- seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
and special chairs from which they could
easily escape, even if sceptical observers
tied them to the chairs with ropes.
Even without any cheating, the traditional
darkened séance room provides ideal con-
ditions for complex interactions between
imagination and reality involving illu-
sions, hallucinations, motivated errors,
and criterion shifts. British sceptic and
parapsychologist Richard Wiseman recre-
ated similar conditions in fake séances in
which an actor suggested that a table was
levitating when it was not. Small objects
were painted with luminous paint and a
hidden assistant moved them about in
the darkness using a long stick. About a
third of participants reported afterwards
that the table had moved, including more
believers than disbelievers (Wiseman et al.,
2003).
Spiritualism was ignored by most scientists but appealed to people who felt
threatened by the materialism of Victorian physics and the radical new ideas of
Darwinism that seemed to undermine the special status of humanity. After all, if
spirits of the dead could appear and speak, then materialism must be false. (See
the website for more on the paranormal in the 19th century.)
It was in this context that, in London in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research
(SPR) was founded by a small group of highly respected scientists and scholars
to examine these and other claims of psychic phenomena, and one of their first
achievements was the Census of Hallucinations. Researchers asked 17,000 people:Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had
a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or
inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you
could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?When obvious cases of illness and dreaming were ruled out, 1,684 (almost 10%)
said they had, and thousands of cases were published. Women reported more
hallucinations than men, and visual hallucinations were most common, especially
visions of a living person. Among the many hallucinations of named people, far
more than could be expected by chance occurred within 12 hours either side of
that person’s death. It seemed to be evidence ‘that the mind of one human being
has affected the mind of another, without speech uttered, or word written, or sign
made; – has affected it, that is to say, by other means than through the recognised
channels of sense’ (Gurney et al., 1886, p. xxxv). Fifty years later, the psychical
researcher Donald West (1948) found similar prevalence results, but unlike the
original SPR survey, he found no convincing evidence for telepathy.In the 1980s, the Launay-Slade Hallucination Scale was developed, and several
surveys found large numbers of healthy people reporting experiences usually‘Among those
implications none can
be more momentous
than the light thrown
by this discovery [of
telepathy] upon man’s
intimate nature and
possible survival of
death.’
(Myers, 1903, i, p. 8)
FIGURE 14.2 • In the heyday of spiritualism
mediums were tied up inside a
‘cabinet’ while the ladies and
gentlemen watched. In a deep
trance, they claimed to exude
ectoplasm from various orifices
of the body and so create fully
formed spirits that could move
around the room, touching the
astounded sitters and even
answering their questions.