Can ESP Help Explain How Thoughts Make Things Happen?

By MITCH HOROWITZ

Editor’s Note: The Following is Mitch Horowitz’s new introduction to the G & D Media edition of “The Other Side of the Mind “by W. Clement Stone and Norma Lee Browning now available from Amazon. 

You won’t find any direct mention of the work of Napoleon Hill in this book—but its coauthor, insurance magnate and philanthropist W. Clement Stone (1902-2002), not only presided for many years over the Napoleon Hill Foundation but was instrumental in ensuring that Hill’s books remained in print and in front of the public eye. Hill called Stone the third most successful person to use the ideas he popularized, following Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison.

Yet Stone had another side, reflected in this book: He was a longtime benefactor of psychical research, including the pioneering work of researcher JB Rhine (1895-1980) at Duke University. In his Duke labs, Rhine, with his wife and intellectual collaborator Louisa Rhine (1891-1983), herself a trained scientist and botanist, established in the U.S. the scholarly study of extra-sensory perception, or ESP, a term Rhine popularized.  

Hill, too, was a great admirer of Rhine, to whom he refers several times in Think and Grow Rich, where he signals his conviction that the mind contains extra-physical properties and potentialities. On this question, Hill had no doubts.

But The Other Side of the Mind is not a work of advocacy. Stone’s coauthor, journalist Norma Lee Browning  (1915-2001), was a pioneering female reporter who capitulated to no one’s prejudices or proclivities. Her voice and writing dominate the book, and she expresses earnest agnosticism about the state of ESP research at the time The Other Side of the Mind was published in 1964. Browning provides a sort of travelogue of contemporaneous psi research and phenomena, travelling, with Stone’s financial aid, to the former Soviet Union, India, Australia, and Fiji. She uncovers dubious accounts, frauds—and some intriguing possibilities.

Skeptical but Thoughtful

My only criticism of Browning’s approach is that she chooses certain historical  targets to rightly demonstrate flimflam, but dedicates comparatively little time surveying the research of key historical figures, including Rhine himself, who was still alive at the time. A profile of Rhine by a skeptical but thoughtful journalist would have benefited the popular literature on ESP.

Clement Stone’s sections of the book are concerned, in part, with the application of autosuggestion, which edges us back into the territory that directly concerned Napoleon Hill. Any truly dedicated student of Hill’s work ought to have some familiarity with the kinds of psychical study and offshoots that mattered so deeply to him and Stone. And there is a practical dimension to these interests.

You have probably noticed occasions in your personal life where a focused and emotively charged thought—such as a such as a deep conviction or burning question—seemed to bring you in proximity to people and situations that proveddirectly, even intimately, related to what you were concentrating on. As someone who shares Hill’s and Stone’s interests, I would theorize that such instances might not simply reflect your heightened awareness of relevant circumstances, or your unconscious willingness to seize upon confirmations of a preexisting idea (what is sometimes called “confirmation bias”). Rather, at  such times it is possible, based on findings in psychical research both before and following this book’s publication, that you may be conveying your attitudes in a subtle mind-to-mind fashion, entering a state of rapport with people who can offer assistance, meet you halfway, or provide useful information. 

Anomalous Transfer of Information

What I am describing, in potential at least, is a form of ESP. It comports with work begun by Rhine in the early 1930s. At Duke, the researcher conducted hundreds of thousands of trials in which subjects attempted to “guess” which card was overturned on a five-suit deck. Certain individuals persistently scored higher-than-average hits in these and other types of trials. These percentage points of deviation, tracked across decades of testing, demonstrated some form of anomalous transfer of information—either that, or the manner in which we compile clinical statistics is flawed in some way that we do not understand.  

Rhine labored intensively, and under the scrutiny of critics, to safeguard against every form of corruption in his data—so much so that his experiments far exceeded the controls of most of today’s clinical trials. Mathematician Warren Weaver (1894-1978), a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, who directed the allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars in medical research grants, examined Rhine’s methodology and concluded: “I cannot reject the evidence and I cannot accept the conclusions.” Weaver did not share Rhine’s views on ESP; but, as an authentic scientist, he refused to close the door on it. This is the attitude of skeptical engagement we need today.

Clinical Research on ESP Today

Clinical researchers including Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Daryl Bem of Cornell University currently continue this line of inquiry, and Rhine’s research center remains active as an independent facility.

Again: think back to a time when you experienced a deeply meaningful, emotionally charged concurrence of events, such as urgently needing to see someone who showed up at an uncannily propitious moment. Statistical tools can measure the odds of such an event, but they cannot fully capture the emotional import to one or more of the individuals involved, and hence the occurrence’s truly anomalous nature. Clinical ESP research, of the kind considered in The Other Side of the Mind, suggest that such events may be far more than happy accidents. They may be the ESP of daily life.

Hill took such prospects seriously, as his careful readers know. Reviewing this aspect of Hill’s broad catalogue of interests, as the authors do in this book, will deepen your appreciation for, and ability to benefit from, the master teacher’s ideas.

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Mitch Horowitz is a lecturer-in-residence at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, and the PEN Award-winning author of books including Occult Americaand The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality. Visit him @MitchHorowitz.