- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
THE EXPERIENCE OF WILL
tHe ILLUsIon oF no WILL
In 1853 the new craze of spiritualism was spreading rapidly from the United
States to Europe (see Chapter 15). Mediums claimed that spirits of the dead,
acting through them, could convey messages and move tables. Appreciating the
challenge to science, and infuriated by public hysteria, the famous physicist and
chemist Michael Faraday (1853) investigated what was going on.
In a typical table-turning séance, several sitters sat around a table with their
hands resting on the top. Although they claimed only ever to press down, and
not sideways, the table would move about and spell out answers to questions.
They all said that the table moved their hands, not that their hands moved the
table. In an ingenious experiment, Faraday stuck pieces of card between the
sitters’ hands and the table top, using a specially prepared cement that allowed
the cards to move a little. Afterwards he could see whether the card had lagged
behind the table – showing that the table had moved first
as the sitters claimed – or had moved ahead of the table.
The answer was clear. The card moved ahead, so the force
came from the sitters’ hands. In further experiments, Far-
aday fixed up a visible pointer which revealed any hand
movements. When the sitters watched the pointer, ‘all
effects of table-turning cease, even though the parties
persevere, earnestly desiring motion, till they become
weary and worn out’ (Faraday, 1853, p. 802). Visual feed-
back sensitised the sitters to their muscular activity in a
way that proprioceptive feedback had not been able to.
He concluded that unconscious muscular action was the
only force involved.
Psychologist and magician Jay Olson (Olson et al., 2016)
explored a twenty-first-century version of the paranor-
mal in his ‘simulated thought insertion’ study. For the
‘Mind-Reading Task’, participants lay in a dummy brain
scanner and were told that the machine was part of a
‘Neural Activation Mapping Project’, and could read and
influence their thoughts. The scanner made realistic
noises, and a printer in the next room supposedly printed
out (along with lots of technical-looking but meaningless
statistics) the number they were thinking of, but with
occasional mistakes to make it seem more realistic. Par-
ticipants were convinced, and expressed surprise, amuse-
ment, confusion, or discomfort at the idea of the machine
reading their thoughts.
Next, for the ‘Mind-Influencing Task’, they were told that the machine would ran-
domly choose a number and try to influence them to select it, by manipulating
‘natural electromagnetic fluctuations in the brain’. Participants again believed in
the machine’s powers, some reporting having a hot face or feeling a pulsation
when the machine was influencing them, and others referring to an unknownFIGURE 9.7 • A spiritualist séance from 1853. In
table turning, or table tipping, the
sitters believed that spirits moved
the table and that their own hands
just followed. Faraday proved
that the movements were due to
unconscious muscular action.