Mind Reading as a Cultural Practice

Laurens Schlicht, Carla Seemann, Christian Kassung, Laurens Schlicht, Carla Seemann, Christian Kassung

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030394196
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a genealogical perspective on various forms of mind reading in different settings. We understand mind reading in a broad sense as the twentieth-century attempt to generate knowledge of what people held in their minds – with a focus on scientifically-based governmental practices. This volume considers the techniques of mind reading within a wider perspective of discussions about technological innovation within neuroscience, the juridical system, "occult" practices and discourses within the wider field of parapsychology and magical beliefs. The authors address the practice of, and discourses on, mind reading as they form part of the consolidation of modern governmental techniques. The collected contributions explore the question of how these techniques have been epistemically formed, institutionalized, practiced, discussed, and how they have been used to shape forms of subjectivities – collectively through human consciousness or individually through the criminal, deviant, or spiritual subject. The first part of this book focuses on the technologies and media of mind reading, while the second part addresses practices of mind reading as they have been used within the juridical sphere. The volume is of interest to a broad scholarly readership dealing with topics in interdisciplinary fields such as the history of science, history of knowledge, cultural studies, and techniques of subjectivization.

© The Author(s) 2020

L. Schlicht et al. (eds.)Mind Reading as a Cultural PracticePalgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39419-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Laurens Schlicht¹ and Carla Seemann¹

(1)

Institut für Romanische Kulturwissenschaft und Interkulturelle Kommunikation, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany

Laurens Schlicht (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Carla Seemann

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Most contemporary German encyclopaedias have recognized the shows of the American mentalist John Randall Brown (1851–1926) as the beginning of the phenomenon of “mind reading.”¹ In this specific sense, mind reading in its simplest form was considered “the art of finding a hidden object, in which the seeker, blindfolded, grasps a knowing ‘medium’ by the hands and guides him or her during the search. It is based on the observation of the muscle contractions of the medium, which occur when the right path is taken” as the German encyclopaedia Brockhaus tells us in 1911.² The explanatory scheme of the unconsciously exposed muscle contractions of the medium, provoked by mental images and thus also called “ideomotor movements,” was considered “proven” by William Preyer’s “palmograph”—an apparatus to detect the smallest muscle contractions of the hand—as a German philosophical dictionary puts it in 1907.³

In 1886, William Preyer (1841–1897), professor of physiology at Jena University, formulated in “The Explanation of Mind Reading” (Die Erklärung des Gedankenlesens) the necessity to prove mind reading scientifically and therefore to transfer it from the context of popular entertainment to the realm of natural science.⁴ Preyer wanted to demonstrate that mind reading was a simple and trainable technique and rejected its interpretation as “magnetic rapport” (magnetischer Rapport) or “mental radiation” (psychische Strahlung)⁵ stemming from the rather spiritistic contexts of mesmerism. In his view, mind reading was simply a physical process during which a certain mental image of an object was unconsciously translated into an automatic muscular reaction which allowed the mind reader in the above-mentioned constellation to be guided to the hidden object.⁶ He wanted to visualize the muscular contraction related to a specific mental image with his palmograph which “translated” involuntary movements of the arm—caused physically (by breath or pulse) or psychophysically (by mental images)—graphically into a curve. With his apparatus, he aimed to substantiate that “the muscle contractions occurring independently of mental activity have a uniform character, whereas the others do not.”⁷

There existed alternative interpretations of mind reading at the same time. For example, Max Dessoir (1867–1947), one of the leading figures of Berlin Psychological society, in the same year wrote “On the History of Mind Reading” (Zur Geschichte des Gedankenlesens),⁸ in which he reported on observed phenomena which in his eyes could not be explained by the theory of ideomotor movements, that is, by the observation and measuring of unconsciously exposed muscle contractions. In contrast to this theory, Dessoir was only interested in a form of mind reading he called “supernatural thought transmission without bodily contact.”⁹ He argued that the most desirable version of mind reading was a thought transmission which transferred mental pictures over any distance. Dessoir demarcated his own approach from two other categories of mind reading: firstly, the one practised by show masters who in his view just used trickery; secondly, the physiologist model represented by Preyer and others.¹⁰ In contrast to both, Dessoir aimed at an experimental scene in which all conscious or unconscious transmission of thoughts through one of the bodily senses had to be excluded.¹¹ Therefore, he also had to slightly change the experimental setting: the subject functioning as receiver of the thought-image left the room while the name of an object was written on a piece of paper which was shown to the members of the experimental group. The latter had to concentrate mentally on the object when the receiver came back into the room so that the receiver could see the image in his or her own imagination.¹² The reception of these mental images in Dessoir’s sense could also be refined in order to extend the distance of transmission or the complexity of the objects to be transmitted (so, for example, in more advanced settings the attribute of the will [Willensantriebe] or more abstract impressions of the senses could be transmitted as well).

The quoted actors can be regarded as exemplary figures in a network of practices of and reflections on mind reading. They illustrate the variety of topics dealt with by scientists, show masters or mediums related to this practice. Mind reading, thereby, presented itself as a new field of enquiry for disparate forms of practices and soon it became important for these actors to set their boundaries. In the above-described discussion, one of the central demarcation lines was the question as to what forces constitute our psychical universe. Mind reading stimulated exactly these questions of scientific ontology. We want to give only one example from the field of psychology: Karl Marbe, experimental psychologist and professor at Würzburg University.¹³ As a relatively new academic discipline, at the beginning of the twentieth century, psychology had to protect its claim for scientificity and therefore was particularly vigilant with regard to any putative threat. Marbe wanted to show that indeed mind reading, the ability to know someone’s thoughts without her or him telling explicitly, existed and even formed an integral part of our everyday life, but had nothing to do with any occult or spiritual ability or force. Therefore, Marbe conducted a number of experiments to test the ability of his students in mind reading, aiming to prove the superfluity of any occult or spiritist ability when it comes to literally “reading” people’s minds; in other words, using any kind of resource outside the universe of known scientific techniques or objects was completely unnecessary because for him true mind reading was not supernatural, but a mundane, natural skill. Show masters, as Marbe claimed, have used either simple tricks to feign the ability of mind reading or, conscious or not, used simple predictive knowledge stemming from statistical inference.¹⁴

One type of experiments conducted by Marbe therefore basically consisted in testing if some types of events which appeared to occur randomly in effect showed some regularities. For example, he used an epidiascope (a kind of projector) to present his students a number of cards and invited each to remember just one of them.¹⁵ He wanted to know if the cards remembered were in fact distributed randomly or if there was some repeatable structure. The result of this experiment was that there indeed existed preferences for some cards. People would usually choose the ace to remember, then high numbers, then the jack, queen, king, etc., evidence for what he called the “Gleichförmigkeit des psychischen Geschehens,” the uniformity of mental events.¹⁶ Marbe claimed that the effect of this uniformity could even be increased by the force of suggestion. With his theory of uniformity, Marbe challenged two fields of knowledge, which in his view had been harmful: theories of a collective “spirit,” like the spirit of the “Volk” or of an era, and any type of parapsychological or occultist explanation of the link between two individual spirits. For Marbe, stage performers presented “mind reading” using an array of different techniques, more or less simple tricks, like the statistical inference, a refined ability to detect the smallest muscle movements. With reference to the famous Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929), Marbe tells in an autobiographical text of 1945 that he himself had successfully reproduced these show tricks of “mind reading” based on previously agreed secret signs.¹⁷

Mind Reading as Contest Zone

The previous examples may illustrate that through the concept of mind reading, seemingly separate fields of practice and knowledge became connected—for example, interrogation practices and occultist séances, statistical knowledge and stage magic, neuroscience and popular media. On a conceptual level, “mind reading” became a possibility for building a shared reference for a socially and epistemically heterogeneous group of actors and practices. The concept of mind reading was open enough to give the actors involved enough latitude to fill it with new content. At the same time, the concept was sufficiently clearly delineated to serve as a point of focus for epistemic and social controversies.¹⁸ This conceptual fuzziness was the result of groups of very different social and epistemic reputation delineating the meaning of this concept each in their own way, in order to negotiate ontological, epistemological or social issues at stake (see below).

In history, sociology and philosophy of science, similar phenomena have often been analysed based on the work of Ludwik Fleck.¹⁹ Inspired by historical epistemology, this kind of research posed the question of how actors with different backgrounds working on the same object can actually communicate with each other. At times, this communication can be simplified by defining central joint interests or points of contention through a common conceptual reference. When the actors referred to mind reading, we assume that they referred to exactly such a weakly defined field of possible points of contention (like the legitimacy of breaking into the thoughts of others, the desirability of a widespread use of mind reading or forms of its technical realization).

One argument of this research was that concepts too rigidly defined prevent rather than promote communication and innovation processes. For instance, Ilana Löwy analysed the case of immunology, wherein she proposed to analyse “loose concepts” that may even remain imprecise throughout their life cycle and thus enable the building of what Peter Galison has called a “trading zone”²⁰ or, as Löwy adds, a more stabilized “pidgin zone,” which unites different professional groups: “On the social level such ‘permanently imprecise’ concepts may moreover favour the development of ‘federative’ experimental approaches and may facilitate the long-term maintenance of loose coalitions of institutional alliances between pre-existing professional groups.”²¹ We assume that, analogous to the description of experimental systems, the negotiation of political and social challenges is often grouped around such permanently imprecise concepts. They serve to define the political, social or epistemic differences that are at the centre of these debates.²² Apart from the fact that mind reading was a concept that was referenced in order to enact such differences, it also fulfilled the function ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Technology and Mind Reading: Perspectives on Media and Occult Practices
• Part II. Reading and Interpreting the Criminal Mind: Practices of Policing and Political Control
• Back Matter