The Subject Who Made the Numbers Work

Every experimental programme in this field has depended on a small number of unusually productive subjects, and at Duke in the early 1930s that person was Hubert Pearce. A divinity student who had come to Rhine's attention through an interest in his mother's reported second sight, he was tested from 1932 and returned hit rates on the twenty-five card decks that were high enough to carry the laboratory's published averages more or less by himself.

In the distance series with J. Gaither Pratt he scored while sitting in a different building, which was the result that made the Duke work internationally known. His performance was also noticeably sensitive to circumstance. It rose when he was interested and fell when he was bored, and after an incident in which a visitor announced an intention to prove him a fraud his scoring dropped to chance and, according to the laboratory's own account, never recovered. Rhine treated that pattern as a substantive finding about the fragility of the ability. Critics have treated it as the more ordinary pattern of a result that disappears when conditions tighten or when the subject stops trying whatever he was doing. Both readings are on the record and the atlas does not choose between them.