The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [34]
A few years later, though, Barrett would change his mind about that hasty reply. He enjoyed a habit of spending part of each summer vacationing with friends in the countryside south of Dublin. His friends were fascinated by hypnotism—also called mesmerism, due to the early influence of Anton Mesmer on the field—and they occasionally conducted experiments with local villagers. These exercises amused Barrett; he held to the earlier idea that these so-called trances were some form of hallucination. It was only in 1875 that the tests, carried out with a group of village girls, caught his attention.
When hypnotized, one of the girls seemed sometimes to make an uncanny connection to another person’s thoughts. Barrett, suspecting trickery, some kind of signaling, decided to lend a scientist’s hand. He blindfolded the girl and then asked his friend to perform a selected series of interactions with the hypnotized girl.
As Barrett later wrote, “If [the friend] placed his hand over the lighted lamp, the girl instantly withdrew hers, as if in pain. If he tasted salt or sugar, corresponding expressions of dislike and approval were indicated by the girl.” Occasionally, the girl seemed also to inexplicably know some of what Barrett was pondering as he ran the experiments. Not precisely, but close enough, a “more or less distorted reflection of my own thought.”
When Barrett returned to his university, he conducted some follow-up experiments and drafted a paper on his research. He gave it the studiedly neutral title “On Some Phenomena Associated with Abnormal Conditions of Mind.” He then submitted his paper for presentation at the 1876 meeting of the British Association of Science, the body that, headed by Tyndall, had urged all spiritualists, as well as traditional religious leaders, to step aside for the edicts of science. The association reviewers weren’t fooled by the title; they knew crackpot science when they read it. Barrett’s paper was rejected first by the biology division and then by the anthropology division and was scheduled for the trash pile when the chairman of the anthropology subsection, Alfred Russel Wallace, rescued it and used his position as chair to force it into the program.
In his paper, Barrett wrote with the caution of a man inching his way across thin ice. He tentatively proposed that at some unconscious level, it might be possible for a person to tap into another’s thoughts or feelings. He speculated that this might occur in a “community of sensation,” and suggested that further investigation might be warranted.
Barrett stood firm only in his conclusion, which sounded a warning note. If he and his researchers rejected phenomena simply because they seemed strange and so far inexplicable, scientists might end up “laying ourselves open to that same spirit of bigotry that persecuted Galileo.”
Not unexpectedly, Wallace joined him in urging further investigation. More surprisingly, at least to the members of the association, the decidedly science-centered Lord Rayleigh also urged further investigation. “My opportunities have not been so good as those enjoyed by Professor Barrett,” Rayleigh explained. “But I have seen enough to convince me that those are wrong who wish to prevent investigation.” Rayleigh might be unconvinced as yet himself, but he wasn’t afraid to chastise his peers for taking a political rather than a scientific stance.
Tyndall was flat-out furious. It was outrageous that one of his students had gone so wrong and that the association, under his command, appeared to endorse this preposterous minority view. He wanted it made clear that no real researcher believed that there was anything, anything at all, in thought transference or “mentalism,” as self-anointed