Rhine Opens a Lab at Duke and Gives Psychical Claims a Laboratory

Parapsychology is the controlled study of claimed paranormal phenomena, telepathy, precognition and related effects, establishing what a rigorous experimental test of a specific claim actually found and whether the result has been replicated by others. The American researcher Joseph Banks Rhine founded the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University in 1930, moving the study of claimed extrasensory perception out of anecdotal case collection and into standardized, statistically scored card guessing experiments conducted under controlled conditions, and launched the field's own peer reviewed outlet, the Journal of Parapsychology, in 1937.

A claimed paranormal or psychic ability tied to a religious or spiritual practice, precognitive dreams, telepathic communication with the divine, remote healing, is exactly the kind of claim Rhine's laboratory method is built to test under conditions that rule out chance, coincidence and unconscious cueing. The atlas relies on parapsychology wherever a tradition's claim of paranormal ability has actually been subjected to controlled testing, reporting what the experimental literature found rather than either the tradition's own account or a blanket dismissal that was never tested at all.