The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [66]
IN SUPPORT OF Myers’s call to action, Gurney cited the best evidence so far assembled for both telepathy and crisis apparitions. In support of thought transference, he reviewed all the work; from Barrett’s early studies to some rather neat new work he’d done himself on the telepathic transmission of sensations, such as taste.
Gurney had set up a testing lab in which one taster and two “recipients” each sat in a different room. The sender in one room tasted what he or she was given, with no foreknowledge of what it would be. Immediately after, each recipient in his or her individual rooms was asked to describe it. Gurney simply listed some of the results.
Powdered nutmeg
Response from two different recipients:
• Ginger
• Nutmeg
Powder of dry celery
• A bitter herb
• Something like chamomile
Worcestershire sauce
• Something sweet, also acid, a curious taste
• Is it vinegar?
Bitter aloes
• Something frightfully hot
• It is a very horrid taste
Gurney proposed that shared perceptions came from a transfer of mental energy. He likened it to the transferred vibrations from one tuning fork to another. He didn’t know yet—nobody did—how that transfer occurred or what form of energy might carry a thought from one person to another.
The mind was so clearly an unreliable instrument—not predictable, not consistent—that it tended to complicate all efforts to make sense of telepathy. Sometimes the “transfer” was pitch-perfect, sometimes it was nonexistent. Sometimes it was as if they were measuring one thought in two heads; sometimes it was as if the experimenters were testing two different species on two different planets. Some people seemed adept at sending and clumsy at receiving, some the opposite. Some had no talent at all for the exercise. Some exhibited an almost terrifying awareness of the thoughts in someone else’s head. Some people called nutmeg ginger. Worcestershire sauce became vinegar. Some of their drawing examples were close copies, some borderline. A sender drew a profile of a man with a beard; the recipient drew a man’s profile, but beardless. A downward arrow turned into a shooting star. The name C-L-A-R-A became C-L-A-R-V.
What mechanical system, what physical method of transmission, Gurney wondered, could possibly explain such a wildly varied range of results? His speculation was that the solution lay in the slightly wrong answer. Perhaps the information might be sent in one form, but it could then be altered—bent even—by the mind of the receiver. A man might try conveying the taste of Worcestershire sauce to a woman. The woman might have always been unusually sensitive to the vinegar that was part of the sauce ingredients. He sends a complex taste; she keys into one aspect, and Worcestershire sauce becomes vinegar.
It was, he thought, like a thousand everyday conversations: Henry and Nora Sidgwick talking about their garden, her mind calling up images of glorious roses and starry lilies, his mind flinching from memories of pollen-dusted air and hay fever miseries. The same subject filtered through different experiences—even between two people who knew each other well. Why should anyone expect the sharing of a thought to be easy or predictable?
The wonderfully complicated ways that two minds might interact also came to intrigue—and even obsess—Gurney’s colleague Myers. Pondering the way the mind works below its conscious level, the way it adjusts and personally tunes the information it receives, Myers would come to believe that conscious thoughts and responses are influenced by information stored in the “subliminal mind,” a concept that would later be called the subconscious.
The more detail-oriented Gurney focused for the moment on how such mental exchanges might explain puzzles in telepathy—and in crisis