with help of a growing team of graduate students and colleagues, a new science was born, the experimental science of parapsychology. In 1937 the Journal of Parapsychology was founded as an independent peer-reviewed professional journal to provide an outlet for reporting the findings from the Duke research as well as from other laboratories at home and abroad.
Photo Caption: Dr. Joseph Banks (J.B.) and Louisa Rhine
Progress and Controversy
From the start, parapsychology has known both progress and controversy. The early years at the Duke Lab were characterized by new discoveries into the forms and conditions of psi abilities, improvements in methodology, training of new researchers, and considerable efforts to disseminate the findings. But despite the continued accumulation of evidence for the existence of psi, skeptics and conservatives dominated the academic environment around the Duke Lab and as he neared retirement in the 1960’s, Rhine foresaw the need for an independent organization to allow his work to continue.
In 1965, with the help of benefactors such as Chester Carlson, the founder of Xerox, J. B. Rhine started the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM) and moved it off campus where the work continued with broader connections to other workers on both a national and international scale. For the next thirty years FRNM served as a parent organization to the Institute for Parapsychology, its major research and education institute, and the Parapsychology Press, its publishing branch. In 1995, the centenary of J. B. Rhine’s birth and 15 years following his death, the FRNM was renamed the Rhine Research Center to honor the Rhines and their unique contributions to parapsychology.
Consciousness Research, the New New Thing
Today the Rhine Center continues the mission and work of its founder but with a broadened scope that is reflected in its new subtitle, an Institute for the Study of Consciousness. ESP cards and dice games have long since been replaced by modern techniques that allow more subtle measurements of psi, such as by looking at the physiological changes or bioenergy characteristics of psychics and healers, or by measuring the telepathic awareness of emotional targets in a simulated dream-like situation. Efforts are made to detect clues that come directly from the psi experiencers themselves, whether they are healers, intuitives, or simply ordinary people who have these extraordinary experiences.
As can be seen in the range of their educational programs and discussion groups available for the general public, the Rhine Center seeks to broaden its search for knowledge by an active give-and-take between the psychic experiencer and the scientist. This is a collaboration that stems back to the late 1940’s when Louisa E. Rhine began her original collection of spontaneous psi experiences from the general public, a case collection and analysis that extended and amplified the findings that were continuously emerging from the solid experimental research that is more closely identified with her lifelong collaborator and husband J.B. Rhine.
Five Years in the New Home
In 2002, over thirty years after the move from Duke to the FRNM building, it was decided there was a need for more modern experimental space and updated research equipment as well as for expansion of the Center’s library. The aging Buchanan Avenue building was sold to Duke University and a new building, the first ever in the world built for experimental work in parapsychology, was constructed for the Rhine Research Center at 2741 Campus Walk Avenue in western Durham about a mile west of the Duke Medical Center. This location, across from the Millennium Hotel, is easily accessible from the interstates and is near the Stedman Auditorium on the Duke Center for Living campus where frequent Rhine Center programs are held. Smaller programs and social events are regularly held in the Rhine Center’s Alex Tanous Research Library that was initiated and supported by a gift from the Alex Tanous Foundation of Portland, Maine.
The Rhine Research Center
Who We Are
The Rhine Research Center is a hub for research and education on the basic nature of consciousness.
The Center presents a wide range of educational offerings in which we attempt to draw together and present the most interesting and challenging current ideas on the nature and enhancement of consciousness. We present conferences, teach classes, and offer workshops, lectures, study groups, and other events. Some of these activities are face-to-face in our Durham NC headquarters, and some are web-based.
We conduct careful scientific studies on the parapsychological dimensions of consciousness, in order to answer basic questions about the nature of consciousness, its reach, its durability, its power, its healing potential, and the extent of its autonomy and independence of physical constraints. An important aspect of our research effort is the publication of the Journal of Parapsychology a peer-reviewed scientific periodical that has been published continuously since 1937, and that has consistently offered to the scientific community a large portion of the best theoretical and empirical work that has been done on these problems.
Where We Come From
Over seventy-five years ago J. B. Rhine took the problems of spiritualism and psychical research out of the murky shadows of séance rooms and into the clear light of a university scientific laboratory. Working at Duke University, he stepped away from the sensationalism and trickery and religious controversies that burdened previous work, and developed new laboratory methods with which to ask some basic questions: Is human consciousness capable of acquiring information without using the senses, and can it affect physical events without impinging upon them in physical ways? And there was another question by implication: Is there anything about human consciousness independent enough of physical constraints to conceivably survive the death of the body?
His initial affirmative results about extrasensory perception aroused enormous interest and controversy, brought a new set of fascinating problems to science, and introduced some new language and concerns to the culture. The ensuing years have yielded more controversy and more research, both at our laboratory and at many others. The momentum of the scientific zeitgeist has been against us – the mind is still generally assumed by most working scientists to be a powerless by-product of biochemical processes in the brain; but the evidence for an understanding of consciousness that shows the mind to be much more powerful and autonomous has continued to grow. There is also evidence in recent years that some shift in the zeitgeist may be occurring, as more scientists understand the radical implications of a quantum physical understanding of the basic constitution of reality. To many, a more powerful and less strictly local consciousness seems more reasonable. The work issuing from our laboratory has consistently provided ground-breaking advances in understanding new, previously unknown facts about consciousness, and how to understand it scientifically. What J. B. Rhine discovered, we have continued to explore.
What We Intend
An Integrative Center for the Study of Consciousness. Now independent of Duke University, the Rhine Research Center is still located near Duke’s West Campus and Medical Center. We aim to meet the great need for information about the depth and breadth and potential of human consciousness. We will continue to present in various formats the best and most instructive current thought on these things. And we will continue to add to the body of scientific knowledge about the nature and power of the mind.
Generating scientific knowledge about consciousness and presenting a wide array of speculative ideas about consciousness and its enhancement might seem to be different and even contradictory things. They are potentially complementary, and we attempt to integrate them.
If anyone wishes to make a truly independent study of any subject, and not simply learn of the prior opinions and findings of others, there are two basic paths for exploration. We may study something empirically, and rely upon the methods of science: theory and hypothesis, objective measurements, control of variables, mathematical analysis of results, and peer-review of conclusions. Still, not all important questions are readily amenable to these methods. The other path for study is more personal and informal. We may find an interesting idea and tentatively adopt it, and try it out in the “laboratory” of our own experience. If we find that it is useful, and adds to our sense of understanding important things and enhances our personal sense of efficacy, then we may keep it and build upon it as a basis for testing other new ideas. If it does not prove to be very useful, hopefully we will be clear-headed and independent enough to toss it out, and look for something better. Most people carry out this sort of informal “research” all their lives. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but each has its unique advantages and disadvantges. Personal, informal research permits us to test out ideas that we find difficult or impossible to squeeze into the structure of empirical study. The downside is that our personal perspective is always limited and potentially biased in unwitting ways, and our range of experience is relatively narrow. We may reach conclusions that are wrong, or only very narrowly true, and never know it. Empirical research is painstaking and often slow-going, and may be somewhat narrow in terms of the questions it can manage. It may seem to miss some of the richness and immediacy of ongoing experience. Its advantage is that with it we can know something for sure, and integrate it with the rest of scientific knowledge. It is with scientific knowledge, after all, that our culture has constructed our modern world, with all its advantages. Certain knowledge is powerful knowledge.
The Rhine Research Center strives to pursue both these paths of study, and make them available to all interested persons. Because empirical knowledge is more powerful and certain than the results of purely personal exploration will ever be, our preference will always be for scientific exploration when that is possible. Pursuing both these paths at once, we will continue to advance our understanding of consciousness – its reach, power, durability, healing power and spiritual depth. What J. B. Rhine discovered, we explore.
Mission Statement
The Rhine Research Center is an integrative center for the study of consciousness. We are a hub for ground-breaking research and educational activities on the nature of human consciousness – its reach, its reality, its durability, its healing capacity, and its spiritual dimension.
“The scientific worker seizes upon the inexplicable phenomenon as he (or she) would upon a suddenly discovered treasure. The more unexplainable and mysterious it is, the more insight it will yield when eventually explained.”
--J.B. Rhine (1947)
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