Telepathy

The teaching

As the Society for Psychical Research, from Myers and Gurney onwards teaches it.

The word

Telepathy, in Frederic Myers's own definition, is “the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense.” The word joins the Greek for far and for feeling. Myers chose it with care. What passes, in the cases the Society collected, is seldom a thought in words: it is more often an image, a feeling, a sudden conviction or an impulse to act. The older phrase, thought-reading, belonged in those years to the stage, where it meant something else.

That something else was muscle reading. A performer holding a spectator's wrist could find a hidden pin or follow a path through a hall by the tiny, unconscious movements of the person who knew where it was. The Society's first lesson was that no test of telepathy means anything while the two people can touch, see or hear each other.

Agent and percipient

The Society's terms are still in use. The agent is the person from whom an impression is held to come; the percipient is the one who receives it. In an experiment the agent concentrates on a target, a card, a number or a simple drawing, while the percipient, out of contact, tries to name or draw it. In a spontaneous case the agent is usually someone far away at a moment of crisis, who does nothing deliberately at all.

The forms an impression takes

The Society sorted its spontaneous cases by the form the impression took. Some came as dreams. Some came in what it called the borderland, the doubtful state between waking and sleep, as when a person lying in bed sees a figure at its foot. Some came fully awake, as a figure seen, a voice heard calling one's name, a touch felt. Others came as a sudden feeling or certainty that something was wrong, or as an impulse to act: to go home, to write, to turn back.

Some cases were collective, when two or more people saw or heard the same thing at once, and a few were reciprocal, when each of two people seemed to perceive the other at the same moment.

The crisis case

The heart of the collection is the crisis case. At about the moment when someone is dying, or hurt, or in great danger, a person close to them, far off and with no reason to fear for them, sees them, hears them or simply knows. Most of the Society's spontaneous cases were of this kind, and most of the crises were deaths. Hence the title of the founders' great book: the phantasms were of the living, or the dying, at the moment of their crisis.

The veridical hallucination

Edmund Gurney taught that the figure seen at such a moment is neither the dying person's body nor a ghost in the old sense, but a hallucination made by the percipient's own mind in answer to a telepathic impulse received below awareness. He called it a veridical hallucination: false as an appearance, true as a message. The impulse comes from the agent; the picture, the voice or the touch is the percipient's mind clothing it in the senses.

The rules of evidence

A case counted only if it met strict rules. The account had to be first-hand. The experience had to be told to someone, or written down, before news of the crisis arrived, and those who were told were asked to confirm it. The date and hour of the crisis had to be fixed independently, by a death notice, a letter or a record. The coincidence had to be close, and the Society took twelve hours from a death as its limit. And the percipient must not have had reason to fear for the person, since anxiety alone can make a mind see what it dreads.

The rules are worth keeping for any personal case today. Write the experience down at once, with the date and hour, and tell someone before any news comes. Keep the note even if nothing follows, since the cases that came to nothing belong in the count as much as the ones that seemed to fit.

Myers and the subliminal self

Myers built a wider doctrine on the cases. The waking self, he taught, is only part of the person; below its threshold lies a larger subliminal self, which can receive impressions the waking mind cannot. These rise into awareness by roundabout ways he called automatisms: sensory ones, such as visions, voices and dreams, and motor ones, such as sudden impulses and writing that seems to come of itself. That, in his view, is why telepathic impressions come so often in sleep, in reverie or in the borderland, when the threshold is low.

Thought transference at the table

The Society's experimental test was simple. The agent sits with a target chosen by chance, often a simple drawing, and concentrates on it, silent and still. The percipient sits apart, out of sight and hearing, in another room if possible, and draws or describes whatever comes. The two are then set side by side. The founders learned quickly that the precautions are everything: no contact, no sight of the agent, no sound, no hint from anyone who knows the target, and the percipient's record made before any comparison.

The ganzfeld

The modern form of the test is the ganzfeld, German for whole field. The receiver reclines with halved table tennis balls over the eyes in a soft red light and a steady hiss in headphones, so that the senses receive an even, featureless field. After a period of relaxation the receiver speaks aloud, for half an hour or so, every image and feeling that comes, while a sender in a distant room watches a picture or film clip chosen at random. Afterwards the receiver is shown four candidates and picks the one that fits best; by chance alone the pick is right one time in four.

The thinking behind the design is that telepathic impressions, if they exist, are faint, and that quieting the senses lets them be noticed.

When thoughts feel read

One experience must not be mistaken for telepathy. A feeling that others can hear or read one's thoughts, that thoughts are being put into one's mind or taken out of it, or that strangers know what one is thinking, is not a gift. It can be a sign of illness that a doctor should see, and help is available. If you feel your thoughts are being read, please see a doctor.