Louisa E. Rhine

The publicity that followed her husband's 1934 monograph had an unintended consequence: strangers began writing to Duke to describe things that had happened to them. Louisa Rhine took charge of that correspondence and turned it into an ordered collection, sorting each account by the form the experience took rather than by how impressive it was. Her categories were simple and have been reused since: intuitive impressions with no imagery, hallucinatory experiences in which something was seen or heard, realistic dreams, and unrealistic or symbolic dreams.

Cross-cutting these she recorded whether the experience concerned a past event, a present one or a future one, and whether the person had acted on it. This let her ask questions no laboratory could ask, such as which form of experience most often carried accurate detail and which most often prompted the recipient to do something about it, and to notice that the great majority of reported cases concerned death, injury or crisis rather than anything trivial. The archive she built was the largest of its kind and remains at the Rhine Research Center. Its value was never the individual letter. It was the shape of the distribution across many thousands of them, which is a different kind of evidence from a controlled trial and, as she said repeatedly, a weaker one.

Louisa Rhine was unusually direct about the limits of her own material, and her stated position is the reason her work is still cited by people who reject her husband's conclusions. A spontaneous case, she argued, arrives already selected: the person writes because the experience seemed to come true, and nobody writes about the hunches that came to nothing, so the collection can never establish a rate. It is also a memory of an event, recorded after the outcome is known, and human memory reshapes a vague impression into a specific prediction with great efficiency once the answer is available. She did not treat these as objections to be answered but as the defining conditions of the material, and she said the collection could do only two things honestly: describe what people report, and suggest hypotheses for the laboratory to test under conditions where the selection and the hindsight are removed.

Critics have argued she still wrote as though the accumulation of cases carried some evidential weight of its own, and that the framing of her popular books, among them Hidden Channels of the Mind, invited readers to draw a conclusion her methodology forbade. That criticism has force. What the collection undoubtedly is, whatever one concludes about psi, is a very large body of ordinary people describing anomalous experience in their own words, gathered before the modern interview literature existed.