Perspicacious
SECOND SIGHT
In my estimation, second sight is not an illness, but a gift; you might as well say that it is pathological to be endowed with remarkable intelligence, but the possession of a gift always carries with it the burden of responsibility. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Pages 26.
In any case, the Clairvoyante's visions lead us to the conclusion that she possessed the faculty of exteriorization, of seeing psychic processes as if existing outside herself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Pages 26.
In my estimation, second sight is not an illness, but a gift; you might as well say that it is pathological to be endowed with remarkable intelligence, but the possession of a gift always carries with it the burden of responsibility. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 26.
We can have prophetic dreams without possessing second sight, innumerable people have such anticipatory dreams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Page 26.
Thank you for telling me about your interesting experience. It is a case of what we would call clairvoyance. But since this is just a word that signifies nothing further, it explains nothing. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 17.
4· I do not think that so-called personal messages from the dead can be dismissed in globo as self-deceptions.
Emmanuel Kant once said that he would doubt all stories about spooks, etc., individually, but as a whole there was something in them, which reminds me fatally of a Professor of Catholic Theology who, treating the seven arguments about the existence of God, was made to admit that every one of them was a syllogism.
But in the end he said: "Oh, I admit you can prove that everyone taken singly may be at fault, but there are seven of them, that must mean something!"
I carefully sift my empirical material and I must say that among many most arbitrary assumptions there are some cases that made me sit up.
I have made it a rule to apply Multatuli's wise statement: There is nothing quite true, and even this is not quite true.
Hoping I have answered your questions to your satisfaction,
I remain,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 333-334.
There is no reason whatever to assume that all so-called psychic phenomena are illusory effects of our mental processes. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 333-334.
I don't think that all reports of so-called miraculous phenomena (such as precognition, telepathy, supranormal knowledge, etc.) are doubtful. ~ Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 333-334.
Terms like thought-transmission, telepathy, clairvoyance, mean nothing. How can one imagine a causal explanation for a case of precognition? ~Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Another dream-determinant that deserves mention is telepathy.
The authenticity of this phenomenon can no longer be disputed today. It is; of course, very simple to deny its existence without examining the evidence, but that is an unscientific procedure which is unworthy of notice.
I have found by experience that telepathy does in fact influence dreams, as has been asserted since ancient times.
Certain people are particularly sensitive in this respect and often have telepathically influenced dreams.
But in acknowledging the phenomenon of telepathy I am not giving unqualified assent to the popular theory of action at a distance.
The phenomenon undoubtedly exists, but the theory of it does not seem to me so simple.
~Carl Jung; CW 16; The Practical Use of Dream Analysis; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 503
Half of the psycho-genetic diseases occur where it is a matter of too much intuition, because intuition has this peculiar quality of taking people out of their ordinary reality. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 808.
It is very important for your mental health that you should on the one hand concern yourself with psychic material but on the other hand should do so as systematically and accurately as possible, other-wise you are running a dangerous risk. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 528-529.
The authenticity of this phenomenon can no longer be disputed today. It is; of course, very simple to deny its existence without examining the evidence, but that is an unscientific procedure which is unworthy of notice.
I have found by experience that telepathy does in fact influence dreams, as has been asserted since ancient times.
Certain people are particularly sensitive in this respect and often have telepathically influenced dreams.
But in acknowledging the phenomenon of telepathy I am not giving unqualified assent to the popular theory of action at a distance.
The phenomenon undoubtedly exists, but the theory of it does not seem to me so simple.
~Carl Jung; CW 16; The Practical Use of Dream Analysis; CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy; Page 503
Half of the psycho-genetic diseases occur where it is a matter of too much intuition, because intuition has this peculiar quality of taking people out of their ordinary reality. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 808.
It is very important for your mental health that you should on the one hand concern yourself with psychic material but on the other hand should do so as systematically and accurately as possible, other-wise you are running a dangerous risk. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 528-529.
"Third Eye", by Iona Miller, 2004
Jung on Contemporary Psychological Problems
Evans: You are familiar, of course, with the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University. Some of his work in extrasensory perception and clairvoyance, or mental telepathy, sounds much like the research into intuitive function, a phase of your work which we discussed earlier. For example, would you say that a person who has clairvoyance would be an intuitive type in your frame of reference?
Jung: That's quite probable. Or it can be a sensation type, say an extrovert sensation type who is very much influenced by the unconscious. He has introverted intuition in his unconscious.
Evans: Dr. Jung, you speak of rational and irrational functions, thinking and feeling being rational, and sensation and intuition being irrational. Would you care to elaborate on this notion?
Jung: As you say, there are two groups, the rational group and the irrational group. The rational group consists of the two functions, thinking and feeling. The ideal of thinking is a rational result, and the ideal of feeling is also a rational result. They hold rational values. That is differentiated thinking.
The irrational group is comprised of sensation and intuition. Sensation functions in such a way that it may not prejudice facts; it shall not prejudice facts. To the sensation type, the ideal perception is that you have an accurate perception of things as they are without additions or corrections. On the other side, intuition does not look at things as they are. That is anathema to the intuition. It looks ever so shortly at things as they are, and makes off into an unconscious process at the end in which he will see something nobody else will see.
Evans: So in terms of the person who is clairvoyant--
Jung: Those people who yield the best results are always those people who are introverted, where introverted intuition comes in. But that is a side aspect of it; it is not interesting.
The other question is far more interesting, namely, the terms they use. Rhine himself uses them—recognition, telepathy, etc. They mean nothing at all. They are words, but he thinks he has said something when he says "telepathy.”
Evans: The word itself is not a description of the process.
Jung: It means nothing, nothing at all.
Evans: Now, of course, a lot of the things that you are describing, some scientists would insist are due to chance, chance occurrences and chance factors. In his own work, Rhine used statistical probability analysis methods. He reports these occurrences more often than would be expected by chance.
Jung: Well you see, he proves that it is more than chance; it is statistically plausible. That is the important point which hasn't been contradicted.
There was some experimental proof offered in England, which resulted in the accusation: "Oh, Rhine, that's nothing but guesswork.” And that is exactly true; that is guessing, what you call guessing. However, a hunch is guessing, but a definite guess, you know. All this really means nothing.
You see, the point is that it is more than merely probable; it is beyond chance. That's the major point. But as you know, people hate such problems they can't deal with concretely, and they can't deal with this one concretely. In fact, even Rhine does not understand how often extrasensory phenomena really occur, because it is a revelation which in these sacred rooms is anathema, a revelation of time and space through the psyche. That's the fact; that is what Rhine has made evident, but for scientists to say, "I'll swallow that," now that is difficult.
Evans: We might go a little further into some of your recent works in this area which many consider quite profound, but are not too well known to many of our students.
Jung: Of course not. Nobody in the general public actually reads these things. Of course, my books are at least sold.
Evans: To be more specific, I'm referring to the concept, synchronicity, which you have discussed, and which has some relevance at this point in our discussion. Would you care to comment on synchronicity?
Jung: That is awfully complicated. One wouldn't know where to begin. Of course, this kind of thinking started long ago, and when Rhine brought out his results, I thought, "Now we have at least a more or less dependable basis to argue on.” But the argument has not been understood at all, because it is really very difficult.
When you observe the unconscious, you will come across plenty of cases which show a very peculiar kind of parallel events. For example, I have a certain thought of a certain definite subject which is occupying my attention and my interest; and at the same time, something else happens, quite independently, that portrays just that thought. This is utter nonsense, you know, looked at from a causal point of view. However, that there is something else to it which is not nonsense is made evident by the results of Rhine's experiments. There is a probability; it is something more than chance that such a case occurs.
I never made statistical experiments except one in the way of Rhine. I made one for another purpose. But I have come across quite a number of cases where it was most astounding to find that two causal chains happened at the same time, but independent of each other, so that you could say they had nothing to do with each other. It's really quite clear. For instance, I speak of a red car and at that moment a red car comes here. Now I haven't seen the red car, because it wasn't possible; it was hidden behind the building until just this moment when it suddenly appeared. Now many would say that this is an example of mere chance, but the Rhine experiment proves that these cases are not mere chance.
Now it would be superstitious and false to say, "This car has appeared because here were some remarks made about a red car; it is a miracle that a red car has appeared.” It is not a miracle; it is just chance—but these chances happen more often than chance allows. That shows that there is something behind it.
Rhine has a whole institute, many co-workers, and has the means. We have no means here to make such experiments; otherwise, I probably would have done them. Here it is just physically impossible, so I have to content myself with the observation of facts!!
Evans: An interesting area which is being discussed a lot in the United States today, and I'm sure is of interest to you as well, is that of psychosomatic medicine, an area dealing with the way in which emotional components of personality can affect bodily functions.
Jung: As an example of this, I see a lot of astounding cures of tuberculosis—chronic tuberculosis—effected by analysts; people learn to breathe again. The understanding of what their complexes were—that has helped them.
Evans: When did you first become interested in the psychic factors of tuberculosis? Many years ago?
Jung: I was an analyst to begin with; I was always interested naturally. Maybe also because I understood so little of it, or more importantly, I noticed that I understood so little.
Evans: To expand on my earlier question, we are right now becoming more and more interested in the United States in how emotional, unconscious personality factors can actually have an effect on the body. Of course, the classic example in the literature is the peptic ulcer. It is believed that this is a case where emotional factors have actually created pathology.
These ideas have been extended into many other areas. It is felt, for example, that where there already is pathology, these emotional factors can intensify it. Or sometimes there may be actual symptoms or fears concerning pathology when no true pathology exists, such as in cases of hysteria or hypochondriasis. For example, many physicians in America say that 60 to 70 percent of their patients do not have anything really physically wrong with them, but they instead have disorders of psychosomatic origin.
Jung: Yes, that is well known—since more than fifty years. The question is how to cure them. Evans: Speaking of such psychosomatic disturbances, as, for instance, your experiences and studies into tuberculosis, do you have any ideas as to why the patient selects this type of symptom?
Jung: He doesn't select; they happen to him. You could ask just as well when you are eaten by a crocodile, "How did you happen to select that crocodile?" Nonsense, he has selected you.
Evans: Of course, "selected" in this sense refers to an unconscious process.
Jung: No, not even unconsciously. That is an extraordinary exaggeration of the importance of the subject, to say he was choosing such things. They get him.
Evans: Perhaps one of the most radical suggestions in the area of psychosomatic medicine has been the suggestion that some forms of cancer may have psychosomatic components as causal factors. Would this surprise you?
Jung: Not at all. We know these since long ago, you know. Fifty years ago we already had these cases; ulcer of the stomach, tuberculosis, chronic arthritis, skin diseases. All are psychogenic under certain conditions.
Evans: And even cancer?
Jung: Well you see, I couldn't swear, but I have seen cases where I thought or wondered whether or not there was a psychogenic reason for that particular ailment; it came too conveniently. Many things can be found out about cancer, I'm sure.
You see, with us it has been always a question of how to treat these things, because any disease possible has a psychological accompaniment. It just all depends upon —perhaps life depends upon it—whether you treat such a patient psychologically in the proper way or not. That can help tremendously, even if you cannot prove in the least that the disease in itself is psychogenic.
You can have an infectious disease in a certain moment, that is, a physical ailment or predicament, because you are particularly accessible to an infection—maybe sometimes because of a psychological attitude. Angina is such a typical psychological disease; yet it is not psychological in its physical consequences. It's just an infection. So you ask, "Then why does psychology have anything to do with it?" Because it was the psychological moment maybe that allowed the infection to grow. When the disease has been established and there is a high fever and an abscess, you cannot cure it by psychology. Yet it is quite possible that you can avoid it by a proper psychological attitude.
Evans: So all this interest in psychosomatic medicine is pretty old stuff to you.
Jung: It's all known here long ago.
Evans: And you are not at all surprised at the new developments . . .
Jung: No. For instance, there is the toxic aspect of schizophrenia. I published it fifty years ago—just fifty years ago—and now everyone discovers it. You are far ahead in America with technological things, but in psychological matters and such things, you are fifty years back. You simply don't understand it; that's a fact. I don't want to figure in a general corrective statement; you simply are not yet aware of what there is. There are plenty more things than people have any idea of. I told you that case of the theologian who didn't even know what the unconscious was; he thought it was an apparition. Everyone who says that I am a mystic is just an idiot. He just doesn't understand the first word of psychology.
Evans: There is certainly nothing mystical about the statements you have just been making. Now to pursue this further, another development that falls right in line with this whole discussion of psychosomatic medicine has been the use of drugs to deal with psychological problems. Of course, historically drugs have been used a great deal by people to try to forget their troubles, to relieve pain, etc. However, a particular development has been the so-called non-addictive tranquilizing drugs. These, of course, became prominent in France with the drug, chlorpromazine. Then followed such drugs as reserpine-serpentina, and a great variety of milder tranquilizers, known by such trade names as Miltown and Equinal. They are now being administered very freely to patients by general practitioners and internists. In other words, not only are the stronger tranquilizers being administered to mentally ill patients such as schizophrenics, but to a great extent today these drugs are being dispensed almost as freely as aspirins to reduce everyday tensions.
Jung: This practice is very dangerous.
Evans: Why do you think this is dangerous? These drugs are supposed to be nonaddictive.
Jung: It's just like the compulsion that is caused by morphine or heroin. It becomes a habit. You don't know what you do, you see, when you use such drugs. It is like the abuse of narcotics.
Evans: But the argument is that these are not habit-forming; they are not physiologically addictive.
Jung: Oh, yes, that's what one says.
Evans: But you feel that psychologically there is still addiction?
Jung: Yes. For instance, there are many drugs that don't produce habits, the kind of habits that morphine does; yet it becomes a different kind of habit, a psychical habit, and that is just as bad as anything else.
Evans: Have you actually seen any patients or had any contact with individuals who have been taking these particular drugs, these tranquilizers?
Jung: I can't say. You see, with us there are very few. In America there are all the little powders and the tablets. Happily enough, we are not yet so far. You see, American life is in a subtle way so one-sided and so uprooted that you must have something with which to compensate the real nature of man. You have to pacify your unconscious all along the line because it is in absolute uproar; so at the slightest provocation you have a big moral rebellion in America. Look at the rebellion of modern youth in America, the sexual rebellion, and all that. These rebellions occur because the real, natural man is just in open rebellion against the utterly inhuman form of American life. Americans are absolutely divorced from nature in a way, and that accounts for that drug abuse.
Evans: But what about the treatment of individuals who are seriously mentally ill? We have the problem of hospitalized, psychotic patients. For instance, certain schizophrenics are so withdrawn that they are virtually impossible to interact with in psychotherapy; so in many hospitals in the United States, drugs such as chlorpromazine have been used in order to render many such patients more amenable to psychotherapy. I don't think most of our practitioners believe the drugs cure the patients in themselves, but they at least make the patient more amenable to therapy.
Jung: Yes, the only question is whether that amenability is a real thing or drug-induced. I am sure that any kind of suggestive treatment will have effect, because these people simply become suggestible. You see, any drug or shock in the mind will lower stamina, making these people accessible to suggestion. Then, of course, they can be led, can be made into something, but it is not a very happy result.
Evans: To change the topic for a moment, Professor Jung, I know our students would be interested in your opinion concerning the kind of training and background a psychologist, a person who wants to study the individual, should have. For example, there is one view that says maybe he should be trained primarily as a rigorous scientist, a master of such tools as statistics and experimental design. Others feel, however, that a study of the humanities is also important for the student who wants to study the individual.
Jung: Well of course, when you study human psychology, you can't help noticing that man's psychology doesn't only consist of the ramifications of instinct in his behavior. There are other determinants, many others, and the study of man from his biological aspect only is by far insufficient. To understand human psychology, it is absolutely necessary that you study man also in his social and general environments. You have to consider, for instance, the fact that there are different kinds of societies, different kinds of nations, different traditions; and in the interest of that purpose, it is absolutely necessary that one treat the problem of the human psyche from many standpoints. Each is naturally a considerable task.
Thus, after my association experiments at which time I realized that there was obviously an unconscious, the question became, "Now what is this unconscious? Does it consist merely of remnants of conscious activities, or are there things that are practically forever unconscious? In other words, is the unconscious a factor in itself?" And I soon came to the conclusion that the unconscious must be a factor in itself. You see, I observe time and again, for instance, when delving into people's dreams or schizophrenic patients' delusions and fantasies, that therein is contained motives which they couldn't possibly have acquired in our surroundings. This, of course, depends upon the belief that the child is not born tabula rasa, but instead is a definite mixture or combination of genes; and although the genes seem to contain chiefly dynamic factors and predispositions to certain types of behavior, they have a tremendous importance also for the arrangement of the psyche, inasmuch as it appears, that is. Before you can see into the psyche, you cannot study it, but once it appears, you see that it has certain qualities and a certain character. Now the explanation for this must needs depend upon the elements born in the child, so factors determining human behavior are born within the child, and determine further development. Now that is one side of the picture.
The other side of the picture is that the individual lives in connection with others in certain definite surroundings that will influence the given combination of qualities. And that now is also a very complicated factor, because the environmental influences are not merely personal. There are any number of objective factors. The general social conditions, laws, convictions, ways of looking at things, of dealing with things; these things are not of an arbitrary character. They are historical. There are historical reasons why things are as they are. There are historical reasons for the qualities of the psyche and there is such a thing as the history of man's evolution in past eons, which as a combination show that real understanding of the psyche must consist in the elucidation of the history of the human race—history of the mind, for instance, as in the biological data. When I wrote my first book concerning the psychology of the unconscious, I already had formed a certain idea of the nature of the unconscious. To me it was then a living remnant of the original history of man, man living in his surroundings. It is a very complicated picture.
So you see, man is not complete when he lives in a world of statistical truth. He must live in a world where the "whole" of man, his entire history, is the concern; and that is not merely statistics. It is the expression of what man really is, and what he feels himself to be.
The scientist is always looking for an average. Our natural science makes everything an average, reduces everything to an average; yet the truth is that the carriers of life are individuals, not average numbers. When everything is statistical, all individual qualities are wiped out, and that, of course, is quite unbecoming. In fact, it is unhygienic, because if you wipe out the mythology of a man, his entire historical sequence, he becomes a statistical average, a number; that is, he becomes nothing. He is deprived of his specific value, of experiencing his own unique value.
You see, the trouble is that nobody understands these things apparently. It seems quite strange to me that one doesn't see what an education without the humanities is doing to man. He loses his connection with his family, his connection with his whole past—the whole stem, the tribe —that past in which man has always lived. We think that we are born today tabula rasa without a history, but man has always lived in the myth. To think that man is born without a history within himself— that is a disease. It is absolutely abnormal, because man is not bom every day. He is bom into a specific historical setting with specific historical qualities, and therefore, he is only complete when he has a relation to these things. If you are growing up with no connection from the past, it is like being born without eyes and ears and trying to perceive the external world with accuracy. Natural science may say, "You need no connection with the past; you can wipe it out," but that is a mutilation of the human being. Now I saw from a practical experience that this kind of proceeding has a most extraordinary therapeutic effect. I can tell you such a case.
There was a Jewish girl. Her father was a banker. She had been educated more through worldly experience and formal education, and was decidedly lacking in any understanding of tradition. I examined her history further and found out that her grandfather had been an ascetic in Galicia. With this insight, I knew the whole story, and let me explain why. This particular girl suffered from phobia, a terrible phobia, and had been under psychoanalytic treatment already with no effect. She was really badly plagued by that phobia, in excited states and so on. I observed that this girl had blocked significant influences of her past. For instance, the fact that her grandfather was an ascetic, that he lived in the myth, was one influence she had blocked. Her father too had resisted this ascetic influence. So I simply told her, "You will stamp out your fears if you gain insight into what you have lost or are resisting. Your fear is the fear of the influences from the past.” You know, the effect was that within a week she was cured from so many years of bad anxiety states, because this insight went through her like a lightning bolt. I was able to interpret the source of the problem so quickly because I knew that she was absolutely lost. She thought she was in the middle of things, functioning well, but actually she was in a sense lost or gone.
Evans: What can we learn from this remarkable case, Dr. Jung?
Jung: Well, it illustrates that it makes no sense and that our existence is incomplete when we are just "average numbers.” The more you make people into average numbers, the more you destroy our society. The "ideal state" and the "slave state" come into being. If you want to be an "average number," go to Russia. There it is wonderful; there you can be a number. But one pays very dearly; our whole life goes to blazes, like in the case of the girl. I have plenty of cases of a similar kind. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung
http://gnosis.org/Evans-Jung-Interview/evans5.html
Jung on Contemporary Psychological Problems
Evans: You are familiar, of course, with the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University. Some of his work in extrasensory perception and clairvoyance, or mental telepathy, sounds much like the research into intuitive function, a phase of your work which we discussed earlier. For example, would you say that a person who has clairvoyance would be an intuitive type in your frame of reference?
Jung: That's quite probable. Or it can be a sensation type, say an extrovert sensation type who is very much influenced by the unconscious. He has introverted intuition in his unconscious.
Evans: Dr. Jung, you speak of rational and irrational functions, thinking and feeling being rational, and sensation and intuition being irrational. Would you care to elaborate on this notion?
Jung: As you say, there are two groups, the rational group and the irrational group. The rational group consists of the two functions, thinking and feeling. The ideal of thinking is a rational result, and the ideal of feeling is also a rational result. They hold rational values. That is differentiated thinking.
The irrational group is comprised of sensation and intuition. Sensation functions in such a way that it may not prejudice facts; it shall not prejudice facts. To the sensation type, the ideal perception is that you have an accurate perception of things as they are without additions or corrections. On the other side, intuition does not look at things as they are. That is anathema to the intuition. It looks ever so shortly at things as they are, and makes off into an unconscious process at the end in which he will see something nobody else will see.
Evans: So in terms of the person who is clairvoyant--
Jung: Those people who yield the best results are always those people who are introverted, where introverted intuition comes in. But that is a side aspect of it; it is not interesting.
The other question is far more interesting, namely, the terms they use. Rhine himself uses them—recognition, telepathy, etc. They mean nothing at all. They are words, but he thinks he has said something when he says "telepathy.”
Evans: The word itself is not a description of the process.
Jung: It means nothing, nothing at all.
Evans: Now, of course, a lot of the things that you are describing, some scientists would insist are due to chance, chance occurrences and chance factors. In his own work, Rhine used statistical probability analysis methods. He reports these occurrences more often than would be expected by chance.
Jung: Well you see, he proves that it is more than chance; it is statistically plausible. That is the important point which hasn't been contradicted.
There was some experimental proof offered in England, which resulted in the accusation: "Oh, Rhine, that's nothing but guesswork.” And that is exactly true; that is guessing, what you call guessing. However, a hunch is guessing, but a definite guess, you know. All this really means nothing.
You see, the point is that it is more than merely probable; it is beyond chance. That's the major point. But as you know, people hate such problems they can't deal with concretely, and they can't deal with this one concretely. In fact, even Rhine does not understand how often extrasensory phenomena really occur, because it is a revelation which in these sacred rooms is anathema, a revelation of time and space through the psyche. That's the fact; that is what Rhine has made evident, but for scientists to say, "I'll swallow that," now that is difficult.
Evans: We might go a little further into some of your recent works in this area which many consider quite profound, but are not too well known to many of our students.
Jung: Of course not. Nobody in the general public actually reads these things. Of course, my books are at least sold.
Evans: To be more specific, I'm referring to the concept, synchronicity, which you have discussed, and which has some relevance at this point in our discussion. Would you care to comment on synchronicity?
Jung: That is awfully complicated. One wouldn't know where to begin. Of course, this kind of thinking started long ago, and when Rhine brought out his results, I thought, "Now we have at least a more or less dependable basis to argue on.” But the argument has not been understood at all, because it is really very difficult.
When you observe the unconscious, you will come across plenty of cases which show a very peculiar kind of parallel events. For example, I have a certain thought of a certain definite subject which is occupying my attention and my interest; and at the same time, something else happens, quite independently, that portrays just that thought. This is utter nonsense, you know, looked at from a causal point of view. However, that there is something else to it which is not nonsense is made evident by the results of Rhine's experiments. There is a probability; it is something more than chance that such a case occurs.
I never made statistical experiments except one in the way of Rhine. I made one for another purpose. But I have come across quite a number of cases where it was most astounding to find that two causal chains happened at the same time, but independent of each other, so that you could say they had nothing to do with each other. It's really quite clear. For instance, I speak of a red car and at that moment a red car comes here. Now I haven't seen the red car, because it wasn't possible; it was hidden behind the building until just this moment when it suddenly appeared. Now many would say that this is an example of mere chance, but the Rhine experiment proves that these cases are not mere chance.
Now it would be superstitious and false to say, "This car has appeared because here were some remarks made about a red car; it is a miracle that a red car has appeared.” It is not a miracle; it is just chance—but these chances happen more often than chance allows. That shows that there is something behind it.
Rhine has a whole institute, many co-workers, and has the means. We have no means here to make such experiments; otherwise, I probably would have done them. Here it is just physically impossible, so I have to content myself with the observation of facts!!
Evans: An interesting area which is being discussed a lot in the United States today, and I'm sure is of interest to you as well, is that of psychosomatic medicine, an area dealing with the way in which emotional components of personality can affect bodily functions.
Jung: As an example of this, I see a lot of astounding cures of tuberculosis—chronic tuberculosis—effected by analysts; people learn to breathe again. The understanding of what their complexes were—that has helped them.
Evans: When did you first become interested in the psychic factors of tuberculosis? Many years ago?
Jung: I was an analyst to begin with; I was always interested naturally. Maybe also because I understood so little of it, or more importantly, I noticed that I understood so little.
Evans: To expand on my earlier question, we are right now becoming more and more interested in the United States in how emotional, unconscious personality factors can actually have an effect on the body. Of course, the classic example in the literature is the peptic ulcer. It is believed that this is a case where emotional factors have actually created pathology.
These ideas have been extended into many other areas. It is felt, for example, that where there already is pathology, these emotional factors can intensify it. Or sometimes there may be actual symptoms or fears concerning pathology when no true pathology exists, such as in cases of hysteria or hypochondriasis. For example, many physicians in America say that 60 to 70 percent of their patients do not have anything really physically wrong with them, but they instead have disorders of psychosomatic origin.
Jung: Yes, that is well known—since more than fifty years. The question is how to cure them. Evans: Speaking of such psychosomatic disturbances, as, for instance, your experiences and studies into tuberculosis, do you have any ideas as to why the patient selects this type of symptom?
Jung: He doesn't select; they happen to him. You could ask just as well when you are eaten by a crocodile, "How did you happen to select that crocodile?" Nonsense, he has selected you.
Evans: Of course, "selected" in this sense refers to an unconscious process.
Jung: No, not even unconsciously. That is an extraordinary exaggeration of the importance of the subject, to say he was choosing such things. They get him.
Evans: Perhaps one of the most radical suggestions in the area of psychosomatic medicine has been the suggestion that some forms of cancer may have psychosomatic components as causal factors. Would this surprise you?
Jung: Not at all. We know these since long ago, you know. Fifty years ago we already had these cases; ulcer of the stomach, tuberculosis, chronic arthritis, skin diseases. All are psychogenic under certain conditions.
Evans: And even cancer?
Jung: Well you see, I couldn't swear, but I have seen cases where I thought or wondered whether or not there was a psychogenic reason for that particular ailment; it came too conveniently. Many things can be found out about cancer, I'm sure.
You see, with us it has been always a question of how to treat these things, because any disease possible has a psychological accompaniment. It just all depends upon —perhaps life depends upon it—whether you treat such a patient psychologically in the proper way or not. That can help tremendously, even if you cannot prove in the least that the disease in itself is psychogenic.
You can have an infectious disease in a certain moment, that is, a physical ailment or predicament, because you are particularly accessible to an infection—maybe sometimes because of a psychological attitude. Angina is such a typical psychological disease; yet it is not psychological in its physical consequences. It's just an infection. So you ask, "Then why does psychology have anything to do with it?" Because it was the psychological moment maybe that allowed the infection to grow. When the disease has been established and there is a high fever and an abscess, you cannot cure it by psychology. Yet it is quite possible that you can avoid it by a proper psychological attitude.
Evans: So all this interest in psychosomatic medicine is pretty old stuff to you.
Jung: It's all known here long ago.
Evans: And you are not at all surprised at the new developments . . .
Jung: No. For instance, there is the toxic aspect of schizophrenia. I published it fifty years ago—just fifty years ago—and now everyone discovers it. You are far ahead in America with technological things, but in psychological matters and such things, you are fifty years back. You simply don't understand it; that's a fact. I don't want to figure in a general corrective statement; you simply are not yet aware of what there is. There are plenty more things than people have any idea of. I told you that case of the theologian who didn't even know what the unconscious was; he thought it was an apparition. Everyone who says that I am a mystic is just an idiot. He just doesn't understand the first word of psychology.
Evans: There is certainly nothing mystical about the statements you have just been making. Now to pursue this further, another development that falls right in line with this whole discussion of psychosomatic medicine has been the use of drugs to deal with psychological problems. Of course, historically drugs have been used a great deal by people to try to forget their troubles, to relieve pain, etc. However, a particular development has been the so-called non-addictive tranquilizing drugs. These, of course, became prominent in France with the drug, chlorpromazine. Then followed such drugs as reserpine-serpentina, and a great variety of milder tranquilizers, known by such trade names as Miltown and Equinal. They are now being administered very freely to patients by general practitioners and internists. In other words, not only are the stronger tranquilizers being administered to mentally ill patients such as schizophrenics, but to a great extent today these drugs are being dispensed almost as freely as aspirins to reduce everyday tensions.
Jung: This practice is very dangerous.
Evans: Why do you think this is dangerous? These drugs are supposed to be nonaddictive.
Jung: It's just like the compulsion that is caused by morphine or heroin. It becomes a habit. You don't know what you do, you see, when you use such drugs. It is like the abuse of narcotics.
Evans: But the argument is that these are not habit-forming; they are not physiologically addictive.
Jung: Oh, yes, that's what one says.
Evans: But you feel that psychologically there is still addiction?
Jung: Yes. For instance, there are many drugs that don't produce habits, the kind of habits that morphine does; yet it becomes a different kind of habit, a psychical habit, and that is just as bad as anything else.
Evans: Have you actually seen any patients or had any contact with individuals who have been taking these particular drugs, these tranquilizers?
Jung: I can't say. You see, with us there are very few. In America there are all the little powders and the tablets. Happily enough, we are not yet so far. You see, American life is in a subtle way so one-sided and so uprooted that you must have something with which to compensate the real nature of man. You have to pacify your unconscious all along the line because it is in absolute uproar; so at the slightest provocation you have a big moral rebellion in America. Look at the rebellion of modern youth in America, the sexual rebellion, and all that. These rebellions occur because the real, natural man is just in open rebellion against the utterly inhuman form of American life. Americans are absolutely divorced from nature in a way, and that accounts for that drug abuse.
Evans: But what about the treatment of individuals who are seriously mentally ill? We have the problem of hospitalized, psychotic patients. For instance, certain schizophrenics are so withdrawn that they are virtually impossible to interact with in psychotherapy; so in many hospitals in the United States, drugs such as chlorpromazine have been used in order to render many such patients more amenable to psychotherapy. I don't think most of our practitioners believe the drugs cure the patients in themselves, but they at least make the patient more amenable to therapy.
Jung: Yes, the only question is whether that amenability is a real thing or drug-induced. I am sure that any kind of suggestive treatment will have effect, because these people simply become suggestible. You see, any drug or shock in the mind will lower stamina, making these people accessible to suggestion. Then, of course, they can be led, can be made into something, but it is not a very happy result.
Evans: To change the topic for a moment, Professor Jung, I know our students would be interested in your opinion concerning the kind of training and background a psychologist, a person who wants to study the individual, should have. For example, there is one view that says maybe he should be trained primarily as a rigorous scientist, a master of such tools as statistics and experimental design. Others feel, however, that a study of the humanities is also important for the student who wants to study the individual.
Jung: Well of course, when you study human psychology, you can't help noticing that man's psychology doesn't only consist of the ramifications of instinct in his behavior. There are other determinants, many others, and the study of man from his biological aspect only is by far insufficient. To understand human psychology, it is absolutely necessary that you study man also in his social and general environments. You have to consider, for instance, the fact that there are different kinds of societies, different kinds of nations, different traditions; and in the interest of that purpose, it is absolutely necessary that one treat the problem of the human psyche from many standpoints. Each is naturally a considerable task.
Thus, after my association experiments at which time I realized that there was obviously an unconscious, the question became, "Now what is this unconscious? Does it consist merely of remnants of conscious activities, or are there things that are practically forever unconscious? In other words, is the unconscious a factor in itself?" And I soon came to the conclusion that the unconscious must be a factor in itself. You see, I observe time and again, for instance, when delving into people's dreams or schizophrenic patients' delusions and fantasies, that therein is contained motives which they couldn't possibly have acquired in our surroundings. This, of course, depends upon the belief that the child is not born tabula rasa, but instead is a definite mixture or combination of genes; and although the genes seem to contain chiefly dynamic factors and predispositions to certain types of behavior, they have a tremendous importance also for the arrangement of the psyche, inasmuch as it appears, that is. Before you can see into the psyche, you cannot study it, but once it appears, you see that it has certain qualities and a certain character. Now the explanation for this must needs depend upon the elements born in the child, so factors determining human behavior are born within the child, and determine further development. Now that is one side of the picture.
The other side of the picture is that the individual lives in connection with others in certain definite surroundings that will influence the given combination of qualities. And that now is also a very complicated factor, because the environmental influences are not merely personal. There are any number of objective factors. The general social conditions, laws, convictions, ways of looking at things, of dealing with things; these things are not of an arbitrary character. They are historical. There are historical reasons why things are as they are. There are historical reasons for the qualities of the psyche and there is such a thing as the history of man's evolution in past eons, which as a combination show that real understanding of the psyche must consist in the elucidation of the history of the human race—history of the mind, for instance, as in the biological data. When I wrote my first book concerning the psychology of the unconscious, I already had formed a certain idea of the nature of the unconscious. To me it was then a living remnant of the original history of man, man living in his surroundings. It is a very complicated picture.
So you see, man is not complete when he lives in a world of statistical truth. He must live in a world where the "whole" of man, his entire history, is the concern; and that is not merely statistics. It is the expression of what man really is, and what he feels himself to be.
The scientist is always looking for an average. Our natural science makes everything an average, reduces everything to an average; yet the truth is that the carriers of life are individuals, not average numbers. When everything is statistical, all individual qualities are wiped out, and that, of course, is quite unbecoming. In fact, it is unhygienic, because if you wipe out the mythology of a man, his entire historical sequence, he becomes a statistical average, a number; that is, he becomes nothing. He is deprived of his specific value, of experiencing his own unique value.
You see, the trouble is that nobody understands these things apparently. It seems quite strange to me that one doesn't see what an education without the humanities is doing to man. He loses his connection with his family, his connection with his whole past—the whole stem, the tribe —that past in which man has always lived. We think that we are born today tabula rasa without a history, but man has always lived in the myth. To think that man is born without a history within himself— that is a disease. It is absolutely abnormal, because man is not bom every day. He is bom into a specific historical setting with specific historical qualities, and therefore, he is only complete when he has a relation to these things. If you are growing up with no connection from the past, it is like being born without eyes and ears and trying to perceive the external world with accuracy. Natural science may say, "You need no connection with the past; you can wipe it out," but that is a mutilation of the human being. Now I saw from a practical experience that this kind of proceeding has a most extraordinary therapeutic effect. I can tell you such a case.
There was a Jewish girl. Her father was a banker. She had been educated more through worldly experience and formal education, and was decidedly lacking in any understanding of tradition. I examined her history further and found out that her grandfather had been an ascetic in Galicia. With this insight, I knew the whole story, and let me explain why. This particular girl suffered from phobia, a terrible phobia, and had been under psychoanalytic treatment already with no effect. She was really badly plagued by that phobia, in excited states and so on. I observed that this girl had blocked significant influences of her past. For instance, the fact that her grandfather was an ascetic, that he lived in the myth, was one influence she had blocked. Her father too had resisted this ascetic influence. So I simply told her, "You will stamp out your fears if you gain insight into what you have lost or are resisting. Your fear is the fear of the influences from the past.” You know, the effect was that within a week she was cured from so many years of bad anxiety states, because this insight went through her like a lightning bolt. I was able to interpret the source of the problem so quickly because I knew that she was absolutely lost. She thought she was in the middle of things, functioning well, but actually she was in a sense lost or gone.
Evans: What can we learn from this remarkable case, Dr. Jung?
Jung: Well, it illustrates that it makes no sense and that our existence is incomplete when we are just "average numbers.” The more you make people into average numbers, the more you destroy our society. The "ideal state" and the "slave state" come into being. If you want to be an "average number," go to Russia. There it is wonderful; there you can be a number. But one pays very dearly; our whole life goes to blazes, like in the case of the girl. I have plenty of cases of a similar kind. ~Carl Jung; Conversations with C.G. Jung
http://gnosis.org/Evans-Jung-Interview/evans5.html
In Norse mythology,there is the Well of Fate, and then there is the Well of Wisdom...
--C.G. Jung:
"When Horus the son sacrificed one of his own eyes to Ra, so his sight was restored, but Horus then only had one eye, Like Wotan [Odin], who sacrificed one eye to Mimir, the speaking fountainhead of the underworld – the unconscious in other words – in return for a draft of the wisdom giving water; and thereafter he had a connection with the wisdom of the earth." [from Visions: notes of the seminar given in 1930-1934 by C.G. Jung, Volume 2]
--C.G. Jung:
"When Horus the son sacrificed one of his own eyes to Ra, so his sight was restored, but Horus then only had one eye, Like Wotan [Odin], who sacrificed one eye to Mimir, the speaking fountainhead of the underworld – the unconscious in other words – in return for a draft of the wisdom giving water; and thereafter he had a connection with the wisdom of the earth." [from Visions: notes of the seminar given in 1930-1934 by C.G. Jung, Volume 2]
Should Second Sight Be Called 'First Sight'?
There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart,
but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.
The word 'clairvoyant' is derived from Latin words meaning to see the light, not merely in the sense of a realization, but in the mystical sense of actually seeing living entities (light beings) in the spiritual realm.
"Clairvoyance. The faculty of seeing with the inner eye or spiritual sight... Real clairvoyance means the faculty of seeing through the densest matter (the latter disappearing at the will and before the spiritual eye of the Seer), and irrespective of time (past, present and future) or distance." --Theosophical Glossary
Often seen as supernatural, unpredictable, illusory and possibly dangerous, ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance and other parapsychological activities are actually happening all the time and help us make sense of everyday experiences. The First Sight Model provides a new way of understanding such experiences and describes a way of thinking about the unconscious mind that makes it clear that these abilities are not rare and anomalous, but instead are used by all of us all the time, unconsciously and efficiently.
There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart,
but in the thin places that distance is even smaller.
The word 'clairvoyant' is derived from Latin words meaning to see the light, not merely in the sense of a realization, but in the mystical sense of actually seeing living entities (light beings) in the spiritual realm.
"Clairvoyance. The faculty of seeing with the inner eye or spiritual sight... Real clairvoyance means the faculty of seeing through the densest matter (the latter disappearing at the will and before the spiritual eye of the Seer), and irrespective of time (past, present and future) or distance." --Theosophical Glossary
Often seen as supernatural, unpredictable, illusory and possibly dangerous, ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance and other parapsychological activities are actually happening all the time and help us make sense of everyday experiences. The First Sight Model provides a new way of understanding such experiences and describes a way of thinking about the unconscious mind that makes it clear that these abilities are not rare and anomalous, but instead are used by all of us all the time, unconsciously and efficiently.
Randy Mack, Dreamscape
A recent meta-analysis of experiments from seven independent laboratories (n=26) published since 1978 indicates that the human body can apparently detect randomly delivered stimuli occurring 1-10 seconds in the future (Mossbridge, Tressoldi, & Utts, 2012). The key observation in these studies is that human physiology appears to be able to distinguish between unpredictable dichotomous future stimuli, such as emotional vs. neutral images or sound vs. silence. This phenomenon has been called presentiment (as in "feeling the future"). In this paper we call it predictive anticipatory activity or PAA. The phenomenon is "predictive" because it can distinguish between upcoming stimuli; it is "anticipatory" because the physiological changes occur before a future event; and it is an "activity" because it involves changes in the cardiopulmonary, skin, and/or nervous systems.
PAA is an unconscious phenomenon that seems to be a time-reversed reflection of the usual physiological response to a stimulus. It appears to resemble precognition (consciously knowing something is going to happen before it does), but PAA specifically refers to unconscious physiological reactions as opposed to conscious premonitions. Though it is possible that PAA underlies the conscious experience of precognition, experiments testing this idea have not produced clear results.
The first part of this paper reviews the evidence for PAA and examines the two most difficult challenges for obtaining valid evidence for it: expectation bias and multiple analyses. The second part speculates on possible mechanisms and the theoretical implications of PAA for understanding physiology and consciousness. The third part examines potential practical applications. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146/abstract
- See more at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146/abstract#sthash.xA8qx0xD.dpuf
PAA is an unconscious phenomenon that seems to be a time-reversed reflection of the usual physiological response to a stimulus. It appears to resemble precognition (consciously knowing something is going to happen before it does), but PAA specifically refers to unconscious physiological reactions as opposed to conscious premonitions. Though it is possible that PAA underlies the conscious experience of precognition, experiments testing this idea have not produced clear results.
The first part of this paper reviews the evidence for PAA and examines the two most difficult challenges for obtaining valid evidence for it: expectation bias and multiple analyses. The second part speculates on possible mechanisms and the theoretical implications of PAA for understanding physiology and consciousness. The third part examines potential practical applications. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146/abstract
- See more at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146/abstract#sthash.xA8qx0xD.dpuf
Telepathy? Psychokinesis? Mind-reading? Nope.
The brain does have a “sixth sense” beyond taste, smell, touch, sight and hearing, researchers say, but it’s nothing worthy of the X-Men.
According to Utrech University’s Benjamin Harvey, a sixth part of the human brain works topographically, as do the five sections associated with senses, to map numbers in our brains and count items in the world at large, a concept referred to as “numerosity.”
"We use symbolic numbers to represent numerosity and other aspects of magnitude, but the symbol itself is only a representation," Harvey said in a press release announcing the news.
To uncover this “sixth sense,” Harvey and his colleagues asked eight adult study participants to look at patterns of dots that varied in number over time, all the while analyzing the neural response in their brains.
Their efforts revealed a topographical layout of numerosity in the human brain; the small quantities of dots the participants observed were encoded by neurons in one part of the brain, and the larger quantities, in another. This finding demonstrates that topography can emerge not just for lower-level cognitive functions, like the primary senses, but for higher-level cognitive functions, too.
"We are very excited that association cortex can produce emergent topographic structures," Harvey said.
"We believe this will lead to a much more complete understanding of humans' unique numerical and mathematical skills," Harvey said
The brain does have a “sixth sense” beyond taste, smell, touch, sight and hearing, researchers say, but it’s nothing worthy of the X-Men.
According to Utrech University’s Benjamin Harvey, a sixth part of the human brain works topographically, as do the five sections associated with senses, to map numbers in our brains and count items in the world at large, a concept referred to as “numerosity.”
"We use symbolic numbers to represent numerosity and other aspects of magnitude, but the symbol itself is only a representation," Harvey said in a press release announcing the news.
To uncover this “sixth sense,” Harvey and his colleagues asked eight adult study participants to look at patterns of dots that varied in number over time, all the while analyzing the neural response in their brains.
Their efforts revealed a topographical layout of numerosity in the human brain; the small quantities of dots the participants observed were encoded by neurons in one part of the brain, and the larger quantities, in another. This finding demonstrates that topography can emerge not just for lower-level cognitive functions, like the primary senses, but for higher-level cognitive functions, too.
"We are very excited that association cortex can produce emergent topographic structures," Harvey said.
"We believe this will lead to a much more complete understanding of humans' unique numerical and mathematical skills," Harvey said
Randy Mack, We Go There Together
Non-Conscious Primordial Awareness
http://www.amazon.com/First-Sight-Parapsychology-Everyday-Life/dp/1442213906
In First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life (2012), James Carpenter reframes the memes and tropes of ESP. He concludes, "we have learned that many implicit psychological processes precede our experiences too, processes like subliminal sensations, stored memories and long-term values. These things aren't conscious in themselves, but the unconscious mind uses them to help lead to whatever we do become conscious of. A difference about this theory, called "First Sight," is that it assumes that a much bigger domain of unconscious information stands behind experience. This includes things that are beyond the reach of our senses -- it includes the extrasensory. And it assumes that this reference to extrasensory information is not rare, but that it is continual.
First Sight brings in what is popularly called the "paranormal." It is different from previous ways of thinking about the paranormal in that it shows that our use of extrasensory information is actually normal and helpful, although unconscious. No "para" is needed anymore. This theory leads us to an expanded idea of our normal psychology."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-carpenter-phd/first-sight_b_1940728.html
"Often seen as supernatural, unpredictable, illusory and possibly dangerous, ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance and other parapsychological activities are actually happening all the time and help us make sense of everyday experiences. First Sight provides a new way of understanding such experiences and describes a way of thinking about the unconscious mind that makes it clear that these abilities are not rare and anomalous, but instead are used by all of us all the time, unconsciously and efficiently.
Drawing upon a broad array of studies in contemporary psychology, the author integrates a new model for understanding these unusual abilities with the best research in psychology on problems as diverse as memory, perception, personality, creativity and fear. In doing so, he illustrates how the field of parapsychology, which, historically, has been riddled with confusion, skepticism and false claims, can move from the edges of science to its center, where it will offer fascinating new knowledge about unmapped aspects of our nature. The author demonstrates that the new model accounts for accumulated findings very well, and explains previous mysteries, resolves apparent contradictions, and offers clear directions for further study. First Sight also ventures beyond the laboratory to explain such things as why apparent paranormal experiences are so rare, why they need not be feared, and how they can be more intentionally accessed. Further study of this theory is likely to lead to a “technology” of parapsychological processes while drastically revising our conception of the science of the mind toward a new science more humane and more replete with possibility than we have imagined in the past.
I have been increasingly troubled by the gulf between our growing knowledge about ESP (and related ideas such as telepathy, precognition and psychokinesis, together referred to as "psi phenomena") and the rest of our understanding of how we tick. First Sight brings them together.
My major thesis is that psychic abilities such as ESP -- long considered to occur only in "gifted" individuals or on rare traumatic occasions -- are, in fact, ongoing subconscious processes that continuously influence all of us in making everyday decisions. As the model's name implies, these common abilities should not be regarded as an incidental "second sight" but as a critical "first sight," an immediate initial contact with information not otherwise presented to our known senses. And just as we are not typically aware of other subliminal or incidental stimuli that impinge upon us and influence us in myriad ways, so too we typically remain unaware of this extrasensory information and its influence. Subliminal primes lead us to experience related things more quickly and more emotionally than we otherwise would. Psi information does the same. Our unconscious use of non-local information is essentially continuous with how we use other kinds of implicit information. ESP, memory, subliminal perception, implicit physiological responses to emotional events and many other things all follow the same tacit rules. No need for "para."
The model tells what psi is for. It's for helping to implicitly guide us in forming each thought and decision. The theory spells out how and when non-local information can be expected to turn up in our experience and behavior and when it should not. The research facts fit these hypotheses well.
The model also tells us where psi fits into personal experience. When are we likely to experience it, and how might we develop this aspect of ourselves? Some of the things that make experiencing psi more likely include an openness to it as a source of information, an open and non-analytical state of mind, and a great need for the particular information.
Review: This lengthy book offers a detailed and extensive examination of a new model of how the unconscious mind works, which Carpenter (psychiatry, Univ. of North Carolina) labels 'First Sight.' Carpenter’s argument is that abilities like extrasensory perception (ESP), parapsychology, psychokinesis, and paranormal experiences are neither unusual nor rare—in fact, humans use them, without knowing it, all the time. The First Sight model asserts that, first, all people have unlimited parapsychological potential and, second, that parapsychological behaviors and experiences occur unconsciously and purposefully. Carpenter supports these two statements by explaining how unconscious parapsychological activities help us make sense of the world, then covers areas of experience like anticipation, summation, intentionality, and frustration, among others. The book concludes with a presentation of research findings that support Carpenter’s theory, as well as suggestions for future directions of research. . . . Recommended for serious readers interested in a scientific theory for parapsychological phenomena that is supported by case studies.
(Library Journal )
Carpenter (psychiatry, Univ. of North Carolina) has presented a model of the mind that is both innovative and compelling. He proposes that so-called "psychic abilities" (such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition) do not comprise an esoteric "second sight" but are an adaptive and ubiquitous "first sight" that permits an immediate encounter with data not immediately available to the known senses. There are other subliminal or incidental factors that influence volition and decision making, and the author proposes that psychic abilities be added to this list. This book will challenge skeptical readers but his model has considerable explanatory power, something missing from most other parapsychological speculations. Carpenter is both a psychotherapist and a research scientist, and he has drawn from both these areas of expertise to illustrate his model with case histories and anecdotes; he also makes connections with the mainstream psychological literature in memory, personality, creativity, and emotionality. Carpenter's chapter on future research directions describes experiments that could put his proposals to the test. Readers may agree or disagree with Carpenter, but they will find his ideas provocative and challenging. Summing Up: Recommended.
(CHOICE )
James C. Carpenter has presented a model of the mind that is both innovative and compelling. Psychic abilities, such as telepathy and precognition, fit easily into this model and are seen as not only ubiquitous but adaptive. First Sight will challenge readers who are skeptical about so-called "extra-sensory" perception, as well as those who are convinced of its existence or those who are simply curious. Carpenter opens the book with a provocative summary of the assumptions underlying his model, and those who read the first page will have trouble putting the book aside until they are finished. Readers may agree with First Sight, or they might disagree with First Sight, but they will never forget it.
(Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., co-editor Varieties of Anomalous Experience and professor of psychology, Saybrook University )
Well-named as he is, Jim Carpenter proves himself a master carpenter of the mind in constructing a provocative new theory that integrates ESP and other psi phenomena into the overall edifice of human consciousness. According to this theory, ESP is not really the Second Sight that common sense has supposed it to be, but indeed is the very earliest information-gathering process of our being, the First Sight upon which all other perceptual and mental processes have become intricately overlaid. The ramifications of the First Sight theory are tremendous, leading to a whole new view of human consciousness and for its serious study by psychologists and parapsychologists alike.
(Sally Rhine Feather, Ph.D., executive director emeritus, Rhine Research Center )
"In First Sight, Dr. James Carpenter shows that there is nothing 'para' about paranormal abilities; they are a normal, natural, and vital part of the human endowment on which we continually rely. In this important book, Carpenter has given us a new vision of what it means to be human. Highly recommended."
(Larry Dossey, M.D., author, Reinventing Medicine and The Power Of Premonitions )
“First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life is written from James Carpenter’s unique dual perspective as both a respected research scientist and a practicing psychotherapist. It is an exciting and elegantly written book that simultaneously makes a major theoretical contribution to the science of psychic functioning while providing an accurate, non-technical overview of the field accessible to the interested general reader.”
(Daryl J. Bem, professor emeritus of psychology, Cornell University )
“Beyond the sixth sense and before second sight there simmers a more fundamental First Sight. In this radical reframing of the meaning and mechanisms of psychic phenomena, James Carpenter proposes that where the edges of mind and matter meet all distinctions between inner and outer, subjectivity and objectivity, disappear. First Sight reigns in this strange place where everyday reality blurs, and it is here where extrasensory perception and other psychic effects suddenly make a good deal of sense. A refreshingly novel approach to understanding psychic phenomena.”
(Dean Radin, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences )
"Psychic abilities like ESP are usually treated as great mysteries, either to be desperately and illogically explained away since they don't fit into our predominant materialistic world view, or embraced uncritically as a prop for unexamined personal belief systems. While we still don't have (and perhaps won't ever have) a simple, physicalistic explanation for psychic abilities, we have a lot of psychological data on what effects it and how it fits in with the psychology of our minds. This data has been pretty scattered and unconnected, though, so Carpenter's book is a brilliant integration of what we know. I'm supposed to be an expert on the subject, but I know this book is going to take me in whole new directions!"
(Charles T. Tart, professor emeritus of psychology, University of California-Davis and author of The End of Materialism and Altered States of Consciousness )
http://firstsightbook.com/wp/?p=127
The First Sight Model asserts that a psychic connection to the world is going on all the time for everyone. If that is so, someone might ask why everyone isn’t having psychic experiences (ESP or PK) all the time? The model also has an explanation for this. The psi-connection is innately unconscious. For First Sight, psychic engagement is not just rarely conscious, it is actually never conscious. Then why do we ever think we have a psychic experience? Because we succeed in interpreting some implicit expression of the psychic engagement. We notice a hunch or a shift in mood or pay attention to imagery appearing on the mind’s inner screen, or reflect on the events of a dream, and connect them to something real and beyond our sensory boundaries – something either hidden or far away or yet to happen. In the case of PK we notice an odd behavior of some physical object, and then see a plausible connection to some inner state of desire or frustration. We can do these things on purpose, or we can just happen upon them.
Back up a bit. Why should psi engagements be expressed by such inadvertent, implicit events? Because we know that all unconscious mental processes are liable to be, and psi seems to work as just another one of those processes. For example, this is how we know that a subliminal prime has influenced someone. It alters the probability of the content of the prime turning up somehow in the person’s spontaneous imagery or feelings or decisions – all without the person ever knowing that the prime has participated in forming those experiences!
There is another wrinkle that has to be added in. Unconscious information like extrasensory events or subliminal primes do not always enter into experience in an additive way. Sometimes they enter in in a negative, subtractive way, leading us to avoid the content in our images, etc. This would seem to make it hopeless to know when such a stimulus is active or not, except that this unconscious decision of pro or con follows meaningful patterns that can be figured out by the right kind of research. Cognitive psychologists and parapsychologists both have been busy trying to determine these hidden patterns, and both have made a lot of progress. One fascinating thing – without their knowing it, the patterns they have found tend to look very similar!
Read an excerpt here: Subliminal Primes
http://firstsightbook.com/wp/?page_id=72
A New Conception Guided by Two Analogies Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees. —Erwin Schrödinger
First Sight offers a new understanding of what psi is. It proposes that psi is a primary aspect of an organism’s engagement with an extended universe of meaning that is carried out perpetually and almost entirely unconsciously. In the most basic terms, psi is the direct, unconscious expression of unconscious intention as it is engaged with things that are outside the sensory boundaries of the organism. If the expression is an effect upon the organism’s own experience and behavior, and parts of reality distant from the organism are consulted in the process, we speak of this as extrasensory perception: the receptive or afferent side of psi. If the expression is an effect upon parts of reality outside the ordinary sensory boundaries of the organism, and no ordinary physical action upon those things is involved, we call it psychokinesis, the active or efferent psi domain. I will suggest some modified terms for these things in chapter 6.
The First Sight model is based upon a pair of related analogies. They can be expressed in the form of questions. What if ESP is like subliminal perception? What if psychokinesis is like unconsciously but psychologically meaningful expressive behaviors? These two things can be seen to imply each other. Subliminal perception (and ESP) can only be discerned by the inadvertent but meaningful behavior that it evokes. Inadvertent behavior can only be seen to be psychologically meaningful by virtue of the unconscious events (subliminal or extrasensory) that have evoked them. We will take these two guiding questions in turn.
ESP AND SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION
Most people think of subliminal perception as a freakish and somewhat frightening way to manipulate people. First published in 1957, Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders created a firestorm of interest in this sort of manipulation, and it has since gone through nine more editions.1 However, in its common, moment-by-moment function, subliminal perception is actually a useful part of the history of every sensory perception.
Turn and look at something, anything. Perhaps you see a certain book on a shelf. Your eye moved to it, and you saw it. However, just before you formed a conscious perception of the book there was a very brief time, a few hundredths of a second, when photons bouncing off the book reached your nervous system before you became conscious of it. These preconscious photons also contributed to your visual experience, even though they were unconscious and you had no awareness of them. Why do we believe this? Because of experiments on subliminal perception. In such an experiment, the researcher controls the flow of light that reaches the retina and interrupts it by some sort of shield after that split second and before you are able to form an experience. Participants staring at a screen in such studies are aware only of a brief flicker of light, and perhaps not even that. No book.
And yet, these preconscious flickers have effects. Psychologists call them primes, because they facilitate the development of particular kinds of responses. If these flickers are of something emotionally disturbing or something happy, you will find yourself a few minutes down the road feeling a little more upset or happy, depending. Suppose the flicker is a picture of one person hitting another. You are not conscious of having seen anything, but if the experimenter then asks you to associate to the spoken word beat (or beet), you are more likely to think of a blow than a vegetable. This very early stage of a perception primes you to feel or think or understand in particular directions that are appropriate for the experience that is about to form.
This shows that even before you have had time to have any conscious awareness of anything, you are already beginning to respond to what you will become aware of shortly. Like a grossly detailed map, it does not show you the house you are headed for, but it directs you to the neighborhood. What is this good for? Surely it speeds up your ability to recognize what you are about to see and respond to the situation in an apt way. From an evolutionary angle, this extra speed could sometimes have important advantages. It probably helped some of your ancestors reach childbearing age and make your existence possible. It is true enough that advertisers can try to sway our purchases or our votes in certain directions using such preconscious primes, but in the common way we all use them, they are ubiquitous and helpful. This whole subject of subliminal perception is so central to the First Sight model that it will be discussed further later on, in chapters 4 and 9.
For many decades the reality of subliminal perception was hotly debated among psychologists. The controversy was almost as heated as the controversy over parapsychology, and for some of the same reasons. It seems an insult to common sense to think that something so brief or faint that it is not consciously experienced can act as if it were a kind of experience by arousing meaningfully related responses. Much research was occupied with trying to demonstrate that subliminal perceptions were genuinely unconscious, or that they were not. One criterion used recently has been to set the stimulus at such a minimal level that the participant cannot accurately guess whether or not any sort of stimulation has even occurred. In recent years this controversy has died down, and many researchers have become so comfortable with the reality—and the power—of subliminal primes that they are widely used in research on such other questions as how opinions are formed, how moods affect actions, and how persons are perceived.
The point to emphasize here is that these subliminal primes are not available to conscious experience. It is really inappropriate and misleading to speak of them as perceptions at all. The problem came partly from the fact that consciousness is not simply all or nothing; it is a continuum. We can be partly aware of something. This is how the study of subliminality began, with perceptions that were somewhat clear but partly uncertain. When research progressed to the point that effects were being described with stimuli that were deeply subliminal, however, to call them perceptions at all became problematic. They are not conscious. Someone exposed to them does not know what they are (knowing is something we do consciously). We may not even know that anything has occurred. And yet they affect us, somewhat in the manner that a prime affects a pump.
WHAT IF EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION
IS LIKE SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION?
If extrasensory perception is like subliminal perception, then it, too, works as an unconscious prime, affecting our experiences and behaviors but never being consciously available as such. The main difference is that in an extrasensory perception the intensity of the stimulus has dropped down to zero, as far as the sensory system of the person is concerned. Like a subliminal perception, it will not be conscious, not be known, and not in fact be any sort of perception at all. Might this be the case? Exploring this question was an important stimulus in developing the First Sight model. In fact, I believe that extrasensory perception is exactly like that. Just how this is so will be elaborated further in chapter 4.
PSYCHOKINESIS AND UNCONSCIOUSLY EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOR
Sigmund Freud made Western society familiar with the notion that the symptoms of various psychiatric disorders could be understood to be unwitting expressions of unconscious mental processes. He and his followers developed an elaborate theory of these unconscious processes, their origins, their dynamics, and their treatment through techniques of conscious uncovering. Partly due to the influence of a powerful pharmaceutical industry, this idea that symptoms have implicit meaning is perhaps less widespread today in favor of a model that understands people as isolated organisms with hypothetical brain diseases to be altered by medications. In everyday psychotherapeutic practice, however, uncovering unconscious meanings is a staple. In a single day an average therapist might find that a case of depression is an expression of the shame aroused by a loss, a teenager’s falling grades speak for loyalty to a divorced and missing parent, and an anxiety before groups communicates a sense of guilt over some earlier failure. The shame, the loss, the loyalty, and the guilt are all unconscious. Making them conscious, seeing the connections, helps to unravel and relieve the symptoms.
It is not only in the realm of psychiatric dysfunction that such behavioral expressions of unconscious issues go on. They go on with everyone, all the time. Freud (1958b) himself moved in this direction, by writing about the “psychopathology of everyday life.”
We needn’t speak of psychopathology at all, however. Consciously inadvertent behaviors can regularly be seen to speak for meanings that are out of sight at the moment, if we wish to go to the trouble of untangling the connections. It isn’t only painfully avoided meanings that may be implied by our behaviors. It may be anything that we simply don’t have in mind at the moment, and it may be many things that are simply (by virtue of our constitution) never amenable to direct awareness at all. Mr. X is intent on what he is trying to communicate in his conversation with Ms. Y. As he speaks he takes a step toward the next room, then stands still again as he continues to talk. If he bothers to reflect on the meaning of the step, it will occur to him easily: he had decided a minute before to check on something going on in the next room. In the conversational moment his intention was temporarily forgotten, but he still expressed it inadvertently as his thinking and talking and listening flowed on. Reflect upon your own behavior and that of others around you, and I believe you will see a wealth of this going on continually and smoothly.
Sometimes unconscious behaviors and subliminal primes work hand in hand. The unconscious meaning prompting the behavior may not be just forgotten at the moment, it may have been apprehended subliminally and was never conscious at all. Consider the findings of Aarts et al. (2008) that were reported in the prestigious journal Science. Some of their participants were exposed to very brief presentations of words having to do with exertion. Half of the people were also consciously shown very positive scenes to observe while they were so primed, while half were not. Then all participants were asked to exert by squeezing on a hand grip. Those persons exposed unconsciously to the exertion primes gripped more quickly and aggressively than those who were not exposed. And those who were primed while looking at the positive scenes squeezed the hardest of all. As the author conclude: “The mere activation of the idea of a behavioral act moves the human body without the person consciously deciding to take action.”
Is this surprising and mysterious? It may seem so, but if these psychologists could capture this so easily in their laboratory it must be going on very frequently for everyone every day. Does it seem insulting to think that you are constantly being influenced by unconscious stimuli? Perhaps, but remember how wonderfully adaptive this is. It is not so much that the subliminal primes are controlling our behavior as that we are unconsciously using subliminal information to respond in a quick and optimal way to what will come to be seen as the demands of a situation. We use the primes implicitly in the service of our unconscious intentions.
WHAT IF PSYCHOKINESIS IS A KIND
OF UNCONSCIOUSLY EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOR?
If psychokinesis is unconsciously expressive behavior, then it also functions as an inadvertent statement of our unconscious intentions. The only difference from other unconsciously expressive behaviors is that it occurs outside of the physical boundaries of the organism. Instead of an odd act of clumsiness resulting in an accident and expressing an unconscious sense (perhaps) of guilt, a meaningful picture falls from the wall, expressing the same inner condition. Instead of gripping something extra forcefully to express an unconscious sense of pleasure in effort, a string of propitious random numbers spins out of an experimenter’s random event generator, speaking for the same inner state. Is this a sensible way to think of the odd events (experimental and spontaneous) that we take to indicate psychokinesis? I believe that it is, and I will try to argue the case in more detail in chapter 7.
NOTE 1. Packard, 2007.
In First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life (2012), James Carpenter reframes the memes and tropes of ESP. He concludes, "we have learned that many implicit psychological processes precede our experiences too, processes like subliminal sensations, stored memories and long-term values. These things aren't conscious in themselves, but the unconscious mind uses them to help lead to whatever we do become conscious of. A difference about this theory, called "First Sight," is that it assumes that a much bigger domain of unconscious information stands behind experience. This includes things that are beyond the reach of our senses -- it includes the extrasensory. And it assumes that this reference to extrasensory information is not rare, but that it is continual.
First Sight brings in what is popularly called the "paranormal." It is different from previous ways of thinking about the paranormal in that it shows that our use of extrasensory information is actually normal and helpful, although unconscious. No "para" is needed anymore. This theory leads us to an expanded idea of our normal psychology."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-carpenter-phd/first-sight_b_1940728.html
"Often seen as supernatural, unpredictable, illusory and possibly dangerous, ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance and other parapsychological activities are actually happening all the time and help us make sense of everyday experiences. First Sight provides a new way of understanding such experiences and describes a way of thinking about the unconscious mind that makes it clear that these abilities are not rare and anomalous, but instead are used by all of us all the time, unconsciously and efficiently.
Drawing upon a broad array of studies in contemporary psychology, the author integrates a new model for understanding these unusual abilities with the best research in psychology on problems as diverse as memory, perception, personality, creativity and fear. In doing so, he illustrates how the field of parapsychology, which, historically, has been riddled with confusion, skepticism and false claims, can move from the edges of science to its center, where it will offer fascinating new knowledge about unmapped aspects of our nature. The author demonstrates that the new model accounts for accumulated findings very well, and explains previous mysteries, resolves apparent contradictions, and offers clear directions for further study. First Sight also ventures beyond the laboratory to explain such things as why apparent paranormal experiences are so rare, why they need not be feared, and how they can be more intentionally accessed. Further study of this theory is likely to lead to a “technology” of parapsychological processes while drastically revising our conception of the science of the mind toward a new science more humane and more replete with possibility than we have imagined in the past.
I have been increasingly troubled by the gulf between our growing knowledge about ESP (and related ideas such as telepathy, precognition and psychokinesis, together referred to as "psi phenomena") and the rest of our understanding of how we tick. First Sight brings them together.
My major thesis is that psychic abilities such as ESP -- long considered to occur only in "gifted" individuals or on rare traumatic occasions -- are, in fact, ongoing subconscious processes that continuously influence all of us in making everyday decisions. As the model's name implies, these common abilities should not be regarded as an incidental "second sight" but as a critical "first sight," an immediate initial contact with information not otherwise presented to our known senses. And just as we are not typically aware of other subliminal or incidental stimuli that impinge upon us and influence us in myriad ways, so too we typically remain unaware of this extrasensory information and its influence. Subliminal primes lead us to experience related things more quickly and more emotionally than we otherwise would. Psi information does the same. Our unconscious use of non-local information is essentially continuous with how we use other kinds of implicit information. ESP, memory, subliminal perception, implicit physiological responses to emotional events and many other things all follow the same tacit rules. No need for "para."
The model tells what psi is for. It's for helping to implicitly guide us in forming each thought and decision. The theory spells out how and when non-local information can be expected to turn up in our experience and behavior and when it should not. The research facts fit these hypotheses well.
The model also tells us where psi fits into personal experience. When are we likely to experience it, and how might we develop this aspect of ourselves? Some of the things that make experiencing psi more likely include an openness to it as a source of information, an open and non-analytical state of mind, and a great need for the particular information.
Review: This lengthy book offers a detailed and extensive examination of a new model of how the unconscious mind works, which Carpenter (psychiatry, Univ. of North Carolina) labels 'First Sight.' Carpenter’s argument is that abilities like extrasensory perception (ESP), parapsychology, psychokinesis, and paranormal experiences are neither unusual nor rare—in fact, humans use them, without knowing it, all the time. The First Sight model asserts that, first, all people have unlimited parapsychological potential and, second, that parapsychological behaviors and experiences occur unconsciously and purposefully. Carpenter supports these two statements by explaining how unconscious parapsychological activities help us make sense of the world, then covers areas of experience like anticipation, summation, intentionality, and frustration, among others. The book concludes with a presentation of research findings that support Carpenter’s theory, as well as suggestions for future directions of research. . . . Recommended for serious readers interested in a scientific theory for parapsychological phenomena that is supported by case studies.
(Library Journal )
Carpenter (psychiatry, Univ. of North Carolina) has presented a model of the mind that is both innovative and compelling. He proposes that so-called "psychic abilities" (such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition) do not comprise an esoteric "second sight" but are an adaptive and ubiquitous "first sight" that permits an immediate encounter with data not immediately available to the known senses. There are other subliminal or incidental factors that influence volition and decision making, and the author proposes that psychic abilities be added to this list. This book will challenge skeptical readers but his model has considerable explanatory power, something missing from most other parapsychological speculations. Carpenter is both a psychotherapist and a research scientist, and he has drawn from both these areas of expertise to illustrate his model with case histories and anecdotes; he also makes connections with the mainstream psychological literature in memory, personality, creativity, and emotionality. Carpenter's chapter on future research directions describes experiments that could put his proposals to the test. Readers may agree or disagree with Carpenter, but they will find his ideas provocative and challenging. Summing Up: Recommended.
(CHOICE )
James C. Carpenter has presented a model of the mind that is both innovative and compelling. Psychic abilities, such as telepathy and precognition, fit easily into this model and are seen as not only ubiquitous but adaptive. First Sight will challenge readers who are skeptical about so-called "extra-sensory" perception, as well as those who are convinced of its existence or those who are simply curious. Carpenter opens the book with a provocative summary of the assumptions underlying his model, and those who read the first page will have trouble putting the book aside until they are finished. Readers may agree with First Sight, or they might disagree with First Sight, but they will never forget it.
(Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., co-editor Varieties of Anomalous Experience and professor of psychology, Saybrook University )
Well-named as he is, Jim Carpenter proves himself a master carpenter of the mind in constructing a provocative new theory that integrates ESP and other psi phenomena into the overall edifice of human consciousness. According to this theory, ESP is not really the Second Sight that common sense has supposed it to be, but indeed is the very earliest information-gathering process of our being, the First Sight upon which all other perceptual and mental processes have become intricately overlaid. The ramifications of the First Sight theory are tremendous, leading to a whole new view of human consciousness and for its serious study by psychologists and parapsychologists alike.
(Sally Rhine Feather, Ph.D., executive director emeritus, Rhine Research Center )
"In First Sight, Dr. James Carpenter shows that there is nothing 'para' about paranormal abilities; they are a normal, natural, and vital part of the human endowment on which we continually rely. In this important book, Carpenter has given us a new vision of what it means to be human. Highly recommended."
(Larry Dossey, M.D., author, Reinventing Medicine and The Power Of Premonitions )
“First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life is written from James Carpenter’s unique dual perspective as both a respected research scientist and a practicing psychotherapist. It is an exciting and elegantly written book that simultaneously makes a major theoretical contribution to the science of psychic functioning while providing an accurate, non-technical overview of the field accessible to the interested general reader.”
(Daryl J. Bem, professor emeritus of psychology, Cornell University )
“Beyond the sixth sense and before second sight there simmers a more fundamental First Sight. In this radical reframing of the meaning and mechanisms of psychic phenomena, James Carpenter proposes that where the edges of mind and matter meet all distinctions between inner and outer, subjectivity and objectivity, disappear. First Sight reigns in this strange place where everyday reality blurs, and it is here where extrasensory perception and other psychic effects suddenly make a good deal of sense. A refreshingly novel approach to understanding psychic phenomena.”
(Dean Radin, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences )
"Psychic abilities like ESP are usually treated as great mysteries, either to be desperately and illogically explained away since they don't fit into our predominant materialistic world view, or embraced uncritically as a prop for unexamined personal belief systems. While we still don't have (and perhaps won't ever have) a simple, physicalistic explanation for psychic abilities, we have a lot of psychological data on what effects it and how it fits in with the psychology of our minds. This data has been pretty scattered and unconnected, though, so Carpenter's book is a brilliant integration of what we know. I'm supposed to be an expert on the subject, but I know this book is going to take me in whole new directions!"
(Charles T. Tart, professor emeritus of psychology, University of California-Davis and author of The End of Materialism and Altered States of Consciousness )
http://firstsightbook.com/wp/?p=127
The First Sight Model asserts that a psychic connection to the world is going on all the time for everyone. If that is so, someone might ask why everyone isn’t having psychic experiences (ESP or PK) all the time? The model also has an explanation for this. The psi-connection is innately unconscious. For First Sight, psychic engagement is not just rarely conscious, it is actually never conscious. Then why do we ever think we have a psychic experience? Because we succeed in interpreting some implicit expression of the psychic engagement. We notice a hunch or a shift in mood or pay attention to imagery appearing on the mind’s inner screen, or reflect on the events of a dream, and connect them to something real and beyond our sensory boundaries – something either hidden or far away or yet to happen. In the case of PK we notice an odd behavior of some physical object, and then see a plausible connection to some inner state of desire or frustration. We can do these things on purpose, or we can just happen upon them.
Back up a bit. Why should psi engagements be expressed by such inadvertent, implicit events? Because we know that all unconscious mental processes are liable to be, and psi seems to work as just another one of those processes. For example, this is how we know that a subliminal prime has influenced someone. It alters the probability of the content of the prime turning up somehow in the person’s spontaneous imagery or feelings or decisions – all without the person ever knowing that the prime has participated in forming those experiences!
There is another wrinkle that has to be added in. Unconscious information like extrasensory events or subliminal primes do not always enter into experience in an additive way. Sometimes they enter in in a negative, subtractive way, leading us to avoid the content in our images, etc. This would seem to make it hopeless to know when such a stimulus is active or not, except that this unconscious decision of pro or con follows meaningful patterns that can be figured out by the right kind of research. Cognitive psychologists and parapsychologists both have been busy trying to determine these hidden patterns, and both have made a lot of progress. One fascinating thing – without their knowing it, the patterns they have found tend to look very similar!
Read an excerpt here: Subliminal Primes
http://firstsightbook.com/wp/?page_id=72
A New Conception Guided by Two Analogies Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees. —Erwin Schrödinger
First Sight offers a new understanding of what psi is. It proposes that psi is a primary aspect of an organism’s engagement with an extended universe of meaning that is carried out perpetually and almost entirely unconsciously. In the most basic terms, psi is the direct, unconscious expression of unconscious intention as it is engaged with things that are outside the sensory boundaries of the organism. If the expression is an effect upon the organism’s own experience and behavior, and parts of reality distant from the organism are consulted in the process, we speak of this as extrasensory perception: the receptive or afferent side of psi. If the expression is an effect upon parts of reality outside the ordinary sensory boundaries of the organism, and no ordinary physical action upon those things is involved, we call it psychokinesis, the active or efferent psi domain. I will suggest some modified terms for these things in chapter 6.
The First Sight model is based upon a pair of related analogies. They can be expressed in the form of questions. What if ESP is like subliminal perception? What if psychokinesis is like unconsciously but psychologically meaningful expressive behaviors? These two things can be seen to imply each other. Subliminal perception (and ESP) can only be discerned by the inadvertent but meaningful behavior that it evokes. Inadvertent behavior can only be seen to be psychologically meaningful by virtue of the unconscious events (subliminal or extrasensory) that have evoked them. We will take these two guiding questions in turn.
ESP AND SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION
Most people think of subliminal perception as a freakish and somewhat frightening way to manipulate people. First published in 1957, Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders created a firestorm of interest in this sort of manipulation, and it has since gone through nine more editions.1 However, in its common, moment-by-moment function, subliminal perception is actually a useful part of the history of every sensory perception.
Turn and look at something, anything. Perhaps you see a certain book on a shelf. Your eye moved to it, and you saw it. However, just before you formed a conscious perception of the book there was a very brief time, a few hundredths of a second, when photons bouncing off the book reached your nervous system before you became conscious of it. These preconscious photons also contributed to your visual experience, even though they were unconscious and you had no awareness of them. Why do we believe this? Because of experiments on subliminal perception. In such an experiment, the researcher controls the flow of light that reaches the retina and interrupts it by some sort of shield after that split second and before you are able to form an experience. Participants staring at a screen in such studies are aware only of a brief flicker of light, and perhaps not even that. No book.
And yet, these preconscious flickers have effects. Psychologists call them primes, because they facilitate the development of particular kinds of responses. If these flickers are of something emotionally disturbing or something happy, you will find yourself a few minutes down the road feeling a little more upset or happy, depending. Suppose the flicker is a picture of one person hitting another. You are not conscious of having seen anything, but if the experimenter then asks you to associate to the spoken word beat (or beet), you are more likely to think of a blow than a vegetable. This very early stage of a perception primes you to feel or think or understand in particular directions that are appropriate for the experience that is about to form.
This shows that even before you have had time to have any conscious awareness of anything, you are already beginning to respond to what you will become aware of shortly. Like a grossly detailed map, it does not show you the house you are headed for, but it directs you to the neighborhood. What is this good for? Surely it speeds up your ability to recognize what you are about to see and respond to the situation in an apt way. From an evolutionary angle, this extra speed could sometimes have important advantages. It probably helped some of your ancestors reach childbearing age and make your existence possible. It is true enough that advertisers can try to sway our purchases or our votes in certain directions using such preconscious primes, but in the common way we all use them, they are ubiquitous and helpful. This whole subject of subliminal perception is so central to the First Sight model that it will be discussed further later on, in chapters 4 and 9.
For many decades the reality of subliminal perception was hotly debated among psychologists. The controversy was almost as heated as the controversy over parapsychology, and for some of the same reasons. It seems an insult to common sense to think that something so brief or faint that it is not consciously experienced can act as if it were a kind of experience by arousing meaningfully related responses. Much research was occupied with trying to demonstrate that subliminal perceptions were genuinely unconscious, or that they were not. One criterion used recently has been to set the stimulus at such a minimal level that the participant cannot accurately guess whether or not any sort of stimulation has even occurred. In recent years this controversy has died down, and many researchers have become so comfortable with the reality—and the power—of subliminal primes that they are widely used in research on such other questions as how opinions are formed, how moods affect actions, and how persons are perceived.
The point to emphasize here is that these subliminal primes are not available to conscious experience. It is really inappropriate and misleading to speak of them as perceptions at all. The problem came partly from the fact that consciousness is not simply all or nothing; it is a continuum. We can be partly aware of something. This is how the study of subliminality began, with perceptions that were somewhat clear but partly uncertain. When research progressed to the point that effects were being described with stimuli that were deeply subliminal, however, to call them perceptions at all became problematic. They are not conscious. Someone exposed to them does not know what they are (knowing is something we do consciously). We may not even know that anything has occurred. And yet they affect us, somewhat in the manner that a prime affects a pump.
WHAT IF EXTRASENSORY PERCEPTION
IS LIKE SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION?
If extrasensory perception is like subliminal perception, then it, too, works as an unconscious prime, affecting our experiences and behaviors but never being consciously available as such. The main difference is that in an extrasensory perception the intensity of the stimulus has dropped down to zero, as far as the sensory system of the person is concerned. Like a subliminal perception, it will not be conscious, not be known, and not in fact be any sort of perception at all. Might this be the case? Exploring this question was an important stimulus in developing the First Sight model. In fact, I believe that extrasensory perception is exactly like that. Just how this is so will be elaborated further in chapter 4.
PSYCHOKINESIS AND UNCONSCIOUSLY EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOR
Sigmund Freud made Western society familiar with the notion that the symptoms of various psychiatric disorders could be understood to be unwitting expressions of unconscious mental processes. He and his followers developed an elaborate theory of these unconscious processes, their origins, their dynamics, and their treatment through techniques of conscious uncovering. Partly due to the influence of a powerful pharmaceutical industry, this idea that symptoms have implicit meaning is perhaps less widespread today in favor of a model that understands people as isolated organisms with hypothetical brain diseases to be altered by medications. In everyday psychotherapeutic practice, however, uncovering unconscious meanings is a staple. In a single day an average therapist might find that a case of depression is an expression of the shame aroused by a loss, a teenager’s falling grades speak for loyalty to a divorced and missing parent, and an anxiety before groups communicates a sense of guilt over some earlier failure. The shame, the loss, the loyalty, and the guilt are all unconscious. Making them conscious, seeing the connections, helps to unravel and relieve the symptoms.
It is not only in the realm of psychiatric dysfunction that such behavioral expressions of unconscious issues go on. They go on with everyone, all the time. Freud (1958b) himself moved in this direction, by writing about the “psychopathology of everyday life.”
We needn’t speak of psychopathology at all, however. Consciously inadvertent behaviors can regularly be seen to speak for meanings that are out of sight at the moment, if we wish to go to the trouble of untangling the connections. It isn’t only painfully avoided meanings that may be implied by our behaviors. It may be anything that we simply don’t have in mind at the moment, and it may be many things that are simply (by virtue of our constitution) never amenable to direct awareness at all. Mr. X is intent on what he is trying to communicate in his conversation with Ms. Y. As he speaks he takes a step toward the next room, then stands still again as he continues to talk. If he bothers to reflect on the meaning of the step, it will occur to him easily: he had decided a minute before to check on something going on in the next room. In the conversational moment his intention was temporarily forgotten, but he still expressed it inadvertently as his thinking and talking and listening flowed on. Reflect upon your own behavior and that of others around you, and I believe you will see a wealth of this going on continually and smoothly.
Sometimes unconscious behaviors and subliminal primes work hand in hand. The unconscious meaning prompting the behavior may not be just forgotten at the moment, it may have been apprehended subliminally and was never conscious at all. Consider the findings of Aarts et al. (2008) that were reported in the prestigious journal Science. Some of their participants were exposed to very brief presentations of words having to do with exertion. Half of the people were also consciously shown very positive scenes to observe while they were so primed, while half were not. Then all participants were asked to exert by squeezing on a hand grip. Those persons exposed unconsciously to the exertion primes gripped more quickly and aggressively than those who were not exposed. And those who were primed while looking at the positive scenes squeezed the hardest of all. As the author conclude: “The mere activation of the idea of a behavioral act moves the human body without the person consciously deciding to take action.”
Is this surprising and mysterious? It may seem so, but if these psychologists could capture this so easily in their laboratory it must be going on very frequently for everyone every day. Does it seem insulting to think that you are constantly being influenced by unconscious stimuli? Perhaps, but remember how wonderfully adaptive this is. It is not so much that the subliminal primes are controlling our behavior as that we are unconsciously using subliminal information to respond in a quick and optimal way to what will come to be seen as the demands of a situation. We use the primes implicitly in the service of our unconscious intentions.
WHAT IF PSYCHOKINESIS IS A KIND
OF UNCONSCIOUSLY EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOR?
If psychokinesis is unconsciously expressive behavior, then it also functions as an inadvertent statement of our unconscious intentions. The only difference from other unconsciously expressive behaviors is that it occurs outside of the physical boundaries of the organism. Instead of an odd act of clumsiness resulting in an accident and expressing an unconscious sense (perhaps) of guilt, a meaningful picture falls from the wall, expressing the same inner condition. Instead of gripping something extra forcefully to express an unconscious sense of pleasure in effort, a string of propitious random numbers spins out of an experimenter’s random event generator, speaking for the same inner state. Is this a sensible way to think of the odd events (experimental and spontaneous) that we take to indicate psychokinesis? I believe that it is, and I will try to argue the case in more detail in chapter 7.
NOTE 1. Packard, 2007.
What is parasociology? Short explanation: Parasociology is a new branch of sociology dedicated to the study of how societies and paranormal or “psi” phenomena interact. In other words, parasociology is to sociology what parapsychology is to psychology.
Full explanation: To understand what parasociology is, it is important to explain first what sociology is, and how this discipline has studied the paranormal so far.
Sociology 101
Sociology is the mother discipline of all social sciences. Its original focus was to explain how societies are possible, and how can we live together in large and complex groups? It is no surprise that sociology emerged during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. Western societies were becoming rapidly and increasingly complex and urbanized, causing major changes such as less people involved in agriculture and more involved in industrial waged labor; rapid demographic growth and its associate pressures on public infrastructures; creation of a large business owners class and labor unions to defend the interest of industrial workers; a lesser role for religion, etc.
The first sociologists, such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, looked into how the new industrial society was able to continue existing in spite of major social changes. They emphasize different aspects: Marx focused on the dynamics of social class conflicts; Durkheim emphasized the evolving role of social institutions such as religion; while Weber looked into how shared understanding and acceptance of cultural patterns (such as working for bureaucratic organizations) contribute to maintaining societies together.
Over time, sociology became more specialized. A series of sub-disciplines emerged to provide a more detailed account of how narrowly defined social phenomena play their part in making society possible, such as sociology of the family, sociology of the professions, political sociology, sociology of science, sociology of gender, sociology of religions, etc.
Starting with the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, sociology took what many called a “critical turn.” For many sociologists, the discipline was not only there to understand social phenomena, but also to change society by uncovering and denouncing unfair social patterns such as colonialist attitudes, sexism, racism, etc. In many ways, sociology has been effective, as Western societies became more aware of these injustices, and implemented measures to address them such as maternity leave programs for women protecting their job, zero-tolerance programs against racism in school, etc.
Sociology, however, has become victim of its own success. Most social injustices are now well-known and well-researched, and at least partly addressed through various public welfare programs. Hence, many sociologists are now digging for increasingly minute issues and injustices that are quite irrelevant for the majority of the population such as alternate sexuality, radical eco-feminism, economic disparity among trans-gendered communities, etc.
Parasociology
Parasociology, first of all, breaks away from sociology’s increasing social irrelevance by going back to its fundamental question: what makes society possible? One may ask what this has to do with the paranormal? Well, paranormal phenomena have been described and discussed in one form or another as far as written records go back in time. They might have been described under other names such as magic, shamanism, miracles, etc. But they are a permanent fixture of human societies. Then, it is not irrational to think that the paranormal may have something to do with making society possible.
Early sociologists and anthropologists, like Marcel Mauss and Herbert Spencer, noticed the important role that magic and religion play in human societies. They extensively studied magical practices in so-called primitive societies (primitive to be understood here as “primal”, i.e., structured like the first human societies in history). But their main focus was the belief in magic and how such belief plays a role in structuring social interactions (e.g., the social role of the shaman in a tribe). This approach to the paranormal was extended later on to the study of Western societies through researches on beliefs in UFOs, ghosts, etc. Sociologists doing this type of research are usually considered as belonging to the sub-disciplines of sociology of religion, and sociology of knowledge and science (when it focuses on the belief in “pseudo-sciences” such as ufology, psychic research, etc). Sociologists conducting this type of research, with very few exceptions, tend to be either uncommitted about the existence of paranormal phenomena or reject them outright as superstitions.
Although the study of beliefs in the paranormal has its own merit, and it is likely that paranormal phenomena cannot have an objective reality without first having people subjectively believing in them, but let’s be absolutely clear here, parasociology is NOT primarily about studying the belief in the paranormal. Instead, parasociology takes note of the substantial amount of work done in parapsychology. Like parapsychologist Dean Radin has shown in his recent books, paranormal phenomena do exist beyond any reasonable doubt. Thus, we are now beyond the point of trying to prove their existence. It is now time to understand how they work. This constitutes a fundamental distinction with previous sociological works on the paranormal.
If parasociology builds on parapsychology, it is also different from it. Parapsychology, being a sub-discipline of psychology, emphasizes the individual dimension of paranormal experiences. The collective or social dimension remains largely unstudied with a few exceptions. The most notable of these exceptions are parapsychological research projects like Global Consciousness, and those who propose a new understanding of Carl Jung’s concept of collective unconscious. In this last case, the concept of collective unconscious (which has the same origins as Durkheim’s concept of collectiove consciousness) is construed as going beyond supposing that we share, as individuals, “hard wired” archetypes, and accepts that the collective unconscious is much dynamic and actively interacting with the social environment.
Inspired by these researches in parapsychology that highlight the possibility of a social “psi”, parasociology, then, posits as its central hypothesis that paranormal or “psi” phenomena are observable outcomes of one of the social “glues” that make society possible.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Full explanation: To understand what parasociology is, it is important to explain first what sociology is, and how this discipline has studied the paranormal so far.
Sociology 101
Sociology is the mother discipline of all social sciences. Its original focus was to explain how societies are possible, and how can we live together in large and complex groups? It is no surprise that sociology emerged during the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s. Western societies were becoming rapidly and increasingly complex and urbanized, causing major changes such as less people involved in agriculture and more involved in industrial waged labor; rapid demographic growth and its associate pressures on public infrastructures; creation of a large business owners class and labor unions to defend the interest of industrial workers; a lesser role for religion, etc.
The first sociologists, such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, looked into how the new industrial society was able to continue existing in spite of major social changes. They emphasize different aspects: Marx focused on the dynamics of social class conflicts; Durkheim emphasized the evolving role of social institutions such as religion; while Weber looked into how shared understanding and acceptance of cultural patterns (such as working for bureaucratic organizations) contribute to maintaining societies together.
Over time, sociology became more specialized. A series of sub-disciplines emerged to provide a more detailed account of how narrowly defined social phenomena play their part in making society possible, such as sociology of the family, sociology of the professions, political sociology, sociology of science, sociology of gender, sociology of religions, etc.
Starting with the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, sociology took what many called a “critical turn.” For many sociologists, the discipline was not only there to understand social phenomena, but also to change society by uncovering and denouncing unfair social patterns such as colonialist attitudes, sexism, racism, etc. In many ways, sociology has been effective, as Western societies became more aware of these injustices, and implemented measures to address them such as maternity leave programs for women protecting their job, zero-tolerance programs against racism in school, etc.
Sociology, however, has become victim of its own success. Most social injustices are now well-known and well-researched, and at least partly addressed through various public welfare programs. Hence, many sociologists are now digging for increasingly minute issues and injustices that are quite irrelevant for the majority of the population such as alternate sexuality, radical eco-feminism, economic disparity among trans-gendered communities, etc.
Parasociology
Parasociology, first of all, breaks away from sociology’s increasing social irrelevance by going back to its fundamental question: what makes society possible? One may ask what this has to do with the paranormal? Well, paranormal phenomena have been described and discussed in one form or another as far as written records go back in time. They might have been described under other names such as magic, shamanism, miracles, etc. But they are a permanent fixture of human societies. Then, it is not irrational to think that the paranormal may have something to do with making society possible.
Early sociologists and anthropologists, like Marcel Mauss and Herbert Spencer, noticed the important role that magic and religion play in human societies. They extensively studied magical practices in so-called primitive societies (primitive to be understood here as “primal”, i.e., structured like the first human societies in history). But their main focus was the belief in magic and how such belief plays a role in structuring social interactions (e.g., the social role of the shaman in a tribe). This approach to the paranormal was extended later on to the study of Western societies through researches on beliefs in UFOs, ghosts, etc. Sociologists doing this type of research are usually considered as belonging to the sub-disciplines of sociology of religion, and sociology of knowledge and science (when it focuses on the belief in “pseudo-sciences” such as ufology, psychic research, etc). Sociologists conducting this type of research, with very few exceptions, tend to be either uncommitted about the existence of paranormal phenomena or reject them outright as superstitions.
Although the study of beliefs in the paranormal has its own merit, and it is likely that paranormal phenomena cannot have an objective reality without first having people subjectively believing in them, but let’s be absolutely clear here, parasociology is NOT primarily about studying the belief in the paranormal. Instead, parasociology takes note of the substantial amount of work done in parapsychology. Like parapsychologist Dean Radin has shown in his recent books, paranormal phenomena do exist beyond any reasonable doubt. Thus, we are now beyond the point of trying to prove their existence. It is now time to understand how they work. This constitutes a fundamental distinction with previous sociological works on the paranormal.
If parasociology builds on parapsychology, it is also different from it. Parapsychology, being a sub-discipline of psychology, emphasizes the individual dimension of paranormal experiences. The collective or social dimension remains largely unstudied with a few exceptions. The most notable of these exceptions are parapsychological research projects like Global Consciousness, and those who propose a new understanding of Carl Jung’s concept of collective unconscious. In this last case, the concept of collective unconscious (which has the same origins as Durkheim’s concept of collectiove consciousness) is construed as going beyond supposing that we share, as individuals, “hard wired” archetypes, and accepts that the collective unconscious is much dynamic and actively interacting with the social environment.
Inspired by these researches in parapsychology that highlight the possibility of a social “psi”, parasociology, then, posits as its central hypothesis that paranormal or “psi” phenomena are observable outcomes of one of the social “glues” that make society possible.
Copyright © 2008 Eric Ouellet
Introduction
Psychic powers vary widely. It's commonplace for a person to answer the phone and exclaim to the caller, "Oh, I was just thinking of you." Is that person psychic? Probably only to a minor degree, if at all. By contrast, intensely psychic people may feel bombarded by uninvited impressions of others' thoughts, of events happening at a distance or events still to come. Sometimes they receive messages from the dead for themselves or someone else. Mediums and people who practice automatic writing move on to invite such impressions; they strive to obtain them by paranormal means.
But what empowers them to do so? Answering this question may help us respond to those skeptics who believe that since they don't receive psychic impressions, nobody does.
Many skeptics seem to assume that the capacity to receive information via paranormal routes, if it exists at all, should be present in all of us to a significant degree. A growing body of evidence suggests quite the opposite. Certain kinds of backgrounds may make one almost impervious to paranormal messages—or perhaps unwilling to acknowledge them when they come. Intense sensitivity to psi would seem to stem from inherited abilities, from family belief in the reality of psi, and/or from having experienced a high degree of stress in childhood. In this paper, I will try to outline what some of these influences may be.
Genetic Inheritance and Family Expectations
It's widely accepted that sensitivity to psi runs in families. In cultures where shamanism is recognized, the role of shaman is often hereditary, most typically passed from father to son (Eliade, 1964). Two sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, were responsible for the birth of Spiritualism. Both of them performed for years as mediums, not infrequently attaining veridical results. At times their older sister, Leah, also served as a medium (Weisberg, 2004). ^Detailed evidence for familial patterns of psi has been supplied by a series of studies of second sight done in Scotland by Shari Cohn (Cohn,1999A, 1999B, 1999C).
This form of clairvoyance, which can comprise remote viewing, retrocognition and precognition, is believed to be particularly common in the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. In the early 1990s, Cohn distributed a long questionnaire to hundreds of Scots and people of Scottish ancestry living abroad, most of whom had experienced psi. Several of her findings, based on 208 completed responses, matched those of earlier studies. Thus, for instance, she found that women were more likely to have second sight than men. Over a hundred years ago, the Society of Psychical Research's Census of Hallucinations reported that women were more than half again as likely as men to report having had a psi experience. (Sidgwick, Johnson, Myers, Podmore and Sidgwick, 1894, p. 152-153).
Cohn also found that almost 10% of those who returned her questionnaire were twins—though twins make up less than 3% of the general population. Many of those who weren't twins reported that they had twins in their family. The remarkable sensitivity of twins to psi has been noted elsewhere in the literature (Playfair, 1999,2002). [1] In addition, striking anecdotal evidence of the unusual psychic powers of children of multiple births appears in anthropologist Margaret Mead's description of one of her forebears. (Mead, 1975, p. 51-52) "Grandma ... told me about Great-Aunt Louisian, who could read people's minds and tell them everything they had said about her and who had been a triplet and so small when she was born that she could fit into a quart cup.... I saw the house in which my father's cousin Cally had heard the sound of a ghostly coffin bumping on the stairs until her mother made her get down on her knees and promise never again to indulge in that strange, outlandish Aunt-Louisian behavior."
Later in the decade Cohn analyzed 130 family histories, using standard methods from genetics, and determined that there was a strong tendency for second sight to run in families In my own work also, I have found a strong association between spending your early childhood years in an environment where psi is acknowledged and experiencing it yourself (Wright, 1999,2002). It should how^ever be noted that family views regarding psychic perception affect the nurture as well as the nature of young family members. Negative attitudes toward psi—of ten related to rigidly materialistic values—may lead highly intuitive yoimgsters to repress their psychic powers. By contrast, being taught that receiving information via paranormal means is possible and accepted liberates children to do so themselves.
Mediums may even set psychic tasks for their kids to do. One third-generation spirit rnedium told sociologist Charles Emmoris (Emmor\s, 1998) that when she told her mother there was a man standing in the comer, her mother asked, "What's his name?" Another medium reported that her grandmother used to play psychic games with her. For instance, she would hide a key and say, "Become the key, then see where you are."
Another Contributing Factor: Childhood Stress
According to a growing body of data, experiencing intense stress in childhood also may heighten one's psychic powers. Needless to say, severe trauma in one's early years can in some cases have highly undesirable aftereffects such as depression, learning and memory disorders, and difficulty identifying and bonding with others. Such aftereffects are a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, akin to the experience of battle scarred war veterans (Bremner, 1999; Schwarz and Perry, 1994). Many of its survivors are society's walking wounded. No feeling person could want their numbers to increase. Nonetheless, responsible scholarship demands that we acknowledge this apparent connection. What is more, recent genetic research suggests that a variant form of gene related to the delivery of serotonin may protect some sufferers of childhood abuse from its more harmful consequences (Caspi, Sugden. Moffitt, Taylor, Craig, Harrington, McClay, Mill, Martin, Braithwaite, and Poulton, 2003).
Brad Steiger, who for decades interviewed mediums and other psychically gifted individuals, reported that "nearly every medium has undergone a series of personal crises in his childhood or youth" (Steiger, 1982, p. 129). He cited an observation by Gardner Murphy, former president of the American Psychological Association, that "severe illness, things that are biologically or in a broader sense personal crises—dismpting, alerting situations" (p. 129) may lead to heightened psychic awareness. Nonetheless Steiger noted that most mediums—few of^whom earn their living as psychics—are well-adjusted, enthusiastic extroverts of at least average intelligence p. 128).
A classic study of over 1400 Americans (the NORC-Luce Foundation Basic Belief Study), done at the National Opinion Research Center associated with University of Chicago, yielded interesting results regarding those who scored especially high for psi, reporting clairvoyance, ESP and/or deja Vu experiences (Greeley, 1975). They were more likely than others to report a high level of family tension during their early years: strained relationships between their parents, between themselves and their fathers, and to a lesser degree between themselves and their mothers. On the other hand, their scores for "life satisfaction" now and expected five years hence were substantially above average (p. 17-24).
Summarizing these data, the American sociologist Andrew Greeley wrote, "Frequent psychic experience, it would appear, is 'caused' in part by growing up in a tense family but has no direct relationship with current family tension." Two Canadian researchers, studying the relationship between childhood parenting and creativity in adulthood found that creative adults were especially likely to come from families where mother and father openly disagreed. "Parental conflict/' they reported, "was significantly positively related to later adult levels of creativity" (Koestner and Walker, 1999).
The significance of experiences in early childhood, up to the age of 10—and even later for especially bright youngsters—cannot be overemphasized. In the 1990s, neurobiologists came to understand that the infant brain contains a huge number of neurons, which develop synapses or are pruned according to what some call a "use-it-or-lose-it" principle. As one scientist working in this field has pointed out (Siegel, 1999, p. 13-14) "experience early in life may be especially crucial in organizing the way the basic structures of the brain develop.
For example, traumatic experiences early in life may have more profound effects on the 'deeper' structures of the brain, which... enable the mind to respond later to stress. Thus we see that abused children have elevated baseline and reactive stress hormone levels . . . . Genes contain the information for the general organization of the brain's structure but experience determines which genes become expressed, how and when. The expression of genes leads to the production of proteins that enable neuronal growth and the formation of new synapses. Experience—the activation of specific neuronal pathways—therefore directly shapes gene expression and leads to the maintenance, creation, and strengthening of the connections that form the neural substrate of the mind."
With respect to the brain development of especially bright youngsters, recent research at the National Institute of Mental Health revealed differences between their brain development and that of less gifted children. Brain scans showed that "children with the highest IQs began with a relatively thin cortex—the folded outer layer of the brain that is involved in complex thinking—which rapidly grew thicker before reaching a peak and then rapidly becoming thinner." Children of average intelligence had a thicker cortex around age 6, but by around 13 it was thinner than in children of superior intelligence."
A Washington Post article (www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902182.html) on
this study, which was headed by lead investigator Philip Shaw, reported that "the cortex continued to thicken in gifted children until around age 11 or 12, much later than in children of average intelligence, whose cortex thickening peaked by age 8." These findings—in conjunction with case histories I've collected in my own research—suggest that highly intelligent youngsters who experience intense trauma primarily in their pre-teen years may still be impressionable enough at that stage of their development to develop greater than average psychic powers.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, several psychologists noticed that people who had endured severe stress in childhood were particularly likely to report having psychic experiences. They concluded that childhood trauma impels suffering youngsters to dissociate, that is, to divert their conscious focus from the here and now, turning their attention to fantasy. But then the British psychologist Tony Lawrence, using a series of statistical tests, showed that a stronger link existed between trauma and psychic experience than between trauma and fantasy (Lawrence, 1995). "You have this direct link from childhood trauma to paranormal experience.... And you don't necessarily have to be a good fantasizer to get that paranormal experience coming in.... Even people with low levels of childhood fantasy could still experience the paranormal because they have trauma in their lives" (Lawrence, 1999).
Kenneth Ring has observed that adults who report near-death and UFO experiences are particularly likely to report childhood abuse and trauma (Ring, 1992, p. 142-144). However, he sees them as empowered by these earlier ordeals to be more perceptive of alternate realities. As Ring puts it, "Growing up under such conditions tends to stimulate the development of a dissociative response style as a means of psychological defense. After all, a child who is exposed to either the threat or actuality of physical violence, sexual abuse, or other severe traumas, will be strongly motivated selectively to 'tune out' those aspects of his physical and social world ... by dissociating. By doing so ... he is more likely to 'tune into' other realities...."[Original italics]
In an autobiographical work Eileen Garrett, one of the greatest mediums of the past century, described just such a connection between childhood trauma, accompanied by positive input regarding the paranormal, and the development of her remarkable psychic powers (Garrett, 2002). From earliest childhood, Garrett endured virtually daily abuse from the aunt who raised her. Garrett's well-to-do Irish Protestant mother had defied family expectations by marrying a Spanish Catholic with "neither position nor money." Then both committed suicide shortly after the birth of their child, (p. 49-51) Garrett's aunt, determined to guide her tiny charge to a different path, was exceedingly hard on her. By the time Garrett was four, she sensed the presence of what are customarily dismissed as "imaginary friends." She soon came to see auras and once got into particular trouble by seeing a vision of a relative who—unknown to the household at the time—had just died.
Though most of the people in Garrett's environment disparaged what she sensed, an old Roma woman took the little girl under her wing and led her to respect her own psychic gifts, teaching her how to read cards and interpret omens. Garrett quotes the gypsy as telling her, "Do not be unhappy if others do not believe you. It is not given to everyone to know and see such things.... Ever since I could walk and talk, I have seen and heard things beyond man's understanding, for I was born with the 'seeing eye' and have the power to work charms and to heal." (p. 34) Clearly, the young sensitive gained validation from the old psychic who befriended her.
As a grown woman, Garrett sought to understand how she had acquired her talents as a medium. "I saw that the trance state might be a part of the pattern of my own development. I began to comprehend how the pain and suffering of my early days had made me withdraw from the world of people. Indeed, I had been able to withdraw so completely that, although I had seen my aunt's lips moving as she scolded me, not a word of what she said penetrated my hearing. I remembered how, when the pain or punishment became almost unbearable, I could retire within myself and become numb, negating the painful effects.... I had unconsciously developed the technique of escape in order to avoid suffering. I could now perceive how this practice had perhaps prepared the way for the development of the trance state" (p. 90-91). Garrett's comments clearly indicate that such "turning off," separating mentally from the immediate world around, doesn't have to be a sign of mental illness. Rather it can be both a survival mechanism and a meditative practice, which may lead to heightened psychic awareness.
Findings from Recent Interviews Since 1998,1 have interviewed over a hundred people about their experiences of spontaneous after-death communication (ADC), unexpectedly sensing contact with lost relatives, friends and others. Such experiences do not involve mediums and, unlike near-death experiences, they generally happen when the perceiver is perfectly well. In contrast to most researchers in this field, it was my plan from the start not to ask merely what my interviewees' psi experiences had been but also to learn something about the homes in which they spent their early years. The responses I've received strongly suggest that stress in early childhood tends to create greater than average psychic powers in adults. In the course of informal, rather free-form interviews, I asked whether the household in which they grew up was conventionally religious and whether the adults in it had any interest or belief in the paranormal. The typical interview lasted 45 minutes; the shortest took 20 minutes, the longest a full two hours. All interviews were tape recorded and transcribed (Wright, 1999. P. 259-260).
Perhaps because I told my informants that I myself had sensed my late husband's presence many times since I was widowed, invited them to talk freely about themselves and what they had sensed, and asked questions about details of their accounts, most of them tended to ramble on and, in the course of often very emotional confidences, to tell me extremely personal things. By the time I had completed my first 15 interviews, it struck me that five of my interviewees had said or suggested that one or both of their parents were alcoholics. This although, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, at that time only about 7% of the adult American population had serious problems with drinking, and no major decline in alcoholism had occurred since my informants were children (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, 1998).
So I added a deliberately vague inquiry to my questionnaire: "Would you say that your childhood was generally pleasant or was it difficult?" I tried to get back to those whom I'd already interviewed who hadn't covered this issue in their earlier responses. And I asked this question of all my later informants, but only after they had told me about whatever psi experiences they could recall or chose to share with me. If the answer was "generally pleasant," I didn't pursue it further. (Since those who preferred not to discuss whatever anguish they might have suffered as kids were spared such pain, my numbers for those who had stressful childhoods are probably an undercount.) If the answer was "difficult" or "both pleasant and difficult," I asked for details.
Over a third of the informants from whom I collected these data reported having one or two alcoholic parents or an alcoholic relative—an uncle or grandfather—present in the home. The mother of one woman, a gifted medium as well as a social worker, was addicted to prescription opiates. When this woman was three, her mother smothered her. Only the intervention of a doctor who lived across the street saved her life. The parents of another woman were addicted to both drugs and alcohol.
Many adult children of alcoholics reported suffering frequent beatings or frequently seeing/hearing others in their family beaten. Even where there wasn't significant physical abuse, there was likely to be massive neglect and other problems. One clairvoyant, the daughter of an alcoholic mother, recalled that when she and her sister came home from school, they never knew whether they'd find her passed out on the kitchen floor. An intemationally respected remote viewer who is a twin as well as the son of two drunkards, said that though there was no physical abuse in his home, there were lots of battles between his parents about childrearing and paying bills. "All kinds of strange things that kids shouldn't have to deal with, we had to deal with on a regular basis. It's sort of the Jekyll and Hyde story. You become ultra-sensitive in order to judge the current state of affairs with one or the other parent. The drimker they are, the more Mr. Hyde they are."
This informant, like a number of others, felt that he had developed psychic powers to protect himself, rather than as a byproduct of dissociation. Still another group proposed a third, though related theory. Several informants reported that their alcoholic father was himself psychic but, they believed, drank to numb that side of him. This theory argues that, in these cases, both father and child are genetically predisposed to have psychic powers. Of course, one form of causation need not preclude any other; influences may be additive.
Soon another "difficult" pattern emerged in the early life of sensitives. Almost a third—primarily not from alcoholic homes—reported that they had come from authoritarian/angry/abusive homes where instant, total obedience was demanded, or that they had unloving parents with quick, fiery tempers, which they often unleashed on their children. (One interviewee described her father as a "rage-o-holic") Many of them came from prosperous homes; their rage-o-holic parents often held positions of authority and respect in the community. Here are some of their childhood memories:
Unthinking obedience was demanded. We were not allowed to fight, we were not allowed to say no, we had to jump when we were spoken to. I'm the only one that was never beaten with a strap. The others (her older siblings) all got it. [From a singer and music teacher] My mother was real psychotic. She never knew whether she wanted to love me or hate me or kill me, so most of my childhood she just beat me up a lot. [From a fabric artist who creates unique costumes for operatic and rock performers]
My father was a womanizer and beat us. If we lied or anything.... I never lied, didn't dare, but he'd think you did and ohh .... Of course the boys got it more than the girls but the girls got it too. Whenever my mother and Dad had an argument, she'd get a migraine and have to vomit. [From a retired secretary and social worker] Sara, an intensely psychic woman, suffered different kinds of abuse: her father used her sexually from the age of six. Well into adulthood she felt unexplained tension in her shoulders. It went away when she retrieved a memory of watching her father choke her mother (not fatally). Clearly the stress of her childhood damaged her. A brilliant woman in her early forties— for fun she taught herself Chinese—Sara only returned to college and eamed her degree in her late thirties. Until then, her primary occupations had been delivering newspapers and cleaning other people's houses.
Other sources of intense stress in childhood reported to me have included losing one's mother while a toddler, moving every three months for years at a time, having two bipolar parents, and enduring numerous operations to correct a congenital deformity. Some of the most sensitive of my interviewees— people who had sensed numerous after-death communications and were clairvoyant in other ways as well—as children experienced both alcoholic and rage-o-holic behavior in the home, or some other combination of those genetic and childhood influences which appear to heighten sensitivity to psi. Communal experiences like living through the Blitz do not seem to have had impact of this sort.
Sensing Psi without Childhood Stress
As described earlier, genetic factors such as coming from a psychic family or being a twin may predispose someone to experience psi. But a large percentage of people, especially women, who don't come from such a background and, in addition, enjoyed generally pleasant childhoods may well at some time have one or more intense experiences of after-death communication. Research from around the world documents that people who have lost a life partner are particularly likely to sense their presence after death.
Groundbreaking work done by W. Dewi Rees suggests factors, which may make some bereaved spouses more likely to sense ADCs than others (Rees, 1971). Rees, a physician, interviewed 66 widowers and 227 widowers in an area of Wales, almost all of those healthy enough to be interviewed. Although he did not count in his tally observations of symbolic events, or vivid dreams that seemed like a visit—frequent forms of after-death communication—he still found that half of the widowers and 46% of the widows had sensed some kind of after-death communication from their departed mate. Perhaps because Rees did not count certain kinds of communication, his results differ from later research in the field (e.g. Olson, Suddeth, Peterson and Egelhoff, 1985; Grimby, 1993; Greeley, 1989; and Wright, 1999) in which widows were more likely to report ADCs than widowers.
The bereaved partners who had ADCs were not particularly depressed or socially isolated. Instead, they were more likely to have had longer marriages, happier marriages, and marriages with children. In other words the more strongly the surviving partner had bonded with his or her mate, the more likely they were to sense that partner's presence thereafter. Though ADCs were most likely to occur within the first year after bereavement, sometimes they recurred for years, even decades. They might even continue after the widowed spouse remarried. Some departed spirits seem to be more effective or more frequent commimicators than others (Berger, 1987).
Similarly, in my own work I have found that people with no family history of childhood trauma or belief in psi nonetheless may experience contact with a discamate deeply meaningful in their life: a child, a parent or a beloved life partner. T3^ically such interviewees report no other psi experiences before this life-changing event. But since ADCs tend to open the minds of experiencers to the reality of psi, thereafter they may be more receptive to psychic messages.
Genetic Protection from Childhood Stress
As mentioned toward the beginning of this article, intense trauma in childhood may be associated with depression and other negative consequences in adulthood. Nonetheless, the findings of numerous researchers, myself included, indicate that many people with highly troubled childhoods seem to do remarkably well as adults. Recent research in the field of genetics argues that possession of a variant form of a particular gene may protect against some of the problems often triggered by stressful childhoods (Caspi, Sugden, Moffitt, Taylor, Craig, Harringtron, McClay, Mill, Martin, Braithwaite, and Poulton), 2003). A team of researchers worked in New Zealand with 847 Caucasian, non-Maori members of a health and development study who had been assessed regularly since the age of three.
This cohort was virtually intact at the age of 26 years. The team determined which form of the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene each subject had. "The serotonin system," they explained, "provides a logical source of candidate genes for depression, because this system is the target of selective serotonin reuptake-inhibitor drugs that are effective in treating depression." Testing "whether adult depression was predicted by the interaction between 5-HTTLPR [the 5-HTT gene-linked polymorphic region] and childhood mistreatment that occurred during the first decade of life . . . [they found] that childhood mistreatment predicted adult depression only among individuals carrying an s allele but not among 1/1 homozygotes." It was their conclusion that "this epidemiological study ... provides evidence [that] an individual's response to environmental insults is moderated by his or her genetic makeup."
Conclusions
Much evidence indicates that the person least likely to receive information via paranormal routes is a man who enjoyed a generally happy childhood, who is not a twin, and who comes from a family with no interest or belief in the paranormal. Predictors for particular sensitivity to psi are: 1) coming from a family with a history of psi and/or where psychic powers are accepted as a fact of life; 2) being a child of a multiple birth, e.g., a twin or triplet, and 3) suffering serious trauma in one's first 10-12 years of life. Two frequent sources of trauma are living in a home where one or more adults are alcoholics and living with a habitually angry and abusive parent. Especially gifted psychics frequently have experienced more than one of the above circumstances. In general, women are more psychic than men.
Although intense trauma in childhood may have negative consequences such as depression in adulthood, possession of a variant form of a gene related to the body's use of serotonin might protect against such consequences. In the special case of after-death communication, people with limited psychic gifts nonetheless often sermise the presence of departed loved ones with whom they have an especially strong bond. The role of the communicator must not be overlooked. It would appear that some spirits reach out to the living more effectively or frequently than others.
Bibliography
Berger, A. S. (1987) Aristocracij ofthe dead: New findings in postmortem survival.
Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.
Bremner, J. D. (1999) Does stress damage the brain? (Address: Department of
Diagnostic Radiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT)
Biological Psychiatry 45, 7, 797-805.
Caspi, A., Sugden, K., Moffitt, T. E., et al. (2003) Influence of life stress on depresion:
moderation by a polymorphism in the 5-HnT gene. Science 301,386-389.
Cohn, S. A. (1999A) Second sight and family history: pedigree and segregation
analyses. ]ournal of Scientific Exploration 13, 3, 351-372.
Cohn, S. A. (1999B) A historical review of second sight: the collectors, their
accounts and ideas. Scottish Studies 33,146-185.
Cohn, S. A. (1999C) A questionnaire study on second sight experiences. Journal of
the Society for Psychical Research 63,855,129-157.
Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic techniques ofecstacy. Princeton University
Press;
Emmons, C. F. (1998) Socialization to spirit mediumship. Address delivered to
the Eastern Sociological Society (U.S.A.) March 21,1998.
Garrett, E. J. (2002) Adventures in the supernormal. New York: Helix Press.
Greeley, A. M. (1975) The sociology ofthe paranormal: a reconnaissance. Beverly
Hills/London: Sage Publications.
Greeley, A. M. (1989) Religious Change in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Koestner, R. and Walker, M. (1999) Childhood parenting experiences and adult
creativity. Journal of Research in Personality 33, 92-107.
Lawrence, T. (1995) Paranormal experience and the traumatized mind. Address
to the Society for Psychical Research, London, May 13,1999.
Childhood Influences
Lawrence, T., Edwards, C, Barraclough, N., Church, S., and Hetherington, F.
(1995) Modelling childhood causes of paranormal belief and experience: childhood
trauma and childhood fantasy. Personality and Individual Differences
19, 2, 207-215.
Mead, M. (1975) Blackberry winter: my earlier years. NY Pocket Books.
National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. (1998) Alcoholism and
alcohol-related problems: a sobering look. Fact sheet downloaded from
www.ncadd.org.
Olson, PR., Suddeth, J. A., Peterson, P J., and Egelhoff, C. (1985) Hallucinations
of widowhood. Journal ofthe American Geriatric Association 33,543-547.
Playfair, G. L. (1999) Telepathy and identical twins. Journal ofthe Society for
Psychical Research. 63,854,86-98.
Playfair, G. L. (2002) Twin Telepathy. London: Vega.
Rees, W. D. (1971) The hallucinations of widowhood. British Medical Journal.
4,37-41.
Ring, K. (1992) The Omega Project. New York: William Morrow.
Schwarz, E. and Perry, B. (1994) The post-traumatic response in children and
adolescents. Psychiatric Clinics of North America 17,2, 311-326.
Sidgwick, H., Johnson, A., Myers, A. T., et al., E. (1894) Report on the Census of
Hallucinations. Proceedings oftiie Society for Psychical Research 10,25-422.
Siegel, D. J. (1999) The developing mind: toward a neurobiology of interpersonal
experience. NY and London: Guilford Press.
Steiger, B. (1982) The world beyond death. Norfolk, VA: Downing Company.
Weisberg, B. (2004) Talking to the dead: Kate and Maggie Pox and the rise of Spirtualism.
San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.
Wright, S. H. (1999) Paranormal contact with the dying. Journal ofthe Society for
Psychical Research. 63,857,258-267.
Wright, S. H. (2002) When spirits come calling: The open-minded skeptic's guide
to after-death contacts. Nevada City, CA: Blue Dolphin.
wvvw.vvashingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/
AR2006032902182.html
Reprint requests to:
Sylvia Hart Wright, M.S., M.A.
Professor emeritus.
City University of New York
260 North Grand Street
Eugene, OR 97042, Second Sight and Family History:
Pedigree and Segregation Analyses
Psychic powers vary widely. It's commonplace for a person to answer the phone and exclaim to the caller, "Oh, I was just thinking of you." Is that person psychic? Probably only to a minor degree, if at all. By contrast, intensely psychic people may feel bombarded by uninvited impressions of others' thoughts, of events happening at a distance or events still to come. Sometimes they receive messages from the dead for themselves or someone else. Mediums and people who practice automatic writing move on to invite such impressions; they strive to obtain them by paranormal means.
But what empowers them to do so? Answering this question may help us respond to those skeptics who believe that since they don't receive psychic impressions, nobody does.
Many skeptics seem to assume that the capacity to receive information via paranormal routes, if it exists at all, should be present in all of us to a significant degree. A growing body of evidence suggests quite the opposite. Certain kinds of backgrounds may make one almost impervious to paranormal messages—or perhaps unwilling to acknowledge them when they come. Intense sensitivity to psi would seem to stem from inherited abilities, from family belief in the reality of psi, and/or from having experienced a high degree of stress in childhood. In this paper, I will try to outline what some of these influences may be.
Genetic Inheritance and Family Expectations
It's widely accepted that sensitivity to psi runs in families. In cultures where shamanism is recognized, the role of shaman is often hereditary, most typically passed from father to son (Eliade, 1964). Two sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, were responsible for the birth of Spiritualism. Both of them performed for years as mediums, not infrequently attaining veridical results. At times their older sister, Leah, also served as a medium (Weisberg, 2004). ^Detailed evidence for familial patterns of psi has been supplied by a series of studies of second sight done in Scotland by Shari Cohn (Cohn,1999A, 1999B, 1999C).
This form of clairvoyance, which can comprise remote viewing, retrocognition and precognition, is believed to be particularly common in the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. In the early 1990s, Cohn distributed a long questionnaire to hundreds of Scots and people of Scottish ancestry living abroad, most of whom had experienced psi. Several of her findings, based on 208 completed responses, matched those of earlier studies. Thus, for instance, she found that women were more likely to have second sight than men. Over a hundred years ago, the Society of Psychical Research's Census of Hallucinations reported that women were more than half again as likely as men to report having had a psi experience. (Sidgwick, Johnson, Myers, Podmore and Sidgwick, 1894, p. 152-153).
Cohn also found that almost 10% of those who returned her questionnaire were twins—though twins make up less than 3% of the general population. Many of those who weren't twins reported that they had twins in their family. The remarkable sensitivity of twins to psi has been noted elsewhere in the literature (Playfair, 1999,2002). [1] In addition, striking anecdotal evidence of the unusual psychic powers of children of multiple births appears in anthropologist Margaret Mead's description of one of her forebears. (Mead, 1975, p. 51-52) "Grandma ... told me about Great-Aunt Louisian, who could read people's minds and tell them everything they had said about her and who had been a triplet and so small when she was born that she could fit into a quart cup.... I saw the house in which my father's cousin Cally had heard the sound of a ghostly coffin bumping on the stairs until her mother made her get down on her knees and promise never again to indulge in that strange, outlandish Aunt-Louisian behavior."
Later in the decade Cohn analyzed 130 family histories, using standard methods from genetics, and determined that there was a strong tendency for second sight to run in families In my own work also, I have found a strong association between spending your early childhood years in an environment where psi is acknowledged and experiencing it yourself (Wright, 1999,2002). It should how^ever be noted that family views regarding psychic perception affect the nurture as well as the nature of young family members. Negative attitudes toward psi—of ten related to rigidly materialistic values—may lead highly intuitive yoimgsters to repress their psychic powers. By contrast, being taught that receiving information via paranormal means is possible and accepted liberates children to do so themselves.
Mediums may even set psychic tasks for their kids to do. One third-generation spirit rnedium told sociologist Charles Emmoris (Emmor\s, 1998) that when she told her mother there was a man standing in the comer, her mother asked, "What's his name?" Another medium reported that her grandmother used to play psychic games with her. For instance, she would hide a key and say, "Become the key, then see where you are."
Another Contributing Factor: Childhood Stress
According to a growing body of data, experiencing intense stress in childhood also may heighten one's psychic powers. Needless to say, severe trauma in one's early years can in some cases have highly undesirable aftereffects such as depression, learning and memory disorders, and difficulty identifying and bonding with others. Such aftereffects are a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, akin to the experience of battle scarred war veterans (Bremner, 1999; Schwarz and Perry, 1994). Many of its survivors are society's walking wounded. No feeling person could want their numbers to increase. Nonetheless, responsible scholarship demands that we acknowledge this apparent connection. What is more, recent genetic research suggests that a variant form of gene related to the delivery of serotonin may protect some sufferers of childhood abuse from its more harmful consequences (Caspi, Sugden. Moffitt, Taylor, Craig, Harrington, McClay, Mill, Martin, Braithwaite, and Poulton, 2003).
Brad Steiger, who for decades interviewed mediums and other psychically gifted individuals, reported that "nearly every medium has undergone a series of personal crises in his childhood or youth" (Steiger, 1982, p. 129). He cited an observation by Gardner Murphy, former president of the American Psychological Association, that "severe illness, things that are biologically or in a broader sense personal crises—dismpting, alerting situations" (p. 129) may lead to heightened psychic awareness. Nonetheless Steiger noted that most mediums—few of^whom earn their living as psychics—are well-adjusted, enthusiastic extroverts of at least average intelligence p. 128).
A classic study of over 1400 Americans (the NORC-Luce Foundation Basic Belief Study), done at the National Opinion Research Center associated with University of Chicago, yielded interesting results regarding those who scored especially high for psi, reporting clairvoyance, ESP and/or deja Vu experiences (Greeley, 1975). They were more likely than others to report a high level of family tension during their early years: strained relationships between their parents, between themselves and their fathers, and to a lesser degree between themselves and their mothers. On the other hand, their scores for "life satisfaction" now and expected five years hence were substantially above average (p. 17-24).
Summarizing these data, the American sociologist Andrew Greeley wrote, "Frequent psychic experience, it would appear, is 'caused' in part by growing up in a tense family but has no direct relationship with current family tension." Two Canadian researchers, studying the relationship between childhood parenting and creativity in adulthood found that creative adults were especially likely to come from families where mother and father openly disagreed. "Parental conflict/' they reported, "was significantly positively related to later adult levels of creativity" (Koestner and Walker, 1999).
The significance of experiences in early childhood, up to the age of 10—and even later for especially bright youngsters—cannot be overemphasized. In the 1990s, neurobiologists came to understand that the infant brain contains a huge number of neurons, which develop synapses or are pruned according to what some call a "use-it-or-lose-it" principle. As one scientist working in this field has pointed out (Siegel, 1999, p. 13-14) "experience early in life may be especially crucial in organizing the way the basic structures of the brain develop.
For example, traumatic experiences early in life may have more profound effects on the 'deeper' structures of the brain, which... enable the mind to respond later to stress. Thus we see that abused children have elevated baseline and reactive stress hormone levels . . . . Genes contain the information for the general organization of the brain's structure but experience determines which genes become expressed, how and when. The expression of genes leads to the production of proteins that enable neuronal growth and the formation of new synapses. Experience—the activation of specific neuronal pathways—therefore directly shapes gene expression and leads to the maintenance, creation, and strengthening of the connections that form the neural substrate of the mind."
With respect to the brain development of especially bright youngsters, recent research at the National Institute of Mental Health revealed differences between their brain development and that of less gifted children. Brain scans showed that "children with the highest IQs began with a relatively thin cortex—the folded outer layer of the brain that is involved in complex thinking—which rapidly grew thicker before reaching a peak and then rapidly becoming thinner." Children of average intelligence had a thicker cortex around age 6, but by around 13 it was thinner than in children of superior intelligence."
A Washington Post article (www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902182.html) on
this study, which was headed by lead investigator Philip Shaw, reported that "the cortex continued to thicken in gifted children until around age 11 or 12, much later than in children of average intelligence, whose cortex thickening peaked by age 8." These findings—in conjunction with case histories I've collected in my own research—suggest that highly intelligent youngsters who experience intense trauma primarily in their pre-teen years may still be impressionable enough at that stage of their development to develop greater than average psychic powers.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, several psychologists noticed that people who had endured severe stress in childhood were particularly likely to report having psychic experiences. They concluded that childhood trauma impels suffering youngsters to dissociate, that is, to divert their conscious focus from the here and now, turning their attention to fantasy. But then the British psychologist Tony Lawrence, using a series of statistical tests, showed that a stronger link existed between trauma and psychic experience than between trauma and fantasy (Lawrence, 1995). "You have this direct link from childhood trauma to paranormal experience.... And you don't necessarily have to be a good fantasizer to get that paranormal experience coming in.... Even people with low levels of childhood fantasy could still experience the paranormal because they have trauma in their lives" (Lawrence, 1999).
Kenneth Ring has observed that adults who report near-death and UFO experiences are particularly likely to report childhood abuse and trauma (Ring, 1992, p. 142-144). However, he sees them as empowered by these earlier ordeals to be more perceptive of alternate realities. As Ring puts it, "Growing up under such conditions tends to stimulate the development of a dissociative response style as a means of psychological defense. After all, a child who is exposed to either the threat or actuality of physical violence, sexual abuse, or other severe traumas, will be strongly motivated selectively to 'tune out' those aspects of his physical and social world ... by dissociating. By doing so ... he is more likely to 'tune into' other realities...."[Original italics]
In an autobiographical work Eileen Garrett, one of the greatest mediums of the past century, described just such a connection between childhood trauma, accompanied by positive input regarding the paranormal, and the development of her remarkable psychic powers (Garrett, 2002). From earliest childhood, Garrett endured virtually daily abuse from the aunt who raised her. Garrett's well-to-do Irish Protestant mother had defied family expectations by marrying a Spanish Catholic with "neither position nor money." Then both committed suicide shortly after the birth of their child, (p. 49-51) Garrett's aunt, determined to guide her tiny charge to a different path, was exceedingly hard on her. By the time Garrett was four, she sensed the presence of what are customarily dismissed as "imaginary friends." She soon came to see auras and once got into particular trouble by seeing a vision of a relative who—unknown to the household at the time—had just died.
Though most of the people in Garrett's environment disparaged what she sensed, an old Roma woman took the little girl under her wing and led her to respect her own psychic gifts, teaching her how to read cards and interpret omens. Garrett quotes the gypsy as telling her, "Do not be unhappy if others do not believe you. It is not given to everyone to know and see such things.... Ever since I could walk and talk, I have seen and heard things beyond man's understanding, for I was born with the 'seeing eye' and have the power to work charms and to heal." (p. 34) Clearly, the young sensitive gained validation from the old psychic who befriended her.
As a grown woman, Garrett sought to understand how she had acquired her talents as a medium. "I saw that the trance state might be a part of the pattern of my own development. I began to comprehend how the pain and suffering of my early days had made me withdraw from the world of people. Indeed, I had been able to withdraw so completely that, although I had seen my aunt's lips moving as she scolded me, not a word of what she said penetrated my hearing. I remembered how, when the pain or punishment became almost unbearable, I could retire within myself and become numb, negating the painful effects.... I had unconsciously developed the technique of escape in order to avoid suffering. I could now perceive how this practice had perhaps prepared the way for the development of the trance state" (p. 90-91). Garrett's comments clearly indicate that such "turning off," separating mentally from the immediate world around, doesn't have to be a sign of mental illness. Rather it can be both a survival mechanism and a meditative practice, which may lead to heightened psychic awareness.
Findings from Recent Interviews Since 1998,1 have interviewed over a hundred people about their experiences of spontaneous after-death communication (ADC), unexpectedly sensing contact with lost relatives, friends and others. Such experiences do not involve mediums and, unlike near-death experiences, they generally happen when the perceiver is perfectly well. In contrast to most researchers in this field, it was my plan from the start not to ask merely what my interviewees' psi experiences had been but also to learn something about the homes in which they spent their early years. The responses I've received strongly suggest that stress in early childhood tends to create greater than average psychic powers in adults. In the course of informal, rather free-form interviews, I asked whether the household in which they grew up was conventionally religious and whether the adults in it had any interest or belief in the paranormal. The typical interview lasted 45 minutes; the shortest took 20 minutes, the longest a full two hours. All interviews were tape recorded and transcribed (Wright, 1999. P. 259-260).
Perhaps because I told my informants that I myself had sensed my late husband's presence many times since I was widowed, invited them to talk freely about themselves and what they had sensed, and asked questions about details of their accounts, most of them tended to ramble on and, in the course of often very emotional confidences, to tell me extremely personal things. By the time I had completed my first 15 interviews, it struck me that five of my interviewees had said or suggested that one or both of their parents were alcoholics. This although, according to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, at that time only about 7% of the adult American population had serious problems with drinking, and no major decline in alcoholism had occurred since my informants were children (National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, 1998).
So I added a deliberately vague inquiry to my questionnaire: "Would you say that your childhood was generally pleasant or was it difficult?" I tried to get back to those whom I'd already interviewed who hadn't covered this issue in their earlier responses. And I asked this question of all my later informants, but only after they had told me about whatever psi experiences they could recall or chose to share with me. If the answer was "generally pleasant," I didn't pursue it further. (Since those who preferred not to discuss whatever anguish they might have suffered as kids were spared such pain, my numbers for those who had stressful childhoods are probably an undercount.) If the answer was "difficult" or "both pleasant and difficult," I asked for details.
Over a third of the informants from whom I collected these data reported having one or two alcoholic parents or an alcoholic relative—an uncle or grandfather—present in the home. The mother of one woman, a gifted medium as well as a social worker, was addicted to prescription opiates. When this woman was three, her mother smothered her. Only the intervention of a doctor who lived across the street saved her life. The parents of another woman were addicted to both drugs and alcohol.
Many adult children of alcoholics reported suffering frequent beatings or frequently seeing/hearing others in their family beaten. Even where there wasn't significant physical abuse, there was likely to be massive neglect and other problems. One clairvoyant, the daughter of an alcoholic mother, recalled that when she and her sister came home from school, they never knew whether they'd find her passed out on the kitchen floor. An intemationally respected remote viewer who is a twin as well as the son of two drunkards, said that though there was no physical abuse in his home, there were lots of battles between his parents about childrearing and paying bills. "All kinds of strange things that kids shouldn't have to deal with, we had to deal with on a regular basis. It's sort of the Jekyll and Hyde story. You become ultra-sensitive in order to judge the current state of affairs with one or the other parent. The drimker they are, the more Mr. Hyde they are."
This informant, like a number of others, felt that he had developed psychic powers to protect himself, rather than as a byproduct of dissociation. Still another group proposed a third, though related theory. Several informants reported that their alcoholic father was himself psychic but, they believed, drank to numb that side of him. This theory argues that, in these cases, both father and child are genetically predisposed to have psychic powers. Of course, one form of causation need not preclude any other; influences may be additive.
Soon another "difficult" pattern emerged in the early life of sensitives. Almost a third—primarily not from alcoholic homes—reported that they had come from authoritarian/angry/abusive homes where instant, total obedience was demanded, or that they had unloving parents with quick, fiery tempers, which they often unleashed on their children. (One interviewee described her father as a "rage-o-holic") Many of them came from prosperous homes; their rage-o-holic parents often held positions of authority and respect in the community. Here are some of their childhood memories:
Unthinking obedience was demanded. We were not allowed to fight, we were not allowed to say no, we had to jump when we were spoken to. I'm the only one that was never beaten with a strap. The others (her older siblings) all got it. [From a singer and music teacher] My mother was real psychotic. She never knew whether she wanted to love me or hate me or kill me, so most of my childhood she just beat me up a lot. [From a fabric artist who creates unique costumes for operatic and rock performers]
My father was a womanizer and beat us. If we lied or anything.... I never lied, didn't dare, but he'd think you did and ohh .... Of course the boys got it more than the girls but the girls got it too. Whenever my mother and Dad had an argument, she'd get a migraine and have to vomit. [From a retired secretary and social worker] Sara, an intensely psychic woman, suffered different kinds of abuse: her father used her sexually from the age of six. Well into adulthood she felt unexplained tension in her shoulders. It went away when she retrieved a memory of watching her father choke her mother (not fatally). Clearly the stress of her childhood damaged her. A brilliant woman in her early forties— for fun she taught herself Chinese—Sara only returned to college and eamed her degree in her late thirties. Until then, her primary occupations had been delivering newspapers and cleaning other people's houses.
Other sources of intense stress in childhood reported to me have included losing one's mother while a toddler, moving every three months for years at a time, having two bipolar parents, and enduring numerous operations to correct a congenital deformity. Some of the most sensitive of my interviewees— people who had sensed numerous after-death communications and were clairvoyant in other ways as well—as children experienced both alcoholic and rage-o-holic behavior in the home, or some other combination of those genetic and childhood influences which appear to heighten sensitivity to psi. Communal experiences like living through the Blitz do not seem to have had impact of this sort.
Sensing Psi without Childhood Stress
As described earlier, genetic factors such as coming from a psychic family or being a twin may predispose someone to experience psi. But a large percentage of people, especially women, who don't come from such a background and, in addition, enjoyed generally pleasant childhoods may well at some time have one or more intense experiences of after-death communication. Research from around the world documents that people who have lost a life partner are particularly likely to sense their presence after death.
Groundbreaking work done by W. Dewi Rees suggests factors, which may make some bereaved spouses more likely to sense ADCs than others (Rees, 1971). Rees, a physician, interviewed 66 widowers and 227 widowers in an area of Wales, almost all of those healthy enough to be interviewed. Although he did not count in his tally observations of symbolic events, or vivid dreams that seemed like a visit—frequent forms of after-death communication—he still found that half of the widowers and 46% of the widows had sensed some kind of after-death communication from their departed mate. Perhaps because Rees did not count certain kinds of communication, his results differ from later research in the field (e.g. Olson, Suddeth, Peterson and Egelhoff, 1985; Grimby, 1993; Greeley, 1989; and Wright, 1999) in which widows were more likely to report ADCs than widowers.
The bereaved partners who had ADCs were not particularly depressed or socially isolated. Instead, they were more likely to have had longer marriages, happier marriages, and marriages with children. In other words the more strongly the surviving partner had bonded with his or her mate, the more likely they were to sense that partner's presence thereafter. Though ADCs were most likely to occur within the first year after bereavement, sometimes they recurred for years, even decades. They might even continue after the widowed spouse remarried. Some departed spirits seem to be more effective or more frequent commimicators than others (Berger, 1987).
Similarly, in my own work I have found that people with no family history of childhood trauma or belief in psi nonetheless may experience contact with a discamate deeply meaningful in their life: a child, a parent or a beloved life partner. T3^ically such interviewees report no other psi experiences before this life-changing event. But since ADCs tend to open the minds of experiencers to the reality of psi, thereafter they may be more receptive to psychic messages.
Genetic Protection from Childhood Stress
As mentioned toward the beginning of this article, intense trauma in childhood may be associated with depression and other negative consequences in adulthood. Nonetheless, the findings of numerous researchers, myself included, indicate that many people with highly troubled childhoods seem to do remarkably well as adults. Recent research in the field of genetics argues that possession of a variant form of a particular gene may protect against some of the problems often triggered by stressful childhoods (Caspi, Sugden, Moffitt, Taylor, Craig, Harringtron, McClay, Mill, Martin, Braithwaite, and Poulton), 2003). A team of researchers worked in New Zealand with 847 Caucasian, non-Maori members of a health and development study who had been assessed regularly since the age of three.
This cohort was virtually intact at the age of 26 years. The team determined which form of the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene each subject had. "The serotonin system," they explained, "provides a logical source of candidate genes for depression, because this system is the target of selective serotonin reuptake-inhibitor drugs that are effective in treating depression." Testing "whether adult depression was predicted by the interaction between 5-HTTLPR [the 5-HTT gene-linked polymorphic region] and childhood mistreatment that occurred during the first decade of life . . . [they found] that childhood mistreatment predicted adult depression only among individuals carrying an s allele but not among 1/1 homozygotes." It was their conclusion that "this epidemiological study ... provides evidence [that] an individual's response to environmental insults is moderated by his or her genetic makeup."
Conclusions
Much evidence indicates that the person least likely to receive information via paranormal routes is a man who enjoyed a generally happy childhood, who is not a twin, and who comes from a family with no interest or belief in the paranormal. Predictors for particular sensitivity to psi are: 1) coming from a family with a history of psi and/or where psychic powers are accepted as a fact of life; 2) being a child of a multiple birth, e.g., a twin or triplet, and 3) suffering serious trauma in one's first 10-12 years of life. Two frequent sources of trauma are living in a home where one or more adults are alcoholics and living with a habitually angry and abusive parent. Especially gifted psychics frequently have experienced more than one of the above circumstances. In general, women are more psychic than men.
Although intense trauma in childhood may have negative consequences such as depression in adulthood, possession of a variant form of a gene related to the body's use of serotonin might protect against such consequences. In the special case of after-death communication, people with limited psychic gifts nonetheless often sermise the presence of departed loved ones with whom they have an especially strong bond. The role of the communicator must not be overlooked. It would appear that some spirits reach out to the living more effectively or frequently than others.
Bibliography
Berger, A. S. (1987) Aristocracij ofthe dead: New findings in postmortem survival.
Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.
Bremner, J. D. (1999) Does stress damage the brain? (Address: Department of
Diagnostic Radiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT)
Biological Psychiatry 45, 7, 797-805.
Caspi, A., Sugden, K., Moffitt, T. E., et al. (2003) Influence of life stress on depresion:
moderation by a polymorphism in the 5-HnT gene. Science 301,386-389.
Cohn, S. A. (1999A) Second sight and family history: pedigree and segregation
analyses. ]ournal of Scientific Exploration 13, 3, 351-372.
Cohn, S. A. (1999B) A historical review of second sight: the collectors, their
accounts and ideas. Scottish Studies 33,146-185.
Cohn, S. A. (1999C) A questionnaire study on second sight experiences. Journal of
the Society for Psychical Research 63,855,129-157.
Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic techniques ofecstacy. Princeton University
Press;
Emmons, C. F. (1998) Socialization to spirit mediumship. Address delivered to
the Eastern Sociological Society (U.S.A.) March 21,1998.
Garrett, E. J. (2002) Adventures in the supernormal. New York: Helix Press.
Greeley, A. M. (1975) The sociology ofthe paranormal: a reconnaissance. Beverly
Hills/London: Sage Publications.
Greeley, A. M. (1989) Religious Change in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Koestner, R. and Walker, M. (1999) Childhood parenting experiences and adult
creativity. Journal of Research in Personality 33, 92-107.
Lawrence, T. (1995) Paranormal experience and the traumatized mind. Address
to the Society for Psychical Research, London, May 13,1999.
Childhood Influences
Lawrence, T., Edwards, C, Barraclough, N., Church, S., and Hetherington, F.
(1995) Modelling childhood causes of paranormal belief and experience: childhood
trauma and childhood fantasy. Personality and Individual Differences
19, 2, 207-215.
Mead, M. (1975) Blackberry winter: my earlier years. NY Pocket Books.
National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. (1998) Alcoholism and
alcohol-related problems: a sobering look. Fact sheet downloaded from
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Eugene, OR 97042, Second Sight and Family History:
Pedigree and Segregation Analyses
Randy Mack, Birth
Second Sight and Family History:
Pedigree and Segregation Analyses
Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 351–372, 1999 0892-3310/99
© 1999 Society for Scientific Exploration
www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_13_3_cohn.pdf
SHARI A. COHN
School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh
27 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, United Kingdom
Email address: [email protected]
Pedigree and Segregation Analyses
Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 351–372, 1999 0892-3310/99
© 1999 Society for Scientific Exploration
www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_13_3_cohn.pdf
SHARI A. COHN
School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh
27 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, United Kingdom
Email address: [email protected]
Abstract — Little is known about the inheritance of mental and artistic talents. However, given the growing body of evidence for genetic factors in cognitive ability and complex behavior, investigation of this issue seems merited. This study concerns second sight, a psychic ability that has for centuries been believed, in Scotland and other traditions, to be hereditary. The ability manifests itself through the person having spontaneous vivid imagery through different senses which apparently gives information about a spatially or temporally distant event. A total of 130 family histories were constructed and examined using segregation analysis. Second sight seems to be consistent with an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance, particularly for small family sizes. People with the trait were also evenly distributed with respect to their birth order position, in line with the expectations of a genetic model. It is argued that if other studies find a similar mode of inheritance in other cultures, then second sight could be a creative mental ability where the hereditary aspect lies in the sensitivity of the sensory systems which convey the experiences.
Keywords: family studies — second sight — mental talent — segregation analysis — genetics
Introduction Several well-known neurological diseases such as Huntington’s Chorea, Tay-Sachs syndrome and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome follow a single gene Mendelian inheritance pattern. In contrast, there is no consensus as to whether affective disorders follow a single gene or a polygenic inheritance pattern. Several early researchers argued that bipolar manic-depressive illness followed an X-linked dominant inheritance pattern on the basis of linkage between the disorder and the Xg blood group (Winokur & Tanna, 1969; Mendlewicz et al., 1972; Fieve et al., 1973), color blindness or glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency (Reich et al., 1969; Baron et al., 1987). Subsequent work contradicted the finding of linkage with the Xg blood group (Risch & Baron, 1982) and furthermore demonstrated that the linkage with color blindness or G6PD was weaker than originally claimed (Baron et al., 1994). In addition other studies have found evidence contrary to this mode of inheritance such as incidences of a father- son transmission (Goetzl et al., 1974; Angst et al., 1980).
Also in a study of families in an Amish community in Pennsylvania, USA, an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance was observed with linkage to chromosome 11 (Egeland et al., 1987), though the robustness of this finding has
also been questioned (Kelsoe et al., 1989).
In light of these somewhat contradictory findings, others have argued that bipolar manic-depressive illness involves more than one gene and that environmental factors play a significant role in bringing on the illness. For instance, stress, alcohol, and/or interpersonal conflict may trigger a manic-depressive episode in someone who has a history of this illness in their family. Other siblings exposed to the same stresses might not develop the same illness. There may be a threshold of liability for the onset of manic-depressive illness, making it difficult to pinpoint a single gene or polygenic mode of inheritance (McGuffin, 1988; McGuffin & Katz, 1989). The search for susceptibility genes for bipolar manic-depressive illness is already underway (Straub et al., 1994; Berrettini et al., 1994). There is also strong evidence that very creative and gifted people, especially writers and poets, tend to suffer more than others from affective disorders such as manic-depressive illness (Ellis, 1927; Juda, 1949; Andreasen, 1987; Andreasen & Glick, 1988; Akiskal & Akiskal, 1988; Richards et al., 1988; Jamison, 1989, 1993; Ludwig, 1992; Post, 1994). Furthermore, there is a tendency for both manic-depressive illness and creativity to run in families (McNeil, 1971; Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1993; Ludwig, 1994). These findings raise intriguing issues about the relationship between disorders and abilities.
Many studies using twin, adoption and family methods have found that cognitive ability has both genetic and environmental factors (e.g. Bouchard & McGue, 1981; Plomin & McClearn, 1993; Plomin et al., 1994a). Techniques in molecular genetics are now being applied to locating genes that contribute to particular abilities (Plomin et al., 1994b; McInnes & Freimer, 1995; Plomin et al., 1997). As there are genetic predispositions for neurological, mental and
affective disorders and cognitive abilities, can there not be genetic predispositions for mental talents like artistic or musical ability? For example, there is much anecdotal evidence that musical ability may be hereditary, though there is as yet no firm evidence to substantiate this. However, a recent study has shown that the gift of perfect pitch is associated with a characteristic cortical morphology (Schlaug et al., 1995). In people who are not musicians, there is a leftward hemispheric asymmetry of the planum temporale, an area in the cortex associated with processing of sound. Through magnetic resonance imaging, Schlaug et al. (1995) found that this leftward asymmetry was accentuated in musicians, particularly so for those who have perfect pitch. Musicians with perfect pitch start their training younger than musicians without perfect pitch, thus suggesting the possibility of an interaction between hereditary and environmental factors in fostering musical talent. For a discussion of this work, see Nowak (1995) and Sacks (1995).
In the Gaelic speaking communities of Scotland, many artistic abilities, for instance being a good piper, or singer, were regarded as being hereditary. This was also believed to be the case for having second sight (MacInnes, 1989; Cohn, 1996). Second sight is traditionally believed to be a “psychic” ability, that of having spontaneous awake visions, which apparently gives information about a spatially or temporally distant event. It is usually associated with people living in Scotland, especially in the Western Isles and Highlands though it is known to be reported by people living in different countries such as Germany (Schmëing, 1937, 1950, 1954; see Grober-Glück (1973) for an article in English about Schmëing’s work). People in other countries also report experiences with the same psychological phenomenology as second sight, e.g. vivid precognitive visions, though the specific term second sight might not be used to describe them. In the current study, such experiences are also regarded as second sight.
A recent questionnaire study (Cohn, 1999) found that second sight is reported by people of diverse ages, occupations, and religious and cultural traditions. Women tend to report more experiences than men. Extensive interviews were also conducted with 70 people who lived in different parts of Scotland and over 500 accounts were collected and analyzed (Cohn, 1996). Some classical second sight experiences which reflect local customs of death and burial, such as visions of a funeral procession or a death shroud, feature prominently in the historical literature but are rarely reported today (Cohn, 1999). More contemporary experiences can occur either in a literal or symbolic form. For instance, one informant had a vision of a man hanging in an arched window shortly before he found out that a relative of his had hanged himself in a church fifteen miles away. Other visions can occur in a symbolic form, such as one informant seeing a huge wave engulf a fisherman before he and his crew were drowned. The phenomenology of second sight experiences, which often concern emotionally charged events, suggests that the “imagery,” whether visual, auditory, and/or kinaesthetic, is often perceived as external, real and vivid. These and other distinctive features of second sight experiences helped in distinguishing those people with the trait from those without it, thereby facilitating the task of preparing family histories.
Most of the investigators from the 17th century until the present day have observed that second sight ran in the family. Some observed there was a father- son transmission, though most found that both men and women had second sight. For a review of the historical accounts and investigators, see Cohn (in press).
No family histories were ever presented in the historical accounts, so it is impossible to assess from them alone whether the capacity to have second sight experiences could be hereditary. In a small scale South African study, Neppe (1980) observed an association between the symptomatology of temporal lobe dysfunction and people reporting psychic experiences. Hurst and Neppe (1981) subsequently examined two pedigrees from people who had spontaneous psychic experiences and temporal lobe dysfunction and reported that both features followed an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern.
In a recent survey using random sampling methods, it was found that second sight does seem often to run in families in the Western Isles, Highlands, Grampian and Lowland regions in Scotland (Cohn, 1994). Clearly second sight could run in families as a social and cultural phenomenon where the interpretation of experiences as being “psychic” is orally passed down in families from one generation to another. Alternatively, second sight could be a genuine mental talent that is in part hereditary. To attempt to discriminate between these two possibilities, a total of 130 pedigrees were prepared from people with a history of second sight and they were studied using segregation analysis.
Subjects and Methods
Selection and Construction of Pedigrees
A 65-item questionnaire consisting of questions on personal background, range of second sight experiences and family history information was constructed. Questions on different types of second sight experiences were drawn up in light of the historical literature on second sight from the 17th century onwards and the more recent accounts from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh (1950 to present), for more details see Cohn (1996, 1999).
The questionnaire was sent to people living primarily in Scotland but also to people living elsewhere in Britain and other parts of the world, who had contacted the author about having had such experiences and others through contacts made during the survey study and fieldwork. From a total of 208 questionnaire respondents, 70 of whom were also interviewed, there was sufficiently complete family history information to construct pedigrees for 139 of them. From this total, nine pedigrees were excluded from the study: six from people who professed to being mediums or had some other involvement with the occult, and three from people who provided information about having serious medical or clinical problems likely to impair their judgement.
Therefore a total of 130 family histories were studied. They were analyzed with the aim of eliminating known inheritance patterns incompatible with the data to see if a particular inheritance pattern would be reached. The full set of pedigrees is given in (Cohn, 1996). In addition to the analyses of this large number of pedigrees, a parallel set of analyses were undertaken on a subset of these pedigrees, henceforth called the Scottish Interview Group, consisting of 41 pedigrees which satisfied the condition that the person who provided the pedigree information was interviewed, and was primarily from the Scottish Highlands and Islands or Lowlands.
The Scottish Interview Group was analyzed separately to see if the family histories of second sight would be different from the wider group which included people from throughout Britain and other countries who had second sight and other types of psychic experiences. The pedigrees were prepared using a software program called INHERIT (Jones, 1993) and they were analyzed in consultation with Professor Elof Carlson, a geneticist at Stony Brook University, USA.
Criterion for Identifying Individuals with Trait
In the current study the trait in question was whether or not someone had second sight experiences. As there is no repeatable experimental test yet to measure second sight, the assessment was based upon questionnaire and interview material. Specifically, a person was labeled as having second sight if they reported any experiences falling into certain categories, such as having visions of a funeral procession or death shroud; having visions of a person shortly before, at the moment of, or after death; having visions of a person not recognized but later met or precognitive visions which involve sound, light, scent or physical sensation. For a complete list of categories, see Cohn (1996, 1999).
Following the convention in human genetics, an individual who provided information was identified as the propositus or proband and indicated by an arrow in the pedigrees (e.g.McKusick, 1964; Bodmer & Cavalli-Sforza, 1976; Carlson, 1984). In some families there was more than one propositus, which helped to corroborate the information. In the families in which interviews were conducted, further consistency checks were possible through follow-up interviews.
Relatives were identified as having second sight if they told the propositus that they had such experiences or if they were well-known in the family to have had second sight. The convention used in the pedigrees to indicate that a man reported having second sight was a darkened in square and for a woman, a darkened in circle. Roman numerals are used to label each generation in the pedigree diagrams. The remaining relatives were classed either as not having second sight or as “unsures.” Men and women who were reported as not having had second sight were represented in the pedigrees by open squares and circles, respectively. Individuals about whom there was insufficient information to decide whether they had second sight or not were classed as “unsures” and represented by grey symbols.
Individuals could be classed as “unsures” for several reasons: first, if the relative was well-known to the propositus but never mentioned having second sight; second, if the relative had died before the propositus knew him and no other relatives could verify whether the relative had second sight experiences or not; third, if the relative lived elsewhere and there was little communication between the propositus and his or her family; lastly, if the relative was reserved and did not wish to admit to having such experiences.
Results
Incidence of Second Sight
Table 1 summarizes data from the complete set of family histories and the Scottish Interview Group. Analyses were made only for those relatives for whom there was information about whether they had second sight or not. The alternative approach of including everyone in the analyses was not adopted, as it would require treating the “Nos” and “Unsures” as equivalent and thereby underestimate the incidence of second sight in the pedigrees.
The incidence of reported second sight (n ) in the set of 130 family histories in Table 1, is: 667/(667+1375) = .33 or 33%. The incidence of reported second sight among the 41 families in the Scottish interview group is similar to that in the wider group: n = 254/(254+668) = .275 or 28%.These observed frequencies of second sight are higher than the frequencies observed in a recent random survey (Cohn, 1994). We would expect this finding as the pedigrees constitute
a pre-selected group in which the propositus usually reported having second sight.
Sex Ratio
From the aforementioned survey study, it was observed that there was no significant difference between the proportions of men and women reporting second sight for the Western Isles, Highlands, and Grampian areas, though more women reported second sight than men in the Lowlands. However when we look at the family histories, we observe that women tend to report second sight more than men. The proportion of males with second sight in all the family histories is: 236/992 = .24. The equivalent proportion of females is: 417/1036 = .40. A c 2 test confirmed that this difference was highly significant: c 2= 62.9, df =1, p <.001.
It could be that this difference was due to a strong effect in a small number of pedigrees, rather than being a general one. To check this, each pedigree was examined to see whether the number of women reporting second sight exceeded the equivalent number of men. In the complete set of 130 pedigrees, this
TABLE 1
Summary Figures of Pedigree Data
All Pedigrees Interview
Group
Number of Pedigrees 130 41
Number of Family Members Interviewed 61 51
Number of People with Second Sight 667 254
Number of Males with Second Sight 236 104
Number of Females with Second Sight 417 145
Number of UnspeciŽ ed Sex with Second Sight 14 5
Number without Second Sight 1375 668
Number of Males without Second Sight 756 361
Number of Females without Second Sight 619 307
Number Not Sure About Second Sight 1602 545
Number of Males Not Sure About Second Sight 606 227
Number of Females Not Sure About Second Sight 484 197
Number of UnspeciŽ ed Sex without Second Sight 511 121
Number of Married Couples with Second Sight 69 26
Number of Married Couples 500 218
was indeed the case for 89 pedigrees (the men outnumbering the women in another 25, the remaining 16 being tied). A similar trend was found in the Scottish interview group pedigrees (the equivalent figures being 23, 12 and 6 pedigrees, respectively). Thus the sex difference is a general feature of the data.
Assortative Mating Preference
Do people with second sight tend to marry a partner with second sight? One way to examine whether this is so is to compare the observed proportion of marriages in which both partners have second sight to the proportion of such marriages that would be expected to occur by chance, assuming that second sight played no role in partner selection. From Table 1, the observed proportion is 69/500 = .138.
The proportion expected by chance is the probability that a man and woman selected at random in the family histories would both have second sight. The probability that the man would have second sight is n male = 236/992 = .24, the probability for a woman is n female = 417/1036 = .40. Therefore the probability that both partners in a marriage picked at random would have second sight is n male ´ n female = .096. Multiplying this by the total number of marriages gives 500 ´ .096 = 48.
Thus, if second sight played no role in the selection of a marriage partner we would expect to see around 48 couples in which both partners had second sight. In fact, there are 69 such marriages in the pedigrees, with a test based on normal distribution statistics confirming that the difference is highly significant (two-tailed, p < .01, Z = 3.4.). So we observe an assortative mating preference, that is a tendency for people with second sight to marry partners with second sight more often than would be expected by chance. The Scottish interview data gives a similar finding. The value of n male = 104/465 = .22. The value of n female = 145/452 =.32. Therefore n male n female = .07. If we multiply this by the total number of marriages we get 218 ´ .07 = 17.9. Again this is lower than the observed number of these marriages, 26. So an assortative mating preference is also found in the Scottish interview group.
Excluding Modes of Inheritance
To assess whether second sight is a cultural phenomenon orally transmitted through the family and/or whether it is hereditary, family histories were analyzed looking for the known Mendelian inheritance patterns (Carlson, 1984). Although there is no a priori reason why inheritance should be due to a single gene rather than multiple genes, as single gene transmission patterns are easier to detect, these were searched for first.
The mode of Mendelian inheritance differs according to which type of chromosome the gene in question is on — either on a sex chromosome (X or Y) or on one of the 22 autosomes from each parent — and whether expression of the trait requires just one copy of the gene (dominant) or requires two copies (recessive).
X-linked Recessive Inheritance
Of the 130 pedigrees, none showed an X-linked recessive inheritance pattern. In fact, many pedigrees showed transmission patterns which would clearly go against this. An example is shown in Figure 1 of a father- son transmission from I-1 to II-1 and then to III-5.
Y-linked Inheritance
The instance of father- son transmission just discussed seems to support the folk tradition that second sight follows this mode of inheritance. If this transmission pattern had a genetic basis, it would imply that some gene was necessary for mental processes conducive to having second sight and it would be transmitted on the Y chromosome. We would observe from the family histories that only males would have second sight. None of the 130 family histories showed a purely father-to-son transmission pattern in each generation. In fact, the majority of the pedigrees (113 out of 130) showed both women and men having second sight, and 11 additional pedigrees showed just women. Therefore Y-linked inheritance can be excluded.
Autosomal Recessive Inheritance
Traits which follow an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern tend rarely to be seen in the population. Such traits would usually show in one individual in generation III but none in generations I and II. Since autosomal recessive inheritance is not sex-linked, we should expect equal numbers of men and women with the trait. There were eight pedigrees which showed this inheritance pattern (three with a single affected male, three with a single affected female and two with identical female twins affected) from which three probands were interviewed. Figure 2 shows one of these pedigrees.
Fig. 1. The pedigree of a woman living in South Uist, Scotland (IV-2), who reports having second sight and can trace it in five generations of her family. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance.
The possibility also arises that these cases are not autosomal recessive but sporadic, in that only one person in the family has the trait. After several generations, if another person had the trait, it would suggest that these were not sporadic occurrences. Three pedigrees could be considered of the sporadic type since the person who had second sight was either in the first generation (two of the pedigrees) or in the second generation (the third pedigree) and no
one else in the family in the other generations had second sight.
Based upon the Mendelian expectation of 1 in 4, in an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern there may occasionally be more than one individual with the trait in generation III. This is illustrated in Figure 3. Despite these examples, the majority of the pedigrees showed individuals with second sight in more than one generation, therefore a purely autosomal recessive mode of inheritance can be excluded.
Autosomal Dominant Inheritance
The pedigrees were then examined for an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern. In such an inheritance pattern, a person with the trait would have both
Fig. 2. The pedigree of a woman living in Durham, England (III-3), who is the only person so far in her family to report having second sight. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal recessive inheritance.
ancestors and descendants showing the trait in several generations. Every affected person will have at least one parent affected with the trait and their sons and daughters would be affected equally.
One hundred and ten pedigrees were judged to be consistent with an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance. Some of these pedigrees were consistent with full penetrance of the trait, for example, Figures 1 and 4. Others were consistent with reduced penetrance, illustrated by Figures 5 and 6.
Sometimes, a pedigree which is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance can also be consistent with an X-dominant inheritance pattern, as shown by Figure 7. An X-dominant model would predict that when the mother has second sight and the father does not, as with II-2 and II-4, on average 50% of the daughters and sons would have second sight. In actuality, the percentages of children were less than those that would be expected. However, when both parents have second sight (III-8, III-9) we should expect to see all daughters with second sight (IV-2) and 50% of sons having second sight (IV-4). When the father has second sight (IV-4) and the mother does not (IV-5), all daughters will have second sight (V-3) and none of the sons (V-2).
In summary, of the 130 pedigrees, eight contained insufficient information to assess the mode of transmission. None indicated either Y-linked inheritance or X-linked recessive inheritance, nine pedigrees were consistent with an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern, and three were sporadic. One hundred and ten pedigrees were consistent with an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, Fig. 3. The pedigree of a brother (III-1) and sister (III-5) who both live in South Uist, Scotland, and report having second sight. One of their brothers (III-2) also had second sight. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal recessive inheritance.
Fig. 4. The pedigree of a woman from Benbecula, Scotland, who reports having second sight (IV-3) and can trace it in three generations on her paternal side and two generations on her maternal side. Her children (V-1 and V-2) are very young and it cannot yet be determined whether they have second sight. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance.
Fig. 5. The pedigree of a woman from South Uist, Scotland (III-5), who reports having second
sight. One of her brothers (III-8), two of her paternal aunts (II-2 and II-4) and paternal
grandfather (I-1) had second sight. She was very hesitant about discussing whether any of
her children and grandchildren had second sight, as evident from generations IV and V.
This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance with reduced penetrance.
Fig. 6. The pedigree of a man from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, who reports having second sight (V-3) and can trace it in both sides of his family. On his maternal line, he knows of it in four generations and on his paternal line, in two generations. His wife has also had experiences (V-4) as have their three daughters (VI-2, VI-3, VI-5) and one son (VI-6). Their young grandchildren have not had any experiences so far. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance with reduced penetrance.
Fig. 7. The pedigree of a woman from Dundee, Scotland (IV-2), who reports having second sight. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance or X-dominant inheritance.
of which 23 provided insufficient information to distinguish between autosomal
dominant and X-dominant inheritance.
Segregation Analysis
To examine more closely whether second sight follows an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance, a quantitative method called segregation analysis was used (Sutton, 1980). Given the genotypes of the parents, the Mendelian laws of inheritance predict the probabilities of the offspring having certain genotypes and their associated phenotypes.
Segregation analysis involves comparing these theoretical probabilities with the actual frequency of the offspring with and without the trait. The genotype for an autosomal dominant trait can either be (AA) or (Aa). In the absence of any genotypic information, as (AA) is rarer than (Aa), the latter genotype was chosen to represent a person having second sight and (aa) as a person without second sight. If second sight follows an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance, and if one parent has second sight and their partner does not, each child has a 50% chance of having second sight. If both parents have second sight, each child has a 75% chance of having second sight. A segregation analysis was done to see if the number of children having second sight, for different family sizes, is consistent with these expectations.
Ascertainment Bias
It is important to take into consideration how the pedigrees are sampled as this can lead to an ascertainment bias which favors the trait (McKusick, 1964). Since this study involved a pre-selected group in which the proband usually reported to have second sight, if the proband enters the analysis as a child of parents with second sight, then this biases the sample toward a higher proportion of children having second sight. One simple way to avoid such a bias is to remove any sibships (i.e. brothers and sisters) involving the proband from each pedigree (Sutton, 1980). Therefore sibships which included the proband were not counted in the segregation analysis.
Results of the Segregation Analysis
The following four tables contain data from the segregation analyses for all the pedigrees and for the Scottish Interview Group. The tables show, for each family size, the total number of children with second sight out of the total number of children, the resulting proportion, and a p value indicating how consistent this proportion is with the range of sample proportions one would expect, assuming an autosomal dominant inheritance model. Under this model, in the case in which one parent has second sight, the sample proportions should lie near 0.5 and in the case in which both parents have second sight, near .75. The observed proportion will generally deviate from the expected value: the p value is the probability that the model would generate a sample proportion with the observed (or greater) deviation, computed using binomial statistics. Thus very small p values indicate inconsistency between the data and the model of autosomal dominance, whereas larger p values indicate consistency with the model. The convention used was: p values > .05 indicated that the proportions were consistent with the model and an asterisk was placed next to those values in all the tables.
The segregation analyses were done excluding those that were “unsure’’ about having second sight. Referring to Table 2, the segregation analysis for families in which one parent has second sight, aggregating over all the pedigrees, showed that the model is consistent for a wide range of family sizes, the observed proportions being .57, .39, .37 and .40, for families of one, three, four or five children respectively. This is also the case when restricting this analysis to only the Scottish Interview Group, see Table 3. The proportions of children with second sight for families of one child, three, four, five, or six, are consistent with the model, being .46, .33, .50, .40, and .16, respectively.
A similar trend is also observed for families in which both parents have second sight. Referring to Table 4, when aggregating over all the pedigrees, the proportions of children with second sight for families of one child, two, three or four, are consistent with the model expectation of 0.75, being .81, .50, .77, and .58, respectively. When restricting the analysis to the Scottish Interview Group, see Table 5, the proportions of children with second sight for families of one child, two, three or four, are consistent with the model, being .80, 1.0, .83, and 1.0, respectively.
In summary, for families in which one or both parents have second sight, the model of autosomal dominant inheritance seems to be in accord with the data especially for small family sizes, see Table 6. For the larger families, the proportions of children with second sight tended to decrease as the family size increased in each of the four tables. (Note that this trend is not due to an ascer-
TABLE 2
Segregation Analysis for Families in Which One Parent Has Second Sight,
Aggregating Over All the Pedigrees1
Family Size Number with Trait Proportion p value
1 19 out of 33 0.576 0.4869*
2 21 out of 60 0.350 0.0273
3 14 out of 36 0.389 0.2430*
4 6 out of 16 0.375 0.4545*
5 6 out of 15 0.400 0.6072*
6 1 out of 12 0.083 0.0063
7 2 out of 14 0.143 0.0129
8- 11 No data
12 0 out of 12 0.000 0.0005
1 or more 69 out of 198 0.348 0.0000
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
tainment bias, as sibships involving the propositus were excluded from the segregation analyses, as stated earlier). This may explain why the overall proportions of children with second sight (shown at the foot of the tables), for either one parent or both parents with second sight, are below those predicted by the model. The model for autosomal dominant inheritance predicts a similar proportion of children with second sight in both small and large families.
Therefore the finding that the proportions decrease as family size increase clearly runs counter to the model. One social explanation, raised by discussions with the informants in extensive interviews (Cohn, 1996), is that second sight was generally a taboo subject and not openly discussed in the family, making it difficult to know about all relatives with second sight. This was especially relevant for the older generations since they tended to have larger
families. Thus this would lead to an under-reporting of relatives with second sight, especially for the larger families.
TABLE 3
Segregation Analysis for Families in Which One Parent Has Second Sight, Aggregating Only the
Pedigrees in the Scottish Interview Group1
Family Size Number with Trait Proportion p value
1 6 out of 13 0.461 1.0000*
2 6 out of 22 0.273 0.0525
3 7 out of 21 0.333 0.1892*
4 2 out of 4 0.500 1.0000*
5 4 out of 10 0.400 0.7539*
6 1 out of 6 0.167 0.2188*
7 2 out of 14 0.143 0.0129
8- 11 No data
12 0 out of 12 0.000 0.0005
1 or more 28 out of 102 0.274 0.0000
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
TABLE 4
Segregation Analysis for Families in Which Both Parents Have Second Sight,
Aggregating Over All the Pedigrees1
Family Size Number with Trait Proportion p value
1 9 out of 11 0.818 0.7419*
2 4 out of 6 0.667 1.0000*
3 14 out of 18 0.778 1.0000*
4 7 out of 8 0.875 0.6885*
5 No data
6 1 out of 6 0.167 0.0046
7- 11 No data
12 1 out of 12 0.083 0.0000
13 No data
14 4 out of 14 0.286 0.0003
1 or more 40 out of 75 0.533 0.0000
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
If this explanation is true, then it leaves open at least two possibilities. Firstly that second sight could be hereditary, following an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, with the deviation from classical expectations for larger family sizes being essentially due to social and cultural factors influencing the reporting of second sight as discussed above. Alternatively, it could be argued that second sight is not hereditary, but is purely a social and cultural phenomenon that is orally transmitted from one generation to another in families, with the fact that for small families the inheritance was consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance pattern being put down to coincidence.
TABLE 6
Segregation Analyses for Families in Which One Parent or Both Parents Have Second Sight,
Aggregating Over All the Pedigrees or Just Those in the Scottish Interview Group
for Family Sizes 1- 41
Condition Number with Trait Proportion p value
One Parent
All 60 out of 145 0.414 0.046
Interview 21 out of 60 0.350 0.027
Both Parents
All 34 out of 43 0.791 0.602*
Interview 17 out of 19 0.895 0.189*
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
TABLE 5
Segregation Analysis for Families in Which Both Parents Have Second Sight,
Aggregating Only the Pedigrees in the Interview Group1
Family Size Number with Trait Proportion p value
1 4 out of 5 0.800 1.0000*
2 4 out of 4 1.000 0.5781*
3 5 out of 6 0.833 1.0000*
4 4 out of 4 1.000 0.5781*
5 No data
6 1 out of 6 0.167 0.0046
7- 11 No data
12 1 out of 12 0.083 0.0000
13 No data
14 4 out of 14 0.286 0.0003
1 or more 23 out of 51 0.451 0.0000
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
Utilizing Birth-Order Data of Siblings
Before attempting to discriminate between these two models we shall first present some quantitative evidence supporting the above explanation for the decrease in the proportions of children with second sight in larger families.
Consider a family in which the propositus reports that he and some of his siblings have second sight. If the propositus has only limited knowledge of who has second sight in his family, then one might expect that the siblings reported to have second sight would show a tendency to be nearer the propositus in the family birth order. This can be quantified by comparing the size of the difference between the birth positions of the propositus and the sibling with second sight with the expected average size of this difference if the sibling had no tendency to be near the propositus.
In other words, if the ratio of these sizes is less than unity then this indicates that there is a clustering effect, consistent with the idea that the propositus tends to know more about those siblings closer in birth position. Aggregating over those 22 families for which birth-order data was available and in which a clustering effect might be seen (i.e. those in which the propositus has two or more siblings), we find the average ratio value to be 0.91. More strikingly, if we consider only the larger families then the average ratio value drops dramatically, indicating a strong clustering effect, as shown pictorially in Figure 8. Birth-Position and Family Size If second sight is hereditary and follows an autosomal dominant mode of
Fig. 8. Schematic diagrams of the birth positions of the propositus and siblings with second
sight in 22 families ranging in size from 3 to 10. For example, the top left diagram represents
a family of three. The propositus is the third born and the sibling with second sight
is the first born.
inheritance, a person’s position in the birth order should have no bearing on whether he or she has second sight or not. To assess whether this was so, the available information about the birth position of those relatives with second sight was analyzed for all the pedigrees. Of the 667 people with second sight (see Table 1) there was information of the birth position of 249 of them. Table 7 shows that the birth positions are generally uniform, especially for family sizes up to five. For example, the 73 people with second sight in families of size three are evenly spread across the three birth positions (24 being the first born, 26 being the second born, and 23 being the third born). There is very little information for larger families but examining the data available, there is no discernible trend.
Discussion
Is second sight a social and cultural phenomenon orally passed down in families from one generation to another, or a mental talent that is inborn and expressed within different cultural traditions? Extensive recent interviews with informants living in the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland (Cohn, 1996) showed that there is an acceptance of the existence of second sight within the community at large. In some families, though, it was taboo to discuss it. Even so, it still ran in these families. This runs counter to the view that second sight runs in families as purely a sociological belief.
Is it hereditary?
The results of both the pedigree and segregation analyses demonstrate that second sight seems to be consistent with an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, especially for small family sizes. This finding, obtained from pedigrees of people from different cultural traditions, also holds when the analysis is restricted to people of a Scottish background. Further evidence comes from
TABLE 7
Frequencies of Birth Positions of People with Second Sight in Family Sizes 1 to 15
Family Birth Position
Size 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
1 26
2 35 40
3 24 26 23
4 8 10 8 11
5 3 4 3 2 0
6 1 1 1 0 3 2
7 0 0 1 0 0 1 4
8 0 1 0 1 0 0 2 1
9 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
10 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
11 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
12 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
13 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
14 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
15 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
data on birth positions. If second sight followed this mode of inheritance, then people with second sight would be equally distributed across the birth positions of the family, regardless of family size. The data were consistent with such a view. In support of this finding, Palmer (1979) found no clear relationship between birth order and having psychic experiences.
Nevertheless, there are aspects of the data which prima facie go against a genetic model of autosomal dominant inheritance. Clearly, these might be taken to be an indication that second sight is a social and cultural phenomenon.
However, it was argued that this data could also reflect the combination of an underlying genetic component with a reporting bias due to social factors. One finding is the decrease in the proportion of children with second sight in larger family groups. Data were presented which showed that siblings with second sight tended to be closer to the propositus in their birth position. It was argued that these data reflect a tendency for the propositus to know more about those siblings closest to him or her in age. A similar tendency at an inter-generational level might lead to an under-reporting of relatives with second sight in other generations, especially those in larger families.
Traits following this mode of inheritance ought to be expressed with equal frequency in males and females, as the transmission is not sex-linked. However, in the current study, significantly more women reported second sight than men. A plausible social and cultural interpretation is that men and women may have second sight equally but women tend to be more open to discussing it.
Usually an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern shows only one side of the family affected. However, in the current study, of the 110 pedigrees compatible with autosomal dominant inheritance, 50 showed relatives from both sides of the family who had second sight. What can account for this? The incidence of second sight suggests that it is not a rare phenomenon, as one might have expected, but is experienced by a sizable number of people in Scotland. In a survey using random sampling, the incidence ranged from 10% to 33% over the regions sampled (Cohn, 1994) and in the current study it is 23% for the interview group and 32% for all the pedigrees.
Therefore on statistical grounds, it would not be uncommon to see both sides of the family having second sight and one also would expect to see marriages in which both partners have second sight. In fact, an assortative mating preference was found. This raises the question whether people are attracted to a partner — either consciously
or unconsciously — with shared values or experiences.
Previous studies have shown the importance of examining the interaction of genetic and environmental factors of mental abilities and the difficulty of getting a consensus about their mode of inheritance (e.g.Muller, 1925; Lander & Schork, 1994; Rose, 1995). With that cautionary note in mind, other studies need to be done to confirm whether second sight and possibly other types of psychic ability follow an autosomal dominant inheritance. One way to test this would be to compare the results from this study on Scottish Second Sight with studies examining pedigrees of second sight from other cultural traditions across different belief systems. If we observed dissimilar inheritance patterns in the pedigrees in different cultural traditions, then this would strengthen the claim that second sight is not hereditary but a social and cultural phenomenon.
Alternatively, if an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern was consistently observed in pedigrees from different cultural traditions, then this would build a stronger case for second sight being partly due to hereditary factors. To decisively demonstrate that having the sensitivity for second sight is due to a single genetic locus would require the identification of the particular chromosomal region through linkage analysis. If this was found to be the case, it would raise the question whether the hereditary aspect of the ability lies in the sensitivity of the normal sensory systems which convey the experiences.
There are, however, potential objections to a single gene model. If, as is widely supposed, cognitive ability is determined by an interaction of polygenic and environmental factors, would the same be true for specific mental and artistic abilities? There may be genes for the susceptibility to have specific mental and artistic abilities, including second sight. Research is currently being conducted to examine the inheritance of musical, artistic and other exceptional abilities in themselves and to see whether there is a relationship between second sight and these abilities. If such a relationship were to be found then this would suggest that second sight is a creative inborn talent of the mind expressed by people of different cultural traditions.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank all the families who participated in this study. This article is based upon the research reported in an unpublished PhD. dissertation in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, 1996. This work was also done in affiliation
with the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The research was supported in part by a Perrott-Warrick Studentship in Psychical Research, of Trinity College, Cambridge, England; an Eileen Garrett Scholarship, USA; a grant from the Society for Psychical Research, England; and a grant from the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Freiburg, Germany, to all of whom I am grateful. I want to thank Professor Elof Carlson, Department of Biochemistry, Stony Brook University, USA, for his assistance in analyzing the pedigree data. I want to also thank Dr. Martin Simmen, Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, University of Edinburgh, UK, for designing the computer program to run the segregation analyses and additional analyses examining the birth-order data. I want to thank the referee for several helpful suggestions.
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Keywords: family studies — second sight — mental talent — segregation analysis — genetics
Introduction Several well-known neurological diseases such as Huntington’s Chorea, Tay-Sachs syndrome and Lesch-Nyhan syndrome follow a single gene Mendelian inheritance pattern. In contrast, there is no consensus as to whether affective disorders follow a single gene or a polygenic inheritance pattern. Several early researchers argued that bipolar manic-depressive illness followed an X-linked dominant inheritance pattern on the basis of linkage between the disorder and the Xg blood group (Winokur & Tanna, 1969; Mendlewicz et al., 1972; Fieve et al., 1973), color blindness or glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency (Reich et al., 1969; Baron et al., 1987). Subsequent work contradicted the finding of linkage with the Xg blood group (Risch & Baron, 1982) and furthermore demonstrated that the linkage with color blindness or G6PD was weaker than originally claimed (Baron et al., 1994). In addition other studies have found evidence contrary to this mode of inheritance such as incidences of a father- son transmission (Goetzl et al., 1974; Angst et al., 1980).
Also in a study of families in an Amish community in Pennsylvania, USA, an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance was observed with linkage to chromosome 11 (Egeland et al., 1987), though the robustness of this finding has
also been questioned (Kelsoe et al., 1989).
In light of these somewhat contradictory findings, others have argued that bipolar manic-depressive illness involves more than one gene and that environmental factors play a significant role in bringing on the illness. For instance, stress, alcohol, and/or interpersonal conflict may trigger a manic-depressive episode in someone who has a history of this illness in their family. Other siblings exposed to the same stresses might not develop the same illness. There may be a threshold of liability for the onset of manic-depressive illness, making it difficult to pinpoint a single gene or polygenic mode of inheritance (McGuffin, 1988; McGuffin & Katz, 1989). The search for susceptibility genes for bipolar manic-depressive illness is already underway (Straub et al., 1994; Berrettini et al., 1994). There is also strong evidence that very creative and gifted people, especially writers and poets, tend to suffer more than others from affective disorders such as manic-depressive illness (Ellis, 1927; Juda, 1949; Andreasen, 1987; Andreasen & Glick, 1988; Akiskal & Akiskal, 1988; Richards et al., 1988; Jamison, 1989, 1993; Ludwig, 1992; Post, 1994). Furthermore, there is a tendency for both manic-depressive illness and creativity to run in families (McNeil, 1971; Andreasen, 1987; Jamison, 1993; Ludwig, 1994). These findings raise intriguing issues about the relationship between disorders and abilities.
Many studies using twin, adoption and family methods have found that cognitive ability has both genetic and environmental factors (e.g. Bouchard & McGue, 1981; Plomin & McClearn, 1993; Plomin et al., 1994a). Techniques in molecular genetics are now being applied to locating genes that contribute to particular abilities (Plomin et al., 1994b; McInnes & Freimer, 1995; Plomin et al., 1997). As there are genetic predispositions for neurological, mental and
affective disorders and cognitive abilities, can there not be genetic predispositions for mental talents like artistic or musical ability? For example, there is much anecdotal evidence that musical ability may be hereditary, though there is as yet no firm evidence to substantiate this. However, a recent study has shown that the gift of perfect pitch is associated with a characteristic cortical morphology (Schlaug et al., 1995). In people who are not musicians, there is a leftward hemispheric asymmetry of the planum temporale, an area in the cortex associated with processing of sound. Through magnetic resonance imaging, Schlaug et al. (1995) found that this leftward asymmetry was accentuated in musicians, particularly so for those who have perfect pitch. Musicians with perfect pitch start their training younger than musicians without perfect pitch, thus suggesting the possibility of an interaction between hereditary and environmental factors in fostering musical talent. For a discussion of this work, see Nowak (1995) and Sacks (1995).
In the Gaelic speaking communities of Scotland, many artistic abilities, for instance being a good piper, or singer, were regarded as being hereditary. This was also believed to be the case for having second sight (MacInnes, 1989; Cohn, 1996). Second sight is traditionally believed to be a “psychic” ability, that of having spontaneous awake visions, which apparently gives information about a spatially or temporally distant event. It is usually associated with people living in Scotland, especially in the Western Isles and Highlands though it is known to be reported by people living in different countries such as Germany (Schmëing, 1937, 1950, 1954; see Grober-Glück (1973) for an article in English about Schmëing’s work). People in other countries also report experiences with the same psychological phenomenology as second sight, e.g. vivid precognitive visions, though the specific term second sight might not be used to describe them. In the current study, such experiences are also regarded as second sight.
A recent questionnaire study (Cohn, 1999) found that second sight is reported by people of diverse ages, occupations, and religious and cultural traditions. Women tend to report more experiences than men. Extensive interviews were also conducted with 70 people who lived in different parts of Scotland and over 500 accounts were collected and analyzed (Cohn, 1996). Some classical second sight experiences which reflect local customs of death and burial, such as visions of a funeral procession or a death shroud, feature prominently in the historical literature but are rarely reported today (Cohn, 1999). More contemporary experiences can occur either in a literal or symbolic form. For instance, one informant had a vision of a man hanging in an arched window shortly before he found out that a relative of his had hanged himself in a church fifteen miles away. Other visions can occur in a symbolic form, such as one informant seeing a huge wave engulf a fisherman before he and his crew were drowned. The phenomenology of second sight experiences, which often concern emotionally charged events, suggests that the “imagery,” whether visual, auditory, and/or kinaesthetic, is often perceived as external, real and vivid. These and other distinctive features of second sight experiences helped in distinguishing those people with the trait from those without it, thereby facilitating the task of preparing family histories.
Most of the investigators from the 17th century until the present day have observed that second sight ran in the family. Some observed there was a father- son transmission, though most found that both men and women had second sight. For a review of the historical accounts and investigators, see Cohn (in press).
No family histories were ever presented in the historical accounts, so it is impossible to assess from them alone whether the capacity to have second sight experiences could be hereditary. In a small scale South African study, Neppe (1980) observed an association between the symptomatology of temporal lobe dysfunction and people reporting psychic experiences. Hurst and Neppe (1981) subsequently examined two pedigrees from people who had spontaneous psychic experiences and temporal lobe dysfunction and reported that both features followed an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern.
In a recent survey using random sampling methods, it was found that second sight does seem often to run in families in the Western Isles, Highlands, Grampian and Lowland regions in Scotland (Cohn, 1994). Clearly second sight could run in families as a social and cultural phenomenon where the interpretation of experiences as being “psychic” is orally passed down in families from one generation to another. Alternatively, second sight could be a genuine mental talent that is in part hereditary. To attempt to discriminate between these two possibilities, a total of 130 pedigrees were prepared from people with a history of second sight and they were studied using segregation analysis.
Subjects and Methods
Selection and Construction of Pedigrees
A 65-item questionnaire consisting of questions on personal background, range of second sight experiences and family history information was constructed. Questions on different types of second sight experiences were drawn up in light of the historical literature on second sight from the 17th century onwards and the more recent accounts from the archives of the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh (1950 to present), for more details see Cohn (1996, 1999).
The questionnaire was sent to people living primarily in Scotland but also to people living elsewhere in Britain and other parts of the world, who had contacted the author about having had such experiences and others through contacts made during the survey study and fieldwork. From a total of 208 questionnaire respondents, 70 of whom were also interviewed, there was sufficiently complete family history information to construct pedigrees for 139 of them. From this total, nine pedigrees were excluded from the study: six from people who professed to being mediums or had some other involvement with the occult, and three from people who provided information about having serious medical or clinical problems likely to impair their judgement.
Therefore a total of 130 family histories were studied. They were analyzed with the aim of eliminating known inheritance patterns incompatible with the data to see if a particular inheritance pattern would be reached. The full set of pedigrees is given in (Cohn, 1996). In addition to the analyses of this large number of pedigrees, a parallel set of analyses were undertaken on a subset of these pedigrees, henceforth called the Scottish Interview Group, consisting of 41 pedigrees which satisfied the condition that the person who provided the pedigree information was interviewed, and was primarily from the Scottish Highlands and Islands or Lowlands.
The Scottish Interview Group was analyzed separately to see if the family histories of second sight would be different from the wider group which included people from throughout Britain and other countries who had second sight and other types of psychic experiences. The pedigrees were prepared using a software program called INHERIT (Jones, 1993) and they were analyzed in consultation with Professor Elof Carlson, a geneticist at Stony Brook University, USA.
Criterion for Identifying Individuals with Trait
In the current study the trait in question was whether or not someone had second sight experiences. As there is no repeatable experimental test yet to measure second sight, the assessment was based upon questionnaire and interview material. Specifically, a person was labeled as having second sight if they reported any experiences falling into certain categories, such as having visions of a funeral procession or death shroud; having visions of a person shortly before, at the moment of, or after death; having visions of a person not recognized but later met or precognitive visions which involve sound, light, scent or physical sensation. For a complete list of categories, see Cohn (1996, 1999).
Following the convention in human genetics, an individual who provided information was identified as the propositus or proband and indicated by an arrow in the pedigrees (e.g.McKusick, 1964; Bodmer & Cavalli-Sforza, 1976; Carlson, 1984). In some families there was more than one propositus, which helped to corroborate the information. In the families in which interviews were conducted, further consistency checks were possible through follow-up interviews.
Relatives were identified as having second sight if they told the propositus that they had such experiences or if they were well-known in the family to have had second sight. The convention used in the pedigrees to indicate that a man reported having second sight was a darkened in square and for a woman, a darkened in circle. Roman numerals are used to label each generation in the pedigree diagrams. The remaining relatives were classed either as not having second sight or as “unsures.” Men and women who were reported as not having had second sight were represented in the pedigrees by open squares and circles, respectively. Individuals about whom there was insufficient information to decide whether they had second sight or not were classed as “unsures” and represented by grey symbols.
Individuals could be classed as “unsures” for several reasons: first, if the relative was well-known to the propositus but never mentioned having second sight; second, if the relative had died before the propositus knew him and no other relatives could verify whether the relative had second sight experiences or not; third, if the relative lived elsewhere and there was little communication between the propositus and his or her family; lastly, if the relative was reserved and did not wish to admit to having such experiences.
Results
Incidence of Second Sight
Table 1 summarizes data from the complete set of family histories and the Scottish Interview Group. Analyses were made only for those relatives for whom there was information about whether they had second sight or not. The alternative approach of including everyone in the analyses was not adopted, as it would require treating the “Nos” and “Unsures” as equivalent and thereby underestimate the incidence of second sight in the pedigrees.
The incidence of reported second sight (n ) in the set of 130 family histories in Table 1, is: 667/(667+1375) = .33 or 33%. The incidence of reported second sight among the 41 families in the Scottish interview group is similar to that in the wider group: n = 254/(254+668) = .275 or 28%.These observed frequencies of second sight are higher than the frequencies observed in a recent random survey (Cohn, 1994). We would expect this finding as the pedigrees constitute
a pre-selected group in which the propositus usually reported having second sight.
Sex Ratio
From the aforementioned survey study, it was observed that there was no significant difference between the proportions of men and women reporting second sight for the Western Isles, Highlands, and Grampian areas, though more women reported second sight than men in the Lowlands. However when we look at the family histories, we observe that women tend to report second sight more than men. The proportion of males with second sight in all the family histories is: 236/992 = .24. The equivalent proportion of females is: 417/1036 = .40. A c 2 test confirmed that this difference was highly significant: c 2= 62.9, df =1, p <.001.
It could be that this difference was due to a strong effect in a small number of pedigrees, rather than being a general one. To check this, each pedigree was examined to see whether the number of women reporting second sight exceeded the equivalent number of men. In the complete set of 130 pedigrees, this
TABLE 1
Summary Figures of Pedigree Data
All Pedigrees Interview
Group
Number of Pedigrees 130 41
Number of Family Members Interviewed 61 51
Number of People with Second Sight 667 254
Number of Males with Second Sight 236 104
Number of Females with Second Sight 417 145
Number of UnspeciŽ ed Sex with Second Sight 14 5
Number without Second Sight 1375 668
Number of Males without Second Sight 756 361
Number of Females without Second Sight 619 307
Number Not Sure About Second Sight 1602 545
Number of Males Not Sure About Second Sight 606 227
Number of Females Not Sure About Second Sight 484 197
Number of UnspeciŽ ed Sex without Second Sight 511 121
Number of Married Couples with Second Sight 69 26
Number of Married Couples 500 218
was indeed the case for 89 pedigrees (the men outnumbering the women in another 25, the remaining 16 being tied). A similar trend was found in the Scottish interview group pedigrees (the equivalent figures being 23, 12 and 6 pedigrees, respectively). Thus the sex difference is a general feature of the data.
Assortative Mating Preference
Do people with second sight tend to marry a partner with second sight? One way to examine whether this is so is to compare the observed proportion of marriages in which both partners have second sight to the proportion of such marriages that would be expected to occur by chance, assuming that second sight played no role in partner selection. From Table 1, the observed proportion is 69/500 = .138.
The proportion expected by chance is the probability that a man and woman selected at random in the family histories would both have second sight. The probability that the man would have second sight is n male = 236/992 = .24, the probability for a woman is n female = 417/1036 = .40. Therefore the probability that both partners in a marriage picked at random would have second sight is n male ´ n female = .096. Multiplying this by the total number of marriages gives 500 ´ .096 = 48.
Thus, if second sight played no role in the selection of a marriage partner we would expect to see around 48 couples in which both partners had second sight. In fact, there are 69 such marriages in the pedigrees, with a test based on normal distribution statistics confirming that the difference is highly significant (two-tailed, p < .01, Z = 3.4.). So we observe an assortative mating preference, that is a tendency for people with second sight to marry partners with second sight more often than would be expected by chance. The Scottish interview data gives a similar finding. The value of n male = 104/465 = .22. The value of n female = 145/452 =.32. Therefore n male n female = .07. If we multiply this by the total number of marriages we get 218 ´ .07 = 17.9. Again this is lower than the observed number of these marriages, 26. So an assortative mating preference is also found in the Scottish interview group.
Excluding Modes of Inheritance
To assess whether second sight is a cultural phenomenon orally transmitted through the family and/or whether it is hereditary, family histories were analyzed looking for the known Mendelian inheritance patterns (Carlson, 1984). Although there is no a priori reason why inheritance should be due to a single gene rather than multiple genes, as single gene transmission patterns are easier to detect, these were searched for first.
The mode of Mendelian inheritance differs according to which type of chromosome the gene in question is on — either on a sex chromosome (X or Y) or on one of the 22 autosomes from each parent — and whether expression of the trait requires just one copy of the gene (dominant) or requires two copies (recessive).
X-linked Recessive Inheritance
Of the 130 pedigrees, none showed an X-linked recessive inheritance pattern. In fact, many pedigrees showed transmission patterns which would clearly go against this. An example is shown in Figure 1 of a father- son transmission from I-1 to II-1 and then to III-5.
Y-linked Inheritance
The instance of father- son transmission just discussed seems to support the folk tradition that second sight follows this mode of inheritance. If this transmission pattern had a genetic basis, it would imply that some gene was necessary for mental processes conducive to having second sight and it would be transmitted on the Y chromosome. We would observe from the family histories that only males would have second sight. None of the 130 family histories showed a purely father-to-son transmission pattern in each generation. In fact, the majority of the pedigrees (113 out of 130) showed both women and men having second sight, and 11 additional pedigrees showed just women. Therefore Y-linked inheritance can be excluded.
Autosomal Recessive Inheritance
Traits which follow an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern tend rarely to be seen in the population. Such traits would usually show in one individual in generation III but none in generations I and II. Since autosomal recessive inheritance is not sex-linked, we should expect equal numbers of men and women with the trait. There were eight pedigrees which showed this inheritance pattern (three with a single affected male, three with a single affected female and two with identical female twins affected) from which three probands were interviewed. Figure 2 shows one of these pedigrees.
Fig. 1. The pedigree of a woman living in South Uist, Scotland (IV-2), who reports having second sight and can trace it in five generations of her family. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance.
The possibility also arises that these cases are not autosomal recessive but sporadic, in that only one person in the family has the trait. After several generations, if another person had the trait, it would suggest that these were not sporadic occurrences. Three pedigrees could be considered of the sporadic type since the person who had second sight was either in the first generation (two of the pedigrees) or in the second generation (the third pedigree) and no
one else in the family in the other generations had second sight.
Based upon the Mendelian expectation of 1 in 4, in an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern there may occasionally be more than one individual with the trait in generation III. This is illustrated in Figure 3. Despite these examples, the majority of the pedigrees showed individuals with second sight in more than one generation, therefore a purely autosomal recessive mode of inheritance can be excluded.
Autosomal Dominant Inheritance
The pedigrees were then examined for an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern. In such an inheritance pattern, a person with the trait would have both
Fig. 2. The pedigree of a woman living in Durham, England (III-3), who is the only person so far in her family to report having second sight. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal recessive inheritance.
ancestors and descendants showing the trait in several generations. Every affected person will have at least one parent affected with the trait and their sons and daughters would be affected equally.
One hundred and ten pedigrees were judged to be consistent with an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance. Some of these pedigrees were consistent with full penetrance of the trait, for example, Figures 1 and 4. Others were consistent with reduced penetrance, illustrated by Figures 5 and 6.
Sometimes, a pedigree which is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance can also be consistent with an X-dominant inheritance pattern, as shown by Figure 7. An X-dominant model would predict that when the mother has second sight and the father does not, as with II-2 and II-4, on average 50% of the daughters and sons would have second sight. In actuality, the percentages of children were less than those that would be expected. However, when both parents have second sight (III-8, III-9) we should expect to see all daughters with second sight (IV-2) and 50% of sons having second sight (IV-4). When the father has second sight (IV-4) and the mother does not (IV-5), all daughters will have second sight (V-3) and none of the sons (V-2).
In summary, of the 130 pedigrees, eight contained insufficient information to assess the mode of transmission. None indicated either Y-linked inheritance or X-linked recessive inheritance, nine pedigrees were consistent with an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern, and three were sporadic. One hundred and ten pedigrees were consistent with an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, Fig. 3. The pedigree of a brother (III-1) and sister (III-5) who both live in South Uist, Scotland, and report having second sight. One of their brothers (III-2) also had second sight. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal recessive inheritance.
Fig. 4. The pedigree of a woman from Benbecula, Scotland, who reports having second sight (IV-3) and can trace it in three generations on her paternal side and two generations on her maternal side. Her children (V-1 and V-2) are very young and it cannot yet be determined whether they have second sight. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance with full penetrance.
Fig. 5. The pedigree of a woman from South Uist, Scotland (III-5), who reports having second
sight. One of her brothers (III-8), two of her paternal aunts (II-2 and II-4) and paternal
grandfather (I-1) had second sight. She was very hesitant about discussing whether any of
her children and grandchildren had second sight, as evident from generations IV and V.
This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance with reduced penetrance.
Fig. 6. The pedigree of a man from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, who reports having second sight (V-3) and can trace it in both sides of his family. On his maternal line, he knows of it in four generations and on his paternal line, in two generations. His wife has also had experiences (V-4) as have their three daughters (VI-2, VI-3, VI-5) and one son (VI-6). Their young grandchildren have not had any experiences so far. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance with reduced penetrance.
Fig. 7. The pedigree of a woman from Dundee, Scotland (IV-2), who reports having second sight. This pedigree is consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance or X-dominant inheritance.
of which 23 provided insufficient information to distinguish between autosomal
dominant and X-dominant inheritance.
Segregation Analysis
To examine more closely whether second sight follows an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance, a quantitative method called segregation analysis was used (Sutton, 1980). Given the genotypes of the parents, the Mendelian laws of inheritance predict the probabilities of the offspring having certain genotypes and their associated phenotypes.
Segregation analysis involves comparing these theoretical probabilities with the actual frequency of the offspring with and without the trait. The genotype for an autosomal dominant trait can either be (AA) or (Aa). In the absence of any genotypic information, as (AA) is rarer than (Aa), the latter genotype was chosen to represent a person having second sight and (aa) as a person without second sight. If second sight follows an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance, and if one parent has second sight and their partner does not, each child has a 50% chance of having second sight. If both parents have second sight, each child has a 75% chance of having second sight. A segregation analysis was done to see if the number of children having second sight, for different family sizes, is consistent with these expectations.
Ascertainment Bias
It is important to take into consideration how the pedigrees are sampled as this can lead to an ascertainment bias which favors the trait (McKusick, 1964). Since this study involved a pre-selected group in which the proband usually reported to have second sight, if the proband enters the analysis as a child of parents with second sight, then this biases the sample toward a higher proportion of children having second sight. One simple way to avoid such a bias is to remove any sibships (i.e. brothers and sisters) involving the proband from each pedigree (Sutton, 1980). Therefore sibships which included the proband were not counted in the segregation analysis.
Results of the Segregation Analysis
The following four tables contain data from the segregation analyses for all the pedigrees and for the Scottish Interview Group. The tables show, for each family size, the total number of children with second sight out of the total number of children, the resulting proportion, and a p value indicating how consistent this proportion is with the range of sample proportions one would expect, assuming an autosomal dominant inheritance model. Under this model, in the case in which one parent has second sight, the sample proportions should lie near 0.5 and in the case in which both parents have second sight, near .75. The observed proportion will generally deviate from the expected value: the p value is the probability that the model would generate a sample proportion with the observed (or greater) deviation, computed using binomial statistics. Thus very small p values indicate inconsistency between the data and the model of autosomal dominance, whereas larger p values indicate consistency with the model. The convention used was: p values > .05 indicated that the proportions were consistent with the model and an asterisk was placed next to those values in all the tables.
The segregation analyses were done excluding those that were “unsure’’ about having second sight. Referring to Table 2, the segregation analysis for families in which one parent has second sight, aggregating over all the pedigrees, showed that the model is consistent for a wide range of family sizes, the observed proportions being .57, .39, .37 and .40, for families of one, three, four or five children respectively. This is also the case when restricting this analysis to only the Scottish Interview Group, see Table 3. The proportions of children with second sight for families of one child, three, four, five, or six, are consistent with the model, being .46, .33, .50, .40, and .16, respectively.
A similar trend is also observed for families in which both parents have second sight. Referring to Table 4, when aggregating over all the pedigrees, the proportions of children with second sight for families of one child, two, three or four, are consistent with the model expectation of 0.75, being .81, .50, .77, and .58, respectively. When restricting the analysis to the Scottish Interview Group, see Table 5, the proportions of children with second sight for families of one child, two, three or four, are consistent with the model, being .80, 1.0, .83, and 1.0, respectively.
In summary, for families in which one or both parents have second sight, the model of autosomal dominant inheritance seems to be in accord with the data especially for small family sizes, see Table 6. For the larger families, the proportions of children with second sight tended to decrease as the family size increased in each of the four tables. (Note that this trend is not due to an ascer-
TABLE 2
Segregation Analysis for Families in Which One Parent Has Second Sight,
Aggregating Over All the Pedigrees1
Family Size Number with Trait Proportion p value
1 19 out of 33 0.576 0.4869*
2 21 out of 60 0.350 0.0273
3 14 out of 36 0.389 0.2430*
4 6 out of 16 0.375 0.4545*
5 6 out of 15 0.400 0.6072*
6 1 out of 12 0.083 0.0063
7 2 out of 14 0.143 0.0129
8- 11 No data
12 0 out of 12 0.000 0.0005
1 or more 69 out of 198 0.348 0.0000
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
tainment bias, as sibships involving the propositus were excluded from the segregation analyses, as stated earlier). This may explain why the overall proportions of children with second sight (shown at the foot of the tables), for either one parent or both parents with second sight, are below those predicted by the model. The model for autosomal dominant inheritance predicts a similar proportion of children with second sight in both small and large families.
Therefore the finding that the proportions decrease as family size increase clearly runs counter to the model. One social explanation, raised by discussions with the informants in extensive interviews (Cohn, 1996), is that second sight was generally a taboo subject and not openly discussed in the family, making it difficult to know about all relatives with second sight. This was especially relevant for the older generations since they tended to have larger
families. Thus this would lead to an under-reporting of relatives with second sight, especially for the larger families.
TABLE 3
Segregation Analysis for Families in Which One Parent Has Second Sight, Aggregating Only the
Pedigrees in the Scottish Interview Group1
Family Size Number with Trait Proportion p value
1 6 out of 13 0.461 1.0000*
2 6 out of 22 0.273 0.0525
3 7 out of 21 0.333 0.1892*
4 2 out of 4 0.500 1.0000*
5 4 out of 10 0.400 0.7539*
6 1 out of 6 0.167 0.2188*
7 2 out of 14 0.143 0.0129
8- 11 No data
12 0 out of 12 0.000 0.0005
1 or more 28 out of 102 0.274 0.0000
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
TABLE 4
Segregation Analysis for Families in Which Both Parents Have Second Sight,
Aggregating Over All the Pedigrees1
Family Size Number with Trait Proportion p value
1 9 out of 11 0.818 0.7419*
2 4 out of 6 0.667 1.0000*
3 14 out of 18 0.778 1.0000*
4 7 out of 8 0.875 0.6885*
5 No data
6 1 out of 6 0.167 0.0046
7- 11 No data
12 1 out of 12 0.083 0.0000
13 No data
14 4 out of 14 0.286 0.0003
1 or more 40 out of 75 0.533 0.0000
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
If this explanation is true, then it leaves open at least two possibilities. Firstly that second sight could be hereditary, following an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, with the deviation from classical expectations for larger family sizes being essentially due to social and cultural factors influencing the reporting of second sight as discussed above. Alternatively, it could be argued that second sight is not hereditary, but is purely a social and cultural phenomenon that is orally transmitted from one generation to another in families, with the fact that for small families the inheritance was consistent with autosomal dominant inheritance pattern being put down to coincidence.
TABLE 6
Segregation Analyses for Families in Which One Parent or Both Parents Have Second Sight,
Aggregating Over All the Pedigrees or Just Those in the Scottish Interview Group
for Family Sizes 1- 41
Condition Number with Trait Proportion p value
One Parent
All 60 out of 145 0.414 0.046
Interview 21 out of 60 0.350 0.027
Both Parents
All 34 out of 43 0.791 0.602*
Interview 17 out of 19 0.895 0.189*
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
TABLE 5
Segregation Analysis for Families in Which Both Parents Have Second Sight,
Aggregating Only the Pedigrees in the Interview Group1
Family Size Number with Trait Proportion p value
1 4 out of 5 0.800 1.0000*
2 4 out of 4 1.000 0.5781*
3 5 out of 6 0.833 1.0000*
4 4 out of 4 1.000 0.5781*
5 No data
6 1 out of 6 0.167 0.0046
7- 11 No data
12 1 out of 12 0.083 0.0000
13 No data
14 4 out of 14 0.286 0.0003
1 or more 23 out of 51 0.451 0.0000
1This includes only those with second sight and those without it.
*Indicates a p value > .05.
Utilizing Birth-Order Data of Siblings
Before attempting to discriminate between these two models we shall first present some quantitative evidence supporting the above explanation for the decrease in the proportions of children with second sight in larger families.
Consider a family in which the propositus reports that he and some of his siblings have second sight. If the propositus has only limited knowledge of who has second sight in his family, then one might expect that the siblings reported to have second sight would show a tendency to be nearer the propositus in the family birth order. This can be quantified by comparing the size of the difference between the birth positions of the propositus and the sibling with second sight with the expected average size of this difference if the sibling had no tendency to be near the propositus.
In other words, if the ratio of these sizes is less than unity then this indicates that there is a clustering effect, consistent with the idea that the propositus tends to know more about those siblings closer in birth position. Aggregating over those 22 families for which birth-order data was available and in which a clustering effect might be seen (i.e. those in which the propositus has two or more siblings), we find the average ratio value to be 0.91. More strikingly, if we consider only the larger families then the average ratio value drops dramatically, indicating a strong clustering effect, as shown pictorially in Figure 8. Birth-Position and Family Size If second sight is hereditary and follows an autosomal dominant mode of
Fig. 8. Schematic diagrams of the birth positions of the propositus and siblings with second
sight in 22 families ranging in size from 3 to 10. For example, the top left diagram represents
a family of three. The propositus is the third born and the sibling with second sight
is the first born.
inheritance, a person’s position in the birth order should have no bearing on whether he or she has second sight or not. To assess whether this was so, the available information about the birth position of those relatives with second sight was analyzed for all the pedigrees. Of the 667 people with second sight (see Table 1) there was information of the birth position of 249 of them. Table 7 shows that the birth positions are generally uniform, especially for family sizes up to five. For example, the 73 people with second sight in families of size three are evenly spread across the three birth positions (24 being the first born, 26 being the second born, and 23 being the third born). There is very little information for larger families but examining the data available, there is no discernible trend.
Discussion
Is second sight a social and cultural phenomenon orally passed down in families from one generation to another, or a mental talent that is inborn and expressed within different cultural traditions? Extensive recent interviews with informants living in the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland (Cohn, 1996) showed that there is an acceptance of the existence of second sight within the community at large. In some families, though, it was taboo to discuss it. Even so, it still ran in these families. This runs counter to the view that second sight runs in families as purely a sociological belief.
Is it hereditary?
The results of both the pedigree and segregation analyses demonstrate that second sight seems to be consistent with an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, especially for small family sizes. This finding, obtained from pedigrees of people from different cultural traditions, also holds when the analysis is restricted to people of a Scottish background. Further evidence comes from
TABLE 7
Frequencies of Birth Positions of People with Second Sight in Family Sizes 1 to 15
Family Birth Position
Size 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
1 26
2 35 40
3 24 26 23
4 8 10 8 11
5 3 4 3 2 0
6 1 1 1 0 3 2
7 0 0 1 0 0 1 4
8 0 1 0 1 0 0 2 1
9 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0
10 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
11 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
12 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
13 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
14 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
15 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
data on birth positions. If second sight followed this mode of inheritance, then people with second sight would be equally distributed across the birth positions of the family, regardless of family size. The data were consistent with such a view. In support of this finding, Palmer (1979) found no clear relationship between birth order and having psychic experiences.
Nevertheless, there are aspects of the data which prima facie go against a genetic model of autosomal dominant inheritance. Clearly, these might be taken to be an indication that second sight is a social and cultural phenomenon.
However, it was argued that this data could also reflect the combination of an underlying genetic component with a reporting bias due to social factors. One finding is the decrease in the proportion of children with second sight in larger family groups. Data were presented which showed that siblings with second sight tended to be closer to the propositus in their birth position. It was argued that these data reflect a tendency for the propositus to know more about those siblings closest to him or her in age. A similar tendency at an inter-generational level might lead to an under-reporting of relatives with second sight in other generations, especially those in larger families.
Traits following this mode of inheritance ought to be expressed with equal frequency in males and females, as the transmission is not sex-linked. However, in the current study, significantly more women reported second sight than men. A plausible social and cultural interpretation is that men and women may have second sight equally but women tend to be more open to discussing it.
Usually an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern shows only one side of the family affected. However, in the current study, of the 110 pedigrees compatible with autosomal dominant inheritance, 50 showed relatives from both sides of the family who had second sight. What can account for this? The incidence of second sight suggests that it is not a rare phenomenon, as one might have expected, but is experienced by a sizable number of people in Scotland. In a survey using random sampling, the incidence ranged from 10% to 33% over the regions sampled (Cohn, 1994) and in the current study it is 23% for the interview group and 32% for all the pedigrees.
Therefore on statistical grounds, it would not be uncommon to see both sides of the family having second sight and one also would expect to see marriages in which both partners have second sight. In fact, an assortative mating preference was found. This raises the question whether people are attracted to a partner — either consciously
or unconsciously — with shared values or experiences.
Previous studies have shown the importance of examining the interaction of genetic and environmental factors of mental abilities and the difficulty of getting a consensus about their mode of inheritance (e.g.Muller, 1925; Lander & Schork, 1994; Rose, 1995). With that cautionary note in mind, other studies need to be done to confirm whether second sight and possibly other types of psychic ability follow an autosomal dominant inheritance. One way to test this would be to compare the results from this study on Scottish Second Sight with studies examining pedigrees of second sight from other cultural traditions across different belief systems. If we observed dissimilar inheritance patterns in the pedigrees in different cultural traditions, then this would strengthen the claim that second sight is not hereditary but a social and cultural phenomenon.
Alternatively, if an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern was consistently observed in pedigrees from different cultural traditions, then this would build a stronger case for second sight being partly due to hereditary factors. To decisively demonstrate that having the sensitivity for second sight is due to a single genetic locus would require the identification of the particular chromosomal region through linkage analysis. If this was found to be the case, it would raise the question whether the hereditary aspect of the ability lies in the sensitivity of the normal sensory systems which convey the experiences.
There are, however, potential objections to a single gene model. If, as is widely supposed, cognitive ability is determined by an interaction of polygenic and environmental factors, would the same be true for specific mental and artistic abilities? There may be genes for the susceptibility to have specific mental and artistic abilities, including second sight. Research is currently being conducted to examine the inheritance of musical, artistic and other exceptional abilities in themselves and to see whether there is a relationship between second sight and these abilities. If such a relationship were to be found then this would suggest that second sight is a creative inborn talent of the mind expressed by people of different cultural traditions.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank all the families who participated in this study. This article is based upon the research reported in an unpublished PhD. dissertation in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, 1996. This work was also done in affiliation
with the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The research was supported in part by a Perrott-Warrick Studentship in Psychical Research, of Trinity College, Cambridge, England; an Eileen Garrett Scholarship, USA; a grant from the Society for Psychical Research, England; and a grant from the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene, Freiburg, Germany, to all of whom I am grateful. I want to thank Professor Elof Carlson, Department of Biochemistry, Stony Brook University, USA, for his assistance in analyzing the pedigree data. I want to also thank Dr. Martin Simmen, Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, University of Edinburgh, UK, for designing the computer program to run the segregation analyses and additional analyses examining the birth-order data. I want to thank the referee for several helpful suggestions.
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Ancestral Communication
CONCEPTS OF THE SOUL
Life soul, selbst, psyché. life force (vitalstoff) as a body-soul immanently present in the body, the ‘inside’ (thymos) which is clearly connected to some part of the body (head, brain, heart, liver, kidneys etc.), it resides there and is associated with bodily functions (breathing, breath, blood circulation, sperm). The soul related to some natural element or phenomenon such as the wind blowing (duše), fog, water. Functions related to various notions/terms for the soul (life force, mental concepts, breathing, movement) etc.
The free soul, external soul, mirror or shadow soul, double ( alter ego, double, harm, fylgja etc.) as the seat of life force, as the depository of communication with the supernatural. It is outside the body either constantly or temporarily, it breaks away from the soul in dreams, in a trance etc. Living and dead, bodily and spiritual variants. Their connection with the soul which lives on after death and with mortal spirits. Its formations (human, animal, mirror image, light, foggy figure). It is only observable in certain situations, at certain times, before death; appears only in dreams or visions. An invisible protector, companion (guardian angel), a fate soul which determines destiny or prophecies the future. It is an emotional and intellectual tie with the alter ego of oneself or others (mara/Mahr/mora phenomena). Accompanying, guarding, helping and initiating spirits interpreted as formal variants of the free soul.
Narrative traditions related to notions of the soul, motifs in stories and legends for the free soul, shadow soul, external soul, as well as departure from the body, the soul departing in sleep, narrative metaphors for transformation, metamorphosis, for turning into a soul (flight, invisibility, becoming small, entering through the keyhole, travelling in a small object, walking on the water, turning into an animal etc.).
Special creatures who have a free soul or an alter ego since birth – two-souled creatures, double beings, shapeshifters: werewolves and mara/mora/Mahr/Alp/lidérc beings, vampires, witches and magicia
Body and soul – death, life after death, spirits of the dead
Death of an individual: death of the body and/or soul, the bodily and spiritual existence of the dead. Dead body (drying out, turning to dust, whether the soil will or will not admit it). Bodies living on, living dead bodies. Half-living or revived bodies, possessed dead bodies. What (sort of soul) dies along with the body, what survives the body. Souls living on in dead bodies and in bones.
Deathbed – with ancestors and relatives appearing, coming to take the soul. Companions of the soul (angels, saints, demons). The soul at the moment of death, which soul dies. Whether and how it leaves the body, where it goes, what shape it takes (breath, blood, fog, tiny man, tiny angel, naked baby, bee, bird etc.). Linguistic metaphors for the departure of the body. The place where the departing soul resides, its different stages, periods, dates of departure. Gradual death, bodily functions which persist temporarily after death, gradual departure. Transitory places, transitory existence: dead persons with no status who have not found a final place of rest, souls roaming in a liminal existence.
Souls and spirits in the other world, up, down, in heaven, in the underworld, in the woods, on the mountain, on an island, under water. The spirit of the dead in the other world – bodily and spiritual attributes and manifestations. Personal judgement and resurrection, resurrected body and/or soul – the fate of the body and/or soul in the meantime; souls in purgatory. Transition between different other worlds. Last judgement, the final destiny of the soul after resurrection.
Souls remaining in the soil, in the body, in the cemetery (in or around the grave), in the house, with the family; the dead of the family in the house, around the hearth, the soul of the ancestor in the wall, around the hearth, under the doorstep – in an animal form (house snake, talašom etc., ‘building sacrifices’). The spirit of the dead person in the likeness, statue, magical object (talisman, stoicheion). Dead people turned into guardian spirits of the family or the individual, ‘evil dead’ assaulting the family or the community.
Mythical beings fused or merged with the dead: fairies; ill-intentioned dead turned into demons; ‘two-souled creatures’ – people who have alter egos or living and dead variants (witches, magicians, vampires), demons. Spiritual beings which are half human or a transition between human and spirit – ‘light shadowed ones’, ‘wind-men’ (storm magicians, stuha, zduhac, planetnyk, chmurnik); fairies.
Spirits of the dead or possessing dead who return to the human community, to earth, who appear to humans (in a dream, trance, in an earthly setting as ghosts, in ’a bodily form’, individually or in a group), helping or assaulting humans, snatching them to death, hoping that they would influence their otherworldly destiny or demanding offerings. Occasions, time and purpose for returning/appearance; times and places of the dead on earth.
Ancestral communication – in the context of the body-soul and spirits
General, spontaneous, lay forms and professionals who use certain bodily/spiritual capacities, birth traits (they have a special soul, alter ego or peculiar guardian spirits etc, and communicate with a unique spirit world or other worlds).
Communication with the dead, with spirits of the dead, with demons of storm clouds, ‘walking with the fairies’ etc. Forms and functions of such communication (assaults by the dead, snatching the living for ‘initiation’, possession by the dead, poltergeist phenomena). Communication with dead people or spirits who appear in dreams. Communication through alter egos/doubles of the living. Lay and professional communication with the dead, with spirits through a double who had broken away from the person: horizontal, earthly travels of the double. Double beings, creatures with two souls and shapeshifters communicating between the worlds of nature and culture (werewolf), and between the human world and the night world of the dead and demons through their demonic alter egos: mora, Mahr, witch, strigoi, vampire etc. Helping spirits as the unique manifestations of the alter ego.
Techniques of the communication. Communication in a trance – inducing a trance, relevant techniques (spontaneous transe, self-suggestion, meditation, objects inducing a trance such as a mirror, water etc). The state of the body and the soul in a transe. Seers and fortune tellers reporting in a transe about their journey int he other world.
Ritual communication, symbolic and trance-inducing rites (fasting, St. Lucy’s stool, magic circle, magic wand, walking around the grave of the dead and the ‘places of the fairies’, beating them with the wand). Ritual invocation of the dead and of fairies, rites for acquiring spirit helpers or invoking the dead.
Spontaneous and professional, ritually induced activity of mediums. The clairvoyant as a medium possessed by the dead. The role of music, dance and turning round in inducing trance; ritual possession by the dead or by fairies (healing societies: rusalia, rusalje, calusari, etc.).
‘Journeys’ of the free soul – with companions, helping souls or spirits or without; the free soul rises out of the body, elevates itself, looks back and sees the body or the earth; falling in a tunnel, crossing the water in a vehicle, rising with the vapours into a storm cloud; flying in dream to a ’fairy heaven’; turning into an animal and thus joining the demonic werewolf troupe; travelling to a witches’ Sabbath on the back of animals, or of objects or metamorphosed into an animal; flying to the fairy other world with a troupe of fairies, making music and dancing etc.
Battles of the soul in dream or trance, against hostile harming spirits, storm souls in storm clouds, against assaulting werewolf demons, between good and bad – healing and harmful – spirits (in a possession trance); night battles (in a dream or trance) against the assaults of the dead or demons.
Narrative tradition, linguistic metaphors and textual representations of trance experiences and soul journeys, of communication through alter egos, of being snatched by the dead and of journeys to the other world, accounts of such experience, motifs in tales, legends and literature; folklore and literary motifs of journeys to the other world; narrative traditions of fairy other worlds and witches’ Sabbaths. 1997 Ingo Swan speculative paper:
http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/HumanGenome.html
Life soul, selbst, psyché. life force (vitalstoff) as a body-soul immanently present in the body, the ‘inside’ (thymos) which is clearly connected to some part of the body (head, brain, heart, liver, kidneys etc.), it resides there and is associated with bodily functions (breathing, breath, blood circulation, sperm). The soul related to some natural element or phenomenon such as the wind blowing (duše), fog, water. Functions related to various notions/terms for the soul (life force, mental concepts, breathing, movement) etc.
The free soul, external soul, mirror or shadow soul, double ( alter ego, double, harm, fylgja etc.) as the seat of life force, as the depository of communication with the supernatural. It is outside the body either constantly or temporarily, it breaks away from the soul in dreams, in a trance etc. Living and dead, bodily and spiritual variants. Their connection with the soul which lives on after death and with mortal spirits. Its formations (human, animal, mirror image, light, foggy figure). It is only observable in certain situations, at certain times, before death; appears only in dreams or visions. An invisible protector, companion (guardian angel), a fate soul which determines destiny or prophecies the future. It is an emotional and intellectual tie with the alter ego of oneself or others (mara/Mahr/mora phenomena). Accompanying, guarding, helping and initiating spirits interpreted as formal variants of the free soul.
Narrative traditions related to notions of the soul, motifs in stories and legends for the free soul, shadow soul, external soul, as well as departure from the body, the soul departing in sleep, narrative metaphors for transformation, metamorphosis, for turning into a soul (flight, invisibility, becoming small, entering through the keyhole, travelling in a small object, walking on the water, turning into an animal etc.).
Special creatures who have a free soul or an alter ego since birth – two-souled creatures, double beings, shapeshifters: werewolves and mara/mora/Mahr/Alp/lidérc beings, vampires, witches and magicia
Body and soul – death, life after death, spirits of the dead
Death of an individual: death of the body and/or soul, the bodily and spiritual existence of the dead. Dead body (drying out, turning to dust, whether the soil will or will not admit it). Bodies living on, living dead bodies. Half-living or revived bodies, possessed dead bodies. What (sort of soul) dies along with the body, what survives the body. Souls living on in dead bodies and in bones.
Deathbed – with ancestors and relatives appearing, coming to take the soul. Companions of the soul (angels, saints, demons). The soul at the moment of death, which soul dies. Whether and how it leaves the body, where it goes, what shape it takes (breath, blood, fog, tiny man, tiny angel, naked baby, bee, bird etc.). Linguistic metaphors for the departure of the body. The place where the departing soul resides, its different stages, periods, dates of departure. Gradual death, bodily functions which persist temporarily after death, gradual departure. Transitory places, transitory existence: dead persons with no status who have not found a final place of rest, souls roaming in a liminal existence.
Souls and spirits in the other world, up, down, in heaven, in the underworld, in the woods, on the mountain, on an island, under water. The spirit of the dead in the other world – bodily and spiritual attributes and manifestations. Personal judgement and resurrection, resurrected body and/or soul – the fate of the body and/or soul in the meantime; souls in purgatory. Transition between different other worlds. Last judgement, the final destiny of the soul after resurrection.
Souls remaining in the soil, in the body, in the cemetery (in or around the grave), in the house, with the family; the dead of the family in the house, around the hearth, the soul of the ancestor in the wall, around the hearth, under the doorstep – in an animal form (house snake, talašom etc., ‘building sacrifices’). The spirit of the dead person in the likeness, statue, magical object (talisman, stoicheion). Dead people turned into guardian spirits of the family or the individual, ‘evil dead’ assaulting the family or the community.
Mythical beings fused or merged with the dead: fairies; ill-intentioned dead turned into demons; ‘two-souled creatures’ – people who have alter egos or living and dead variants (witches, magicians, vampires), demons. Spiritual beings which are half human or a transition between human and spirit – ‘light shadowed ones’, ‘wind-men’ (storm magicians, stuha, zduhac, planetnyk, chmurnik); fairies.
Spirits of the dead or possessing dead who return to the human community, to earth, who appear to humans (in a dream, trance, in an earthly setting as ghosts, in ’a bodily form’, individually or in a group), helping or assaulting humans, snatching them to death, hoping that they would influence their otherworldly destiny or demanding offerings. Occasions, time and purpose for returning/appearance; times and places of the dead on earth.
Ancestral communication – in the context of the body-soul and spirits
General, spontaneous, lay forms and professionals who use certain bodily/spiritual capacities, birth traits (they have a special soul, alter ego or peculiar guardian spirits etc, and communicate with a unique spirit world or other worlds).
Communication with the dead, with spirits of the dead, with demons of storm clouds, ‘walking with the fairies’ etc. Forms and functions of such communication (assaults by the dead, snatching the living for ‘initiation’, possession by the dead, poltergeist phenomena). Communication with dead people or spirits who appear in dreams. Communication through alter egos/doubles of the living. Lay and professional communication with the dead, with spirits through a double who had broken away from the person: horizontal, earthly travels of the double. Double beings, creatures with two souls and shapeshifters communicating between the worlds of nature and culture (werewolf), and between the human world and the night world of the dead and demons through their demonic alter egos: mora, Mahr, witch, strigoi, vampire etc. Helping spirits as the unique manifestations of the alter ego.
Techniques of the communication. Communication in a trance – inducing a trance, relevant techniques (spontaneous transe, self-suggestion, meditation, objects inducing a trance such as a mirror, water etc). The state of the body and the soul in a transe. Seers and fortune tellers reporting in a transe about their journey int he other world.
Ritual communication, symbolic and trance-inducing rites (fasting, St. Lucy’s stool, magic circle, magic wand, walking around the grave of the dead and the ‘places of the fairies’, beating them with the wand). Ritual invocation of the dead and of fairies, rites for acquiring spirit helpers or invoking the dead.
Spontaneous and professional, ritually induced activity of mediums. The clairvoyant as a medium possessed by the dead. The role of music, dance and turning round in inducing trance; ritual possession by the dead or by fairies (healing societies: rusalia, rusalje, calusari, etc.).
‘Journeys’ of the free soul – with companions, helping souls or spirits or without; the free soul rises out of the body, elevates itself, looks back and sees the body or the earth; falling in a tunnel, crossing the water in a vehicle, rising with the vapours into a storm cloud; flying in dream to a ’fairy heaven’; turning into an animal and thus joining the demonic werewolf troupe; travelling to a witches’ Sabbath on the back of animals, or of objects or metamorphosed into an animal; flying to the fairy other world with a troupe of fairies, making music and dancing etc.
Battles of the soul in dream or trance, against hostile harming spirits, storm souls in storm clouds, against assaulting werewolf demons, between good and bad – healing and harmful – spirits (in a possession trance); night battles (in a dream or trance) against the assaults of the dead or demons.
Narrative tradition, linguistic metaphors and textual representations of trance experiences and soul journeys, of communication through alter egos, of being snatched by the dead and of journeys to the other world, accounts of such experience, motifs in tales, legends and literature; folklore and literary motifs of journeys to the other world; narrative traditions of fairy other worlds and witches’ Sabbaths. 1997 Ingo Swan speculative paper:
http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/HumanGenome.html
(c)2013-2014; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.