348 | 32 TURING AND THE PARANORmAl
laureate in physics—it had no academic affiliation. Indeed, in the view of their detractors, the
‘psychists’, as they were known, occupied the same fringe as the mediums and mind-readers
whose claims it sought to verify—or disclaim.
From the beginning the SPR struggled, not always successfully, to reconcile its advertised
objectivity with the vested interest in psychic phenomena that had driven its members to organ-
ize in the first place. Toward that end, it tended to err on the side of caution. Thus, in September
1883 its ‘Committee on thought transference’ undertook an experiment in the ‘transference
of tastes’ in which an examiner tasted various substances and then asked two subjects, young
women referred to as R and E, to identify the substances by telepathic means. When the exam-
iner tasted vinegar, E responded: ‘A sharp and nasty taste’. Port wine was described as having
a flavour ‘between eau de Cologne and beer’. Worcestershire sauce was Worcestershire sauce,
mustard was mustard.^4 No claims were made for this experiment, which was presented simply
as a set of findings. Detailed accounts of such efforts shared the pages of the SPR’s Proceedings
with unsparing exposés of fraud (most notably, the ‘phenomena’ attributed to Madame Helena
Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy) and statistical compilations such as the ‘Census of hal-
lucinations’, undertaken by Henry Sidgwick’s wife, Nora, a mathematician and later Principal
of Newnham College, Cambridge. The latter was in effect an international survey of what the
SPR termed ‘crisis apparitions’: dreams or fantasies of the death of a loved one that turned out,
in retrospect, to be premonitory.^5
Circles, rectangles, stars, crosses, and waves
As an academic field, parapsychology came into its own in 1930 with the establishment by
J. B. Rhine (1895–1980) of the Parapsychology Institute at Duke University in the United States.
Rhine had been obsessed with spiritualist phenomena since his youth, and in the early 1920s this
obsession carried him into the orbit of William MacDougall, another Cambridge-bred member
of the SPR, whom William James had recruited across the Atlantic to Harvard. Rhine’s earliest
investigations into the paranormal were not terribly successful. First he was disillusioned by
the famous psychic Marjory, then duped by a horse named Lady Wonder, which he claimed
in print to have telepathic abilities: in fact, the horse was responding to cues from her owner.^6
MacDougall moved to Duke University in 1927 and Rhine followed him. It was here that he per-
formed the first of his experiments in extra-sensory perception (ESP)—a term that he coined.
At this stage in the game, the position of ‘experimental psychology’, as the philosopher C. D.
Broad wrote in 1941, was akin to that^7
of a woman with a shady past who has at length, after a hard struggle, settled down to a respect-
able life and got on visiting terms with the doctor’s, the solicitor’s, the vicar’s, and even the squire’s
wife . . . She is fanatically determined to keep her hard-won respectability unsullied by the slight-
est breath of scandal. Physics, which has been honoured for centuries, can afford, like the scion
of some noble house, to throw her cap over the mills; but poor dear psychology feels that she
dare not take risks.
In Broad’s view, the route to an invitation to tea from the squire was through ‘precise statistical
treatment’, a point that Rhine also made when he wrote that parapsychology differed from
‘psychic research in the strictly experimental methods used in its procedure’.^8