HBM075: The Weight of Science

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Social Sciences, Science, Documentary, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2017

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Anita Woodley went to the Rhine Research Center for scientific confirmation. Since childhood, she’d dreamt the future, able to predict imminent murders in her neighborhood. She prayed away her abilities for a period of her early adulthood, but they returned unexpectedly after the birth of her first child. Her psychic abilities troubled her. Going to the Rhine Center was her doctor’s suggestion. Her doctor said she wasn’t alone, that there were others with her gift.

The Rhine Research Center is America’s oldest parapsychology lab. It started in 1935 as the Duke Parapsychology Lab under the leadership of Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine. Dr. Rhine, a botanist with a growing fascination of psychics, turned his attention from plants and towards ESP. He devoted the rest of his life to legitimizing its study as a science.

Duke University severed its affiliation with the Rhine Center in 1965 when Dr. Rhine reached retirement age. The lab moved off campus and operates today as an independent non-profit.

John G Kruth, the Rhine Center’s Executive Director, breaks ESP down into five categories: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis and survival studies (persistence of self outside of the body).

While living, Dr. Rhine believed he found evidence for ESP. Other academics were skeptical. What’s not up for debate is that Anita Woodley and others like her feel validated to have the weight of science confirming their abilities.

Anita was given a test similar to a Ganzfeld Experiment. Also, she was tested for remote viewing abilities. She says that she scored highly. Due to the Rhine’s policy of not releasing records, we couldn’t confirm this.

We produced this episode in conjunction with Hi-Phi Nation, a story-driven philosophy podcast hosted by Barry Lam. This episode serves as the introduction to his series called Hackademics which looks into modern overreliance on statistical significance. Listen to Part One. Listen to Part Two.

Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at Vassar College and a visiting fellow at Duke University’s Story Lab.

Jeff Emtman edited this episode with help from Bethany Denton.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters.
0:05.0	It feels personal as if it actually happened to you.
0:16.3	And you know details.
0:21.0	These type of perminitions and things are like tracing paper. You know you got it right because when you put it on top, it's exactly there.
0:55.0	And it's it's it's real. There's a two-story brick building in an office park in Durham, North Carolina. In it is the Rhine Research Center. The Rhine Research Center sits just off the campus of Duke University.
0:59.0	And if you ask people why the Rhine Center is at an office park,
1:02.0	rather than inside the university, you'll get different answers.
1:06.6	My colleagues at Duke say that it's their off campus because what goes on at the Rhine Center
1:11.9	isn't really science.
1:13.8	They say that the Ryan Center's hocus pocus research
1:16.5	has no place at Duke.
1:18.7	But the Ryan researchers say something different.
1:21.5	They say that they were the victims of a shift in public
1:24.0	perception, a PR campaign waged by skeptics in their work who tarnished their
1:29.2	name and ignored their research, their science.
1:32.4	We're talking about and ignore their research, their science.
1:33.0	We're talking about telepathy, mind-to-mind communication.
1:37.0	We're talking about clairvoyance, which is getting information about objects from a distance.
1:42.0	Pre-Cognition, getting information through time, typically from the future.
1:47.0	Psychokinases, having an effect on physical objects from a distance, whether it be large objects,
1:54.6	like when we're saying large, like a pencil or a ball
1:58.9	or micro objects, which might be a electric road.
	...

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