Telepathy Stimulus
Telepathy Response
The references to telepathy in the novel are not fiction, except that I attributed these abilities, which I myself had demonstrated, to my character, Merlin Zauber.
The fact is, I once had the honor of serving as the principal subject for research leading to a master's thesis in psychology at the University of Florida. The title of the thesis reads thus:
An Examination of Telepathy on Symbolic, Cognitive, Unconscious, and Empathic Levels, as It Occurs in the Psychically Gifted Subject Dr. Robert J. R. Rockwood
The graduate psychology student who wrote the thesis, Sharon Marie Smolenyak, had taken an advanced composition course that I taught for graduate students preparing to write a master's thesis or a doctoral dissertation. To liven up the class and get the students' attention I used to do impromptu telepathy demonstrations. After class one day Ms. Smolenyak asked me if I would be willing to serve as the subject for a thesis on telepathy, assuming her thesis committee would approve the topic. I told her I would, but it would have to be based on something more substantial than traditional ESP cards. (The ESP deck was designed at the Duke University Parapsychology Department. It consisted of a deck of cards with five cards each containing a straight line, a wavy line, a square, a circle, and a star.)
Several weeks later Ms. Smolenyak told me that the committee had approved the thesis topic, and had suggested art prints as possible targets, since the University had 8000 art prints in its slide collection. I felt very comfortable about using art prints. Art has affect and elicits the viewer's emotional response. Emotions, even aesthetic emotions, transmit very easy, so I knew this would be "a piece of cake." Had the committee decided that the tests should include something more challenging, such as communicating with the dead or publicly levitating, I guess I would have gone along with that, too, but I felt relieved that the targets would only be art slides viewed through a hand-held viewer.
The protocol for the telepathy experiments was simple. Everything was done in the psychology building on campus. We would meet about three evenings a week for about an hour or so. Very skeptical psychology professors would scrutinize the experiments. The sender would sit on one side of the building in a closed room being observed through one-way glass. I would sit in a similar room on the other side of the building. Sometimes the sender selected the target slide, sometimes it was selected at random. When a red light came on, the sender was to concentrate on the target for five minutes. At the same time a red light would come on in my room, I would stare at the blank white card in my hand until an image popped into my mind. I would sketch what I "saw." Focusing on the sender, I would put my mind "in neutral." The response normally came within seconds after the red light had come on, and within a minute I had drawn something on the card. After awhile, it became obvious that five minutes was far too long, so the time for the sender to concentrate was eventually reduced to two minutes.
Below I show you the results of three typical experiments. Two of the stimulus targets were prints of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani and another by Pablo Picasso. Both were expatriates living in Paris, who were good friends and almost exact contemporaries. Modigliani was Italian, and Picasso was Spanish. The third stimulus target was a picture postcard from Switzerland.
The first telepathic experiment discussed in the thesis involved Modigliani's Jeanne Hebuterne. I will show it as follows. In the left cell of the table below is a color version of the painting from www.allposters.com/-sp/Jeanne-Hebuterne_i291087_.htm. In the right cell is a thumbnail-size, cropped copy of the actual page from the thesis. The white card on which I indicated my response is superimposed on a black-and-white version of the art print.
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Telepathy Stimulus |
Telepathy Response |
My wife, Heidi, was the sender. She carefully noted the oval-shaped face, the hair-do, and the elongated neck. Because she studied this stimulus target with such intensity, these characteristics came through very well in my telepathic response, as indicated in the simple drawing I made on the white card.
One of the targets selected at random was Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon, a Cubist painting depicting a stylized group of prostitutes in Avignon, France. The copy below is from www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/SpecRel/Images/picasso.jpg. In the post mortem after the transmission session, the sender said "I focused exclusively on the face of the lady in the middle." In the right panel is a thumbnail-size view of the page from the thesis. My telepathic response is on the white card superimposed at the bottom left on the black-and-white version of the print.
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Telepathy Stimulus |
Telepathy Response |
Ms. Smalenyak (1974, pp. 55-56) analyzed the target and reception thus:
Dr. Rockwood's drawing in Figure 3 also bears striking correspondence to the original. The sender was focusing upon the central woman in the uppermost portion of the print. The sender stated he was "looking at the points and the faces." Correspondingly, Dr. Rockwood has drawn a star with several points about a face. The lines of the woman's elbows and their relationship to one another are repeated in the upper points of the star Dr. Rockwood has drawn about her face. The line of her breasts and their relationship to one another is reflected in the lower points of the star. In both print and drawing the head is pointed.
The simplified lines of Dr. Rockwood's drawing embody the Cubistic style and express the style of the woman's face in the print. Corresponding facial features appear in Dr. Rockwood's drawing, with the thin brows one above the other and the eyes in this same relationship, with several lines about the eyes. The nose is appropriately elongated. Again, as in Figure 1, inversions appear in the direction of the nose and chin.
The coloration also bears a one-to-one correspondence. Dr. Rockwood has recorded, "Tonality: pink/blue." The basic colors about the woman focused upon are pink and blue, with pink occurring on the left and blue on the right.
Telepathy accesses the sender's mind. Since the sender was concentrating on only one portion of the picture, that is what was communicated. The sender explained that he was not consciously aware that the lady's face was inscribed in a star formed by her elbows, since he was in effect concentrating his energy in making eye-to-eye contact with that particular face, and thinking that the lips were too thin. The telepathic response suggests that when one focuses on one particular item in a scene, everything but the item disappears from awareness.
The telepathy responses are an approximate "picture" of what is happening in the mind of the sender who is viewing an art object. Anytime the mind is in gear, it is in sending mode. To think about something in the usual way is potentially to send it.
In the Modigliani target, the sender energized and transmitted the entire idea of the painting. In the Picasso target, only a portion of the painting was sufficiently energized to be transmitted telepathically. It could be argued that these senders were merely demonstrating their personal ways of thinking about what they were looking at. However, I think these results say something about human perception generally. This is not only how people look a concrete items like a picture or painting, but how they reason and think.
What follows is merely an aside. At the conclusion of the regular telepathy experiments consisting of targets selected from a collection of art prints, one of the senders decided to experiment with transmitting an object instead of an art print. The following is from the thesis (p. 127):
A final intriguing instance of metaphor occurred in [the] transmission of an alabaster owl. The transmission of an object rather than an art print was totally unexpected by Dr. Rockwood. The owl was substantial in weight, and [The sender] focused on feeling the ridges during transmission. [The sender] stated, "I wanted to send some tactile impressions... I concentrated on the face head on, slowly running my fingers over the grooves." [TheSender] also reported that one ridge of the owl was sharp and hurt his finger.
Dr. Rockwood's response drawing of a brain coral encompasses the circular shape of the owl, the idea of ridges, and a sense of weight. Dr. Rockwood correspondingly wrote, "Impression of maze of ridges, like brain coral. Edges are sharp, not smooth. The tactile aspect tells me that this is not a picture but an object. No color except white. If this is a pictures it is certainly a most unusual transmission... I had the feeling of holding something that's weighty and has ridges. I had the feeling of getting my fingers pricked."
Ms. Smolenyak, as well as the others who were observing, seemed to agree that I had "passed the test." As far as I was concerned, the research was ending just when it was starting to get interesting.
Smolenyak, Sharon Marie (1974). An Examination of Telepathy
on Symbolic, Cognitive, Unconscious, and Empathic Levels, as It
Occurs in the Psychically Gifted Subject Dr. Robert J. R. Rockwood.
Thesis for the Master of Science Degree in Psychology
at the University of Florida.
© Copyright 2005 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.