4 - Telepathy, Twins, And Tuning Mental Radios

At about 4:00 P.M. on July 1, 1951, Mrs. Frances Wall had just finished bathing and setting her hair and had lain down on the bed to read until her husband returned from an outing at the park.

She had begun to doze off when she suddenly heard her husband's voice cry out in anguish: "Frances, come to the park. I'm drowning!"

His voice was so loud and distinct that Mrs. Wall thought at first that it had come from the apartment. She sat up, stunned, trying to clear her head.

"Please, Frances, please hurry!"

Sickened by the sudden realization that something dreadful was happening to her husband, Mrs. Wall hurried to put on a robe and ran from the apartment. When she was halfway to the lake in the park, she could see a crowd gathering near the shore. She knew without going a step further that her husband had drowned.

On May 19, 1931, a nurse reported a similar telepathic crisis linkage for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Shortly before she was to go on night duty, Miss Margaret Jones was awakened by a voice calling: "Margaret, Margaret." She had a distinct impression that someone rushed into her room and back out again.

Puzzled, she got out of bed and looked down the corridor. There was no one in sight. Not being able to determine any reason for alarm, Miss Jones began to get dressed. It must have been a maid who had awakened her for duty, she thought. But she was still mystified, especially in view of the fact that no one at the hospital had ever called her by her first name.

When she finally looked at her clock, she saw that she had been awakened at 5:30 A.M. As the night nurses were not usually awakened until 7:30, Miss Jones sat down on her bed completely baffled.

Later, while she was on duty, Miss Jones received a telegram that informed her that her niece had passed away at 5:30 A.M. When she went to be with her sister in her sorrow, she learned that the child had suddenly taken ill, and although an immediate operation had been performed, she had only lived for a few hours. As she lay dying, the child had called out: "Margaret, Margaret."

These two cases bear out the contention that telepathy (and ESP in general) functions best between individuals who have a strong emotional link. This particular level of man's mind seems to operate best spontaneously, especially when a crisis situation makes it necessary to communicate through other than the standard sensory channels.

Parapsychologists have long been aware that twins show unusually high telepathic rapport. A series of tests conducted by psychologists at the University of Alberta, Canada, confirmed this theory by establishing statistical evidence that identical twins, and to a lesser extent, fraternal twins, have remarkable ability to communicate with one another through ESP.

At the behest of Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University, Mrs. Olivia Rivers, a psychologist at Mississippi State University, conducted tests with identical twins, Terry and Sherry Young. The pretty Jackson, Mississippi, twins were able to pass entire sentences to each other via telepathy. The girls seemed to be in constant rapport and even when separated, each knew if the other had turned an ankle, got a, toothache, or developed a cold. Sherry was better as the receiver, Terry as the sender.

Their school-teachers despaired of ever receiving an accurate test from either girl. Even when placed in separate classrooms the girls still used similar phrases and got similar marks. They made no secret of the fact that they helped one another in their school work, but insisted that it was by telepathy alone. It was not cheating to them, nor could anyone consider it as being unfair or dishonest of the girls. It was not their fault if their minds functioned as one.

In an article by Jhan and June Robbins, "Can Twins Read Each Others' Minds?" which appeared in the January 28, 1962, issue of This Week, Dr. Robert Sommer is quoted as saying: "Identical twins obviously share the closest possible relationship that can embrace two human beings. They actually started out as a single individual - and they have the same mental and physical attributes."

Dr. Sommer and his associates studied several twins whose ages ranged from 16 to 50. Their interviews disclosed that fully one-third of the twins had had "psi" experiences with their "other halves."

Occasionally a strange case comes to light where twins have separated at birth, grow up unaware that they even have a twin, yet, when confronted with their "double" several years later, are amazed that their lives have ostensibly followed one path.

The Tacoma, Washington, News Tribune, January 12, 1959, carried one such incredible story.

Margaret Judson, who grew up in Vancouver, was repeatedly baffled whenever, as a member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps, she was sent to Toronto. Here people persisted in calling her "Marion" and told her that she had a double living in that city. After her term of service, Margaret returned to Toronto, determined to track down her alleged duplicate.

When "Margaret" at last faced "Marion" across the counter of a department store, they were both wearing similar brown suits. Startled at being confronted with their mirror-image, the women soon determined over 21 astonishing parallels in their lives. They, had been born twins in Toronto in 1924 and put out for adoption. Neither had ever been told that she had a twin sister. In the same month that Margaret had joined the CWAC, Marion had tried to join up but had failed.

Both had been expert roller skaters in their teens. They had, in their geographically separated but psychically united lives, both taken piano lessons, sung alto in church choirs, had their tonsils removed in the same year. They had both married sailors who were the same age, size, weight, and build, who had been in the service four years, and had decided upon the navy as a career.

When they met in the department store, they had been wearing similar brown suits. As a weird capper, the next time that they met, both women wore identical plaid skirts and similar heart-shaped lockets, which had been gifts from their foster mothers on their 21st birthdays!

Daily newspapers repeatedly carry stories of twins who have received identical injuries at the same time. I once knew twin sisters who even bore identical skin blemishes as they progressed through puberty.

A Chicago telephone company employee, unaware that he had a twin, had been called "Fred" by strangers often enough to arouse his curiosity. His parents admitted that he had been an adopted son and had an identical twin. He found his twin in Topeka, Kansas where both men were astonished to learn that they were both employed by Bell Telephone, had married in the same year to girls of a similar nature and type. In addition to having received the same kind of education in homes of similar background and having married women of the same general type, each had a four-year-old son and a fox terrier named Trixie.

Experiments with twins are offering "psi" researchers their greatest proofs of telepathy. These astonishing demonstrations have done much to break down the intellectual resistance built up by many physical scientists and have opened the door for the tentative acceptance of other "psi" phenomena into the domain of accepted knowledge.

Remarkable experiments have also been conducted with primitive peoples to test the hypothesis that telepathy is an archaic means of communication, which, although remaining as a vestigial function of mind, was once the sole method for conveying ideas.

It has been observed that the primitive bushmen in Australia can accurately transmit thoughts, feelings, and ideas to friends and relatives several miles away. They also use "psi" abilities to locate missing objects, straying cattle, and thieving enemies. The bushmen live a Stone Age existence. Their normal sensory abilities have been heightened by their struggle for survival. Their eyes can identify objects at great distances without the aid of field glasses. Their powers of smell are probably on a par with that of a sensitive collie. Their ESP talents are even more remarkable.

Dr. A.P. Elkin, an anthropologist from Sydney University, was forced to re-arrange some of his scientific thinking after he had conducted some studies among the bushmen. In his Aboriginal Men of High Degree, Dr. Elkin writes that although his arrival was never announced by messenger, drums, or smoke signals, each village was prepared for his arrival, knew where he had just come from, and was aware of the purpose of his wilderness trek.

Whenever the anthropologist heard of a case where a native claimed to have gained personal information telepathically from a faraway village, subsequent investigation proved the knowledge to be accurate. Whether the information concerned a dying parent, the birth of a nephew, or the victory of a successful hunt, the recipients' knowledge of the event was completely in accordance with the actual happening.

Dr. Elkin was told: "Thoughts, though invisible, can be sent flying through the air."

In controlled experiments, Sydney University psychologist Lyndon Rose found that the Australian bushmen consistently averaged better than fifty per cent correct in dice guessing tests. In one particularly impressive test, the psychologists placed a cigarette into a tightly sealed box. Three bushmen were asked to guess what the box contained. One slightly more sophisticated than the others, promptly told the researchers that the box contained a cigarette. The other two guessed that the box contained "tobacco and paper."

To increase the difficulty of the experiment, a cigarette holder was placed in the box and ten natives were chosen at random to guess the contents. Admitted separately to a sealed hut, the aborigines quickly responded to the challenge placed before them by the psychologists. Although none of them had never seen a cigarette holder before, nine of them precisely described the shape, length, and color of the unknown object.

Such field work is fascinating and is certainly in keeping with the best scientific tradition, especially in such areas as geology, botany, and biology. However, because so many reluctant members of the scientific establishment look askance at such findings, it behooves the parapsychologist to set up a number of tedious statistical tests in an effort to provide the skeptics with controlled and repeatable experiments. The most common of these tests consists of a series of card-guessing experiments.

The standard Zener, or ESP, cards consist of a deck of 25 cards, five each of five different symbols: a cross, a square, a circle, a star, and a pair of wavy lines. In The Mind Readers: Some Recent Experiments in Telepathy, Dr. S.G. Soal tells how a "psi" researcher evaluates such statistics. Although Dr. Soal grew weary of the standard designs and made a deck of his own consisting of five sets of brightly colored animals, the mathematical procedure is, of course, exactly the same.

"If the cards are well mixed," Dr. Soal tells us, "we should expect that an ordinary person who guesses through the pack would, on the average, make 5 correct guesses."

The parapsychologist is quick to point out that this assumes "that the guesser is not told whether his individual guess is right until he has finished his 25 guesses." It is apparent that if this precaution were not followed, an, alert subject could quite easily keep count of the number of times that a particular symbol had turned up and adjust his subsequent guesses accordingly.

"When we say that the average score is 5/25," Dr. Soal continues, "this does not mean that a person with no telepathic ability will guess exactly 5 cards correctly every time. Generally he will get more or fewer than 5 cards right. But if he does the experiment say 30 times, adds up all his scores and divides the total by 30 the figure he arrives at will usually be very close to 5, say 5.3 or 4.7, and the more packs he runs through the closer his average score will approximate 5.

"It follows, therefore, that in a total of N guesses one would expect on the average to make N/5 'hits' or 'successes.' Thus if one guessed through 8 packs of cards, i.e., 200 trials, one would expect on an average to guess one-fifth, i.e., 40 of them correctly."

Statisticians term this average number, N/5, the "mean chance expectation." If instead of an average score of 40/200, a man scored 60 or 70, the difference between his actual score and the "expected" or "average" score is called the "deviation." The larger the deviation from the average score, the less likely it is that the high score is a mere chance fluctuation.

But the parapsychologist cannot rest his case by saying that this impressive, deviation from chance has occurred. He must play the statisticians' game to the limit and compare this actual score with a figure known as the "standard deviation." Actual deviation over standard deviation gives the statistician the "critical ratio." The larger the critical ratio, or CR, the more likely that the deviation is due not to "chance" but to some cause, known or unknown.

Soal gives an example in which a subject hypothetically scores 64, or a CR of 4.2. The researcher's final step is to look up the CR on a normal probability table in order to determine what the "odds" are that this score is due to something other than chance.

According to Dr. Soal, "Consulting this ... we find that for CR - 4.0 the odds against chance are 15,770 to 1; for CR - 4.5 the odds are 147,190 to 1. So that for CR - 4.2 we can obtain a very rough interpolation, odds of about 50,000 to 1 against getting a numerical value of the CR as high as 4.2.

"This, of course, for all human purposes is fairly conclusive that some 'cause' other than 'chance' has been at work in our experiment."

The results of such exacting and exhausting laboratory experimentation have not been as conclusive as parapsychologists have hoped, nor, as we have previously mentioned, are the demonstrations of laboratory "psi" as dramatic as spontaneous ESP. Accumulated evidence has indicated, however, that telepathy is a talent, which nearly everyone has to a certain degree, and that it is a talent, like that of painting or singing, which can be developed with training and practice.

Although we shall deal with the testing and development of one's extrasensory abilities in a later chapter, we should mention here that any two people can arrange a series of elementary tests which can be conducted between them in an effort to determine their telepathic talents. Zener "ESP" cards are not difficult to obtain for card-guessing experiments. Another simple test is that of "transmitting" sketches. Designate yourselves as "agent" and "percipient" and seat yourselves at tables in separate rooms.

The agent draws a picture at a previously agreed upon time, numbers it, then concentrates upon his sketch. The percipient, who is sitting with his blank sheet of paper, tries to put himself in as relaxed a mood as possible and in as receptive a state of mind as possible. When he feels that he has received an impression from the agent, the percipient sketches his interpretation of whatever has come to his mind. After a previously agreed upon time and number of transmissions have been achieved, the agent and percipient rejoin one another and compare the results.

An interesting aspect of this test may be noticed. It may happen that as the agent is concentrating upon his sketch, his mind may wander to a subject which has a greater emotional attraction for him. Therefore, the agent may have drawn a sketch of a bird, but the percipient may have sketched that diamond ring which the agent is wondering whether or not to purchase for his sweetheart.

In 1930, the novelist Upton Sinclair published a record of experiments in telepathically transmitted draw-ings, which had been conducted with his wife and his brother-in-law, R. I. Irwin.

Mrs. Sinclair was always the percipient, and when Irwin was the agent, he "transmitted" from over forty miles away. The agent would make a set "of drawings of such simple items as a nest with eggs, a flower, a tree, and enclose each sketch in an opaque envelope. At the agreed upon time, or later, Mrs. Sinclair would lie down on a couch and allow her mind and body to enter a state of complete relaxation. Experience soon taught her that other levels of mind would attempt to "guess" the sketch and thereby often confuse the true information which would come from a deeper level of authentic knowledge.

Mrs. Sinclair commented that for best results in such tests, one must develop the ability to hold in consciousness, without any sense of strain, a single idea, such as the petal of a flower. Association trains must not be allowed to develop, and, above all, no thinking about the idea must take place. A completely relaxed state of body and mind must be achieved.

It is difficult to measure the success of such tests with drawings, because often an idea associated with the drawing would come across rather than the actual sketch. In the Sinclair experiments of 290 drawings, 65 were judged successes, 155 partial successes, and 70 were failures.

Professor William McDougall said of the Sinclairs' experiments with their "mental radio," "The degree of success and the conditions of experiment were such that we can reject them as conclusive evidence of some mode of communication not at present explicable in accepted scientific terms, only by assuming that Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair either are grossly stupid, incompetent, and careless persons, or have deliberately entered upon a conspiracy to deceive the public."

My wife and I had an interesting experience with the spontaneous operation of our own "mental radios."

One morning I lay abed lightly dozing while my wife arose for a few minutes of peaceful contemplation before the children awakened. Being an avid follower of basketball, she picked up the sports pages and began to scan the results of a recent game. At the same moment, I had a visual image of sports copy as if the lines were coming across on some sort of teletype. Next, my "inner eye" swept a picture of action on the basketball court, then read the cutline beneath the photo. This was doubly strange to me, because while I sometimes glance at the results of an occasional football game, I follow only the progress of our local college basketball team.

When I got out of bed, I entered the living room and saw my wife curled up on the davenport reading the newspapers. I turned my back at once and asked her to turn to the sports section. When she assured me that she had, I then told her that I would "read" the story in the upper left-hand column. I recited as much of the sports copy as I could recall, then skipped to the picture and described the action in great detail. The cutline was especially vivid in my mind, and I proceeded to repeat it and as many of the other headlines scattered about the page as I could remember.

When I asked my wife to substantiate my recitation, she told me that my "reading" had been substantially correct. I had not, of course, repeated the story word for word, but my description of the photo was exact, even to the jersey numbers of the basketball players. My reading of the cutline had been almost letter perfect.

While we have not been able to effect such a dramatic transmission of information via the mental radio since that accidental broadcast, I should stress the point that the conditions on that particular morning were ideal. I lay in bed, not in a deep sleep, but in that completely relaxed moment before one truly awakens and begins a new day. This is the time when I find that the door to the deeper levels of my subconscious swings on well-oiled hinges - when I am in this almost somnambulistic state. Subsequent experimentations have been marred by too much conscious effort and physical distractions.

In 1924, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, a prominent "psi" researcher, described a series of experiments conducted between 1910 and 1915 by Professor Gilbert Murray, of Oxford, and his daughter, Mrs. Arnold Toynbee, as "the most important ever brought to the notice of the Society for Psychical Research, both on account of their frequently brilliant success and on account of the eminence of the experimenter."

The procedure followed by Professor Murray is another that anyone interested in testing his own powers of telepathy can follow quite easily. Murray would leave the room and go out of earshot. Someone in the room - generally the Professor's eldest daughter, Mrs. Toynbee - would think of some scene or incident (or anything actually that came to her mind) and say it aloud so that the others in the room might hear it. The "thought" would be written down and Professor Murray would be summoned.

Upon returning to the room, Professor Murray would take hold of his daughter's hand and then proceed to describe in detail what had been described. "Psi" researchers have often noticed that a percipient's mind will respond much better to one agent than another and will also respond better in pleasant and warm surroundings. The Oxford professor was no exception to the general rule that a person gifted with ESP will perform more effectively when there is no hostility or skepticism present among the witnesses. Murray told the Society:

"The least disturbance of our customary method, change of time or place, presence of strangers, controversy and especially noise, is apt to make things go wrong. I become myself somewhat over-sensitive and irritable ...

"When I am getting at the thing which I wish to discover, the only effort I make is a sort of effort of attention of a quite general kind. The thing may come through practically any sense channel, or it may discover a road of its own, a chain of reasoning or of association, which, as far as I remember, never coincides with any similar chain in the mind of anyone present, but is invented, for the purpose of the moment."

Let us witness a few examples from one series of experiments conducted by Professor Murray on a particular evening.

After he has left the room, Mrs. Toynbee rises to act as agent. She tells the group that she is thinking of her infant son, Tony, and of Helena Cornford's infant daughter and that both children are grown up and walking beside the river at Cambridge. Certainly this "thought" deals with concepts decidedly more difficult than a "bright red ball," or "a nest with eggs in it."

Professor Murray is brought back into the room. His daughter tells him that she is the agent, and he takes her by the hand.

"This is not a book," he says after a moment. "It's got a sort of Cambridge feel in it. It's the Cornfords somehow. No, it's a girl walking beside the river, but it isn't Mrs. Cornford. Oh! It's baby Cornford grown up!"

"Who is she with?" his daughter prods.

"No," Murray shakes his head, "I don't get who she is with. No, I should only be guessing."

"Go on!" insist the assembled friends in the room.

"No," Murray smiles. "I should only think of another baby grown up - Tony."

In another experiment, Mrs. Toynbee announced that she was thinking of a real friend, Rupert Brooke, meeting the fictional character Natascha, heroine of Tolstoy's novel, War and Peace, and that Natascha was running through a wood and wearing a yellow dress.

As soon as Professor Murray grasped his daughter's hand, he said: "Well, I thought when I came into the room it was about Rupert. Yes, it's fantastic. He's meeting somebody out of a book. He's meeting Natascha in War and Peace. I don't know what he is saying - perhaps 'Will you run away with me?' "

"Can't you get the scene?"

"I should say it was in a wood."

"What color is Natascha's dress?"

"No, I can't get it."

Critics of Professor Murray's tests protested that hyper-acute hearing could account for his astonishing success at "reading" the thoughts of the various agents. Although Murray was escorted to a room far enough removed from the test room to convince all but the most dogged skeptics that he could not possibly have overheard any of the announced thoughts, "psi" researchers admitted the possibility of Murray passing into a state of hyperaesthesia that may have allowed him to catch the rhythm of a sentence, but not the complete idea. Granted that in some cases Murray (whose ordinary hearing was judged to be normal) might have developed, some super-sonic hearing, hyperaesthesia can hardly be accepted as a general explanation of Murray's high rate of success in the experiments. There were, for example, many instances in which the professor received correct impressions of things that had not been mentioned by the agent in stating the "thought" to be transmitted.

Once Mrs. Toynbee named the scene in the novel Greenmantle in which a German peasant woman takes the principals in out of a snowstorm.

Professor Murray entered the room, touched Mrs. Toynbee's hand, and said that the scene was from literature, but from some book that he himself had not read. "It's a snowstorm," he went on. "It's somebody - I think it is a peasant woman giving shelter to a spy ... I think it's a German peasant woman. The spy is an Englishman. I think it is a book of adventure."

The fact that the hero of Greenmantle is both an Englishman and a spy had not been mentioned when Mrs. Toynbee announced the thought that would be transmitted.

In other cases, Professor Murray seemed to get at the idea via a sensory impression. During one session, Patrick Murray announced that in his role as agent he would think of "the lion in the zoo trying to reach a large piece of meat just outside the cage."

When the professor was summoned and took hold of Patrick's hand, he declared: "A sort of smell of wild animals - carnivorous annuals. Something grabbing through bars at a piece of meat at a zoo. Don't know the animal."

Again, even though Professor Murray did not get an image of the particular animal involved in the thought, he received a distinct impression of the action of the thought and even a sense of the smell characteristic of the zoo.

Rene Warcollier, a chemical engineer who has been president of the Institut Metapsychique since 1950, experimented with telepathic sketch transmissions for over ten years. Enlisting the aid of a number of friends, Warcollier scattered various duos about Paris, designating one as agent, the other as percipient. Although a line by line duplication of the agent's drawings occurred in only a small percentage of the experiments, Warcollier and his friends concluded that more than half of the trials produced meaningful responses.

In addition to re-emphasizing the establishment of telepathy as a genuine phenomenon, they noticed a number of interesting aspects of this particular "psi" function. They discovered, for example, that motion played a major part in the telepathic transmission of the drawings. Often what came through was not an exact photographic duplicate of the agent's original, but an image that had been rearranged into a new pattern. A square, for instance, may have come across as four scattered right angles.

Warcollier's experimenters also determined that pictures with strong emotional content were more readily perceived than those of abstract or intellectual concept. No image seemed to be instantly received by the percipients. In some cases, several minutes would pass before the idea would intrude into consciousness.

Experiments have been conducted with individuals who have been placed in hypnotic trance and told that they have telepathic rapport with each other.

On the evening of April 17, 1958, Hyman Arthur Lewis, Director of the Michigan Hypnosis Institute and a Fellow of the American Society for Psychical Research, headed a test involving Geraldine Ann Glaser, 20, and Robert Topolevski, 35. Topolevski is also an accomplished hypnotist.

Separated by approximately sixty feet, the subjects Were placed in hypnotic trance. Robert was told that he was able to open his eyes but was instructed to remain in trance. He was handed paper and a pen and told to visualize any picture that came to his mind and to draw it on the paper. After he had sketched an object, he was asked to stare at the picture. The hypnotist, Don Meyers, then told him that he was capable of transmitting this visual image to Geraldine Ann.

After Robert had begun to concentrate on the sketch, Meyers signaled Lewis, who was with Miss Glaser, to prepare the woman to receive Robert's telepathic impulse. Lewis told the hypnotized Miss Glaser that she was in direct rapport with Robert and that she would receive an impression from him that she should draw on the paper before her.

During the course of the experiment, which lasted about an hour and a half, several drawings of astonishing similarity were produced by the couple who had been placed in hypnotic rapport.

Laboratory tests have indicated a number of interesting facts concerning the conditions under which telepathy - and, in general, all testable "psi" phenomena - work.

Distance seems to have no effect on telepathy or clairvoyance. Equally remarkable results have been achieved when the percipient was a yard away from the agent or when the experimenters were separated by several hundred miles. Dr. S.G. Soal, the British researcher who has conducted extensive tests with "mind-readers," has written:

"In telepathic communication it is personality, or the linkage of personalities, which counts, and not spatial separation of bodies. This is what we might expect on the assumption that brains have spatial location and spatial extension, but that minds are not spatial entities at all.

"If this is true then there is no sense in talking about the distance between two minds, and we must consider brains as focal points in space at which Mind produces physical manifestations in its inter-action with matter."

"Psi" researchers have learned that the percipient's attitude is of great importance in achieving high ESP scores. Personalities do enter into "psi" testing even as they do into other aspects of human relationships. A cheerful, informal atmosphere that is as un-laboratory-like as possible, encourages the successful functioning of ESP. It has also been demonstrated that those who "believe" in their "psi" powers score consistently higher than those skeptics who regard it all as a lot of nonsense.

Although the agent in the laboratory must be careful to create and foster a friendly and cheerful atmosphere, spontaneous "psi" seems to work best under conditions which Dr. Jan Ehrenwald terms a "state of psychological inadequacy." Naming this state of "psi" readiness the "minus function," Dr. Ehrenwald believes that "a necessary condition for telepathic functioning is a state of inadequacy or deficiency such as loss or clouding of consciousness (sleep, hypnosis, trance, fever, brain defects)."

The "psi" researcher faces another risk in the laboratory when he is engaged in the long-term testing of a percipient: the decline effects in ESP that can be brought on by sheer boredom in the method of testing. The exercise of "psi" ability does sap psychic energy and even excellent performers invariably score higher when they are fresh. Once the novelty of the test has worn off, the interests of the percipient wander elsewhere, and so, apparently, does his ESP. Once again one is reminded of the difficulty of forcing "psi" into the laboratory in strenuous attempts to satisfy orthodox science's demand for controlled and repeatable experiments.

It is interesting to note that, on the average, a man is more effective as an agent and a woman is more effective as the percipient. This seems to apply to spontaneous instances of telepathy and other functions of "psi" as well as to roles assumed under laboratory conditions. Laboratory tests also demonstrate that percipients often achieve better results if the agent is of the opposite sex. Perhaps this is one more indication that "psi" is a fundamental and natural force that must be included in any total concept of man and his world.