Claude M. Bristol and the Metaphysics of Success

In The Magic of Believing, Bristol’s more developed book, self-help readers encountered topics that are rarely held in high repute today: ESP, telepathy, and telekinesis, among them. When I recently abridged and narrated The Magic of Believing,  I made the decision to retain this material—and I did not do so lightly. As I’ve written in One Simple Idea, my own analysis of the positive-thinking movement, I believe that many journalists and academics today have failed to understand, or even attain basic familiarity with, the experiments to which Bristol refers, particularly those conducted by ESP researcher J.B. Rhine at Duke University beginning in the early 1930s.