1. The discovery that finger reading can be trained
Psi abilities have always dazzled us and left us envious. Jesus casting out demons and healing the sick, walking on the sea, turning water into wine, feeding five thousand with a few loaves. The Buddha's six supernormal powers — psychic travel, the divine eye, the divine ear, knowledge of others' minds, knowledge of past lives, and the extinction of the outflows — amounting to the freedom to roam through space and time, to transform anything, to pass through any obstacle. The immortals and perfected ones of the Daoist tradition, Lü Dong-Bin and Zhang San-Feng among them, sending out the yin spirit and the yang spirit through the barriers of space. We also take it for granted that such gifts belong to a vanishingly small number of people, and that the rest of us can only look on and sigh. Yet in 1979 that assumption was broken by Chen Shou-Liang — then Director of Academic Affairs at Peking University and an associate professor of biology — and his wife, Associate Professor He Mu-Yan.
In August 1978 they met two young girls in Beijing who could read written characters with their ears, and careful testing satisfied them that the ability was genuine. They then looked closely at the girls' health, temperament, schoolwork and everything else, and found nothing unusual about them. So, together with Associate Professor Wang Chu of Peking University's radio electronics department and colleagues from other departments — eight teachers in all — they formed a research group and spent their spare hours discussing the phenomenon at length. They ran experiments with Chen Shou-Liang's younger daughter, and after several sessions the ability appeared in her. They then tested her classmates and the neighbors' children, with results just as exciting. When Prof. Chen Shou-Liang mentioned all this to his old classmate Huang at the Shanghai Institute of Brain Research, Huang suggested that perhaps the ability was not confined to a few people after all — a remark that set Prof. Chen thinking. He went on to run what was the first induction training of its kind at Peking University, and among 40 children aged 5 to 12, 40% developed the ability, which he took as evidence that psi abilities are far more widespread than anyone had assumed. It was a landmark experiment in the history of science, and one that will surely be remembered.
2. Confirming what Prof. Chen Shou-Liang found
I have admired Prof. Chen Shou-Liang since I began my own finger-reading experiments before 1993, but for a long time there was no chance to meet him. Later, during the four years from 1996 when I worked with Prof. Shen Jin-Chuan and Ms. Sun Chu-Lin at the Institute of Human Body Science of the China University of Geosciences, I heard he was rather severe, that he had never approved of the term "human body science" for psi abilities, and that he had already retired — so I set the idea of calling on him aside. From 1996 I ran a finger-reading training class every summer, four days at a time, two hours a day, with children aged 7 to 13, and the results bore out Prof. Chen's finding. Counting up to 2004, across nine classes and 176 children, 40 developed finger reading. That is around 24% — lower than his figure, but again showing how widely the capacity is distributed.
3. Meeting Prof. Chen Shou-Liang
In November 2001 the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California invited me to an international conference in Hawaii, with scholars from the United States, Japan, mainland China and Taiwan. The Japanese, mainland Chinese and Taiwanese researchers were mostly working on the effects of emitted qi in qigong and on psi abilities, while the American researchers were mostly on distance healing, physiological measurement in alternative medicine, and the action of emitted qi on cells. When I saw that Prof. Chen Shou-Liang and his wife were also on the guest list, I could hardly contain myself. On the opening day I spotted them from across the room — both well into their seventies by then, and looking exactly as they had on television in the 1990s. I hurried over to introduce myself, and to my surprise Prof. Chen was warm and easy, chatting away as though we were old acquaintances meeting after years apart, not severe in the least. My impression of him had clearly been wrong. It turned out he had long known of the research I did in the 1990s, and since I was then Dean of Academic Affairs at National Taiwan University — the same post he had held at Peking University — we felt an immediate kinship. It reminded me of a Peking University delegation that visited National Taiwan University in 1998, which I looked after. When they learned I was studying finger reading they found it most peculiar: how had the deans of academic affairs at both universities ended up researching psi abilities? Kindred minds, I suppose.
Prof. Chen's paper reported newer results, on residual information among other things, and made a convincing case. He and his wife had retired without stopping work, and were still carrying on their research into psi abilities; their findings are held in high regard by their Peking University colleagues to this day.
