(Buenos Aires . 20 cm. 247 p. : il., fot. Encuadernación e...)
Buenos Aires . 20 cm. 247 p. : il., fot. Encuadernación en tapa blanda de editorial. Colección 'Biblioteca El Tema del Hombre / dirigida por Jorge L. García Venturini'. Rhine, Joseph Banks, 1895-1980. Título del original inglés: Parapsychology / traducción de Adolfo Jasca. En portada escritura manuscrita: R. M. Frías, Bs. As. , 24-1-66. Pratt, Joseph Gaither,. 1910-. García Venturini, Jorge L. director de colección. El Tema del Hombre (Troquel) .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario.
Joseph Banks Rhine, usually known as J. B. Rhine, was an American botanist and psychologist.
Background
Joseph Banks Rhine was born September 29, 1895 in Waterloo, Pennsylvania, the son of Samuel Ellis Rhine and Elizabeth Ellen Vaughan. Rhine, the second of five children, spent his childhood in a fairly isolated mountain region of southern Pennsylvania, where people, including his mother, believed in omens, prophetic warnings, and other supernatural occurrences. His father, a farmer, merchant, and occasional public school teacher, scoffed at these psychic stories and discouraged any belief in them. At the age of four, Rhine began accompanying his father when he taught school during the winter months between farming seasons.
He learned to read by the age of five. His father encouraged him to study hard, and his mother wanted him to be a minister. Rhine did develop a strong interest in religion because of the influence of some devout relatives, the books to which he was exposed, and a seemingly natural philosophical disposition from which he developed a questioning mind. Rhine was eager for answers to perplexing questions about the nature of man, the meaning of existence, man's place in the universe, and other issues of an epistemological and metaphysical nature. Rhine's family moved eleven times from one small farming community to another during his elementary school years. Being rather shy and a bookworm, he was often teased and attacked by other students and frequently had to "fight his way to social acceptance, " which helped him develop a tenacity and ability to stand up for his beliefs.
Education
In 1910 the Rhine family moved to Marshallville, Ohio, where his father rented a farm from their neighbor, whose daughter, Louisa Ella Weckesser, taught in the local elementary school. Weckesser was four years older than Rhine but had much the same philosophical temperament. She was impressed with his maturity and integrity. He was thoughtful, quiet and self-confident, and had a passion for learning. They spent hours discussing religion and philosophy and soon developed a close relationship.
In 1916 they both enrolled in the College of Wooster, Rhine as a student in the Department of Religion with the intention of becoming a minister, but he was soon frustrated by what he perceived to be the overly restrictive nature of religion. In 1921 he joined the United States Marine Corps and won the gold medal in the President's Rifle Match of 1919. After his discharge that year with the rank of sergeant, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where Weckesser was also a student. Two years later, Rhine received his B. S. degree and his wife an M. S. degree. In 1923, Rhine received his M. S. degree in biology and Louisa a Ph. D. From 1923 to 1924 the Rhines worked as assistant plant physiologists at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Yonkers, New York. From 1924 to 1926, Rhine was an instructor in botany at West Virginia University in Morgantown. He received a Ph. D. in 1925 from the University of Chicago, where his interest in psychic research germinated.
Career
Disillusioned with orthodox religion but intrigued by questions concerning the nature of man posed by philosophy and religion, Rhine saw psychic research as an area in which to use science to address such questions. This possibility was suggested in a lecture on spirit survival by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and by such books as Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution and William McDougall's Body and Mind and Psychical Research as a University Study. McDougall, a widely respected psychologist and advocate of psychic research, was chairperson of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
Rhine moved to Cambridge to work with him in the summer of 1926, and to take advanced courses in psychology and philosophy. McDougall, however, was beginning a year's sabbatical, but the Rhines remained at Harvard until McDougall accepted the chairmanship of the newly formed Psychology Department at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and offered Rhine a research fellowship. Beginning in 1927 as an evaluator of the mediumistic material of Dr. John F. Thomas, Rhine adopted an experimental approach to psychic research that he and McDougall called parapsychology.
In 1930, Rhine, McDougall, and two of McDougall's former students, Karl Zener and Helge Lundholm, created the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, which marked the beginning of the first sustained, systematic, and scientific study of psychic phenomena under controlled laboratory conditions in a university setting. Rhine was concerned with understanding the human mind and how it acquired knowledge, because, in his view, this determined one's "approach to life, living, and problem solving. For it is by what we are mentally even more than by what we are bodily that we identify and regulate ourselves. " One fundamental question addressed by Rhine was whether the acquisition of knowledge is limited to the parameters of time and space as governed by the physical laws of the universe or whether the human mind can transcend scientific law and come to know things through means other than the known senses.
From 1930 to 1934, Rhine and his associates conducted 90, 000 experiments with a wide variety of subjects to demonstrate the existence and functioning of psychic phenomena, which he termed extrasensory perception, or ESP, meaning perception without the mediation of sensation, including such phenomena as clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition. Clairvoyance, the ESP of objects, is the ability to know objects and objective events without the use of the senses.
A standard test of clairvoyance was to ask subjects to identify the order of cards with distinctive symbols in a shuffled deck hidden from their view. Telepathy, the ESP of another's mental activity or mind reading, is direct thought transference from one person to another without the intervention of any physical form of energy transmission. Rhine tested for telepathy by asking a subject, or "sender, " to think of symbols on each card in a special deck while another subject, or "receiver, " was locked in another room and simultaneously tried to state which card the sender had in mind. In these experiments, the score or number of successes is compared to the chance rate of scoring by appropriate mathematical and statistical principles of probability.
Rhine obtained some impressive results and was convinced of the existence of ESP. He also discovered that these paranormal phenomena obeyed certain laws or were affected by certain conditions and subject characteristics. In 1934, Rhine published his work in Extra-Sensory Perception, and although some scientists confirmed many of his findings, the book was roundly criticized by many scholars, some of whom questioned Rhine's methods and objectivity. Others pointed to the failure of many researchers to replicate Rhine's results, and still others maintained that Rhine's findings could be explained by factors other than ESP, such as natural laws, coincidence, fraud, and trickery. Nevertheless, Rhine doggedly pursued his work and remained devoted to the scientific method in exploring the dynamics of ESP. In 1937 he published much of the same material in a less technical volume, New Frontiers of the Mind. This book became a nonfiction best-seller and made ESP cards a commercial commodity. In March 1937, Rhine founded the Journal of Parapsychology.
In 1940 he became director of the Parapsychology Laboratory and with four of his assistants published Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years. This volume surveyed and critically examined all the research evidence for and against ESP up to that time. It temporarily silenced many of Rhine's critics. During the 1940's Rhine broadened his research interests to include a related paranormal phenomenon, known as psychokinesis (PK), the ability of the mind to directly influence material objects, for example, to move objects without touching them or to influence the fall of dice on a dice toss.
On July 30, 1962, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man was founded in Durham with the Institute for Parapsychology as its research unit. This organization allowed Rhine to continue his work after his retirement from Duke in 1965.
He died at his home in Hillsborough, North Carolina.