Experiments using thought transference to bring about physical reactions have been among the most provocative in the history of Russian parapsychology. This article summarizes these tests, compares them with differing research approaches outside the Soviet Union and notes their contemporary significance. Much of the following comes from via the efforts of Professor C. C. L. Gregory who administered the Institute for the Study of Mental Images at Church Crookham, Hampshire, England, which published the English translation of Professor L. L. Vasiliev's work Experiments in Mental Suggestion (1963). (Available in the MOT Shop Here.)
The basic difference between research approaches on parapsychology in the United States and the Soviet Union is this: American researchers are mainly concerned with the person who is apparently receiving extrasensory knowledge, while Russian scientists emphasize the role of the sender. In the United States the key question is, "Did the subject obtain information he could not have received through ordinary channels of information?" By contrast, the Russians ask, "Did this sender exert an influence outside the known sensory range?" Of course, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. They can even be regarded as complementary. But they have certainly led to marked difference in research emphasis and experimental choice.
Current Russian research can be traced to nineteenth century hypnosis experiments in which the key questions were, "Can a hypnotist influence his subject by other than verbal or standard physical signals? If so, is it possible to discover how this influence is conveyed from hypnotist to subject? Does a form of electromagnetic radiation convey the instructions? Does some disturbance of an electric field communicate this influence? Or is the compelling message, if any, carried in some manner as yet wholly inexplicable in terms of current physical concepts?"
From a scientific point of view it is obviously desirable to investigate effects that are as simple as possible, that can easily be isolated, classified and recorded. When, therefore, in the early nineteen twenties, Professor Leonid L. Vasiliev of the Brain Research Institute of Leningrad University took charge of a project investigating claims for telepathy and similar phenomena, it was natural that he should begin experimenting with mental suggestion of ordinary body movements. His research was prompted by these questions: Can a hypnotist get a subject to move an arm or a leg, or a specific muscle, without giving any verbal instructions? Is it possible to produce reflexes, normally elicited by touch, through purely mental influence?
To answer these questions, Vasiliev and his associates selected as their first subject a chronic patient from one of Leningrad's mental hospitals. The patient, identified only as Kouzima, suffered from a longstanding hysterical paralysis of her left side. The experimenters, most of whom were medically qualified, observed that during hypnosis Kouzima could be persuaded to move her left side in response to verbal commands. They also found that after continued and repeated hypnotic instructions the patient became "negativistic," refusing to do as she was told.
This type of experience had already been well recorded by the pioneer French hypnotist Jean M. Charcot. The Vasiliev group, however, went further: they hoped to find out whether the patient would respond to mental "willing" by the doctors. Their forerunner in this type of experiment was another French hypnotist, Dr. Paul Joire. Rather to their surprise, the Russian researchers discovered that Kouzima continued her characteristic negative response to verbal instructions but went on to obey merely mental commands.
These preliminary experiments were made in a small hospital ward from which all furniture had been removed, except for one chair and the patient's bed in the middle of the room. Dr. Vasiliev's associate, Dr. V. N. Finne, placed Kouzima in a hypnotic state through verbal suggestion. One of the experimenters sat behind the patient's head, at a distance of about two meters (between six and seven feet). This experimenter first wrote down on paper the movements he planned to "will" the subject to perform. He then proceeded to imagine, as vividly as possible, the subject actually making the series of muscular contractions necessary to execute the movement, and to influence the subject to comply with his mental commands. All present sought to avoid unconscious whispering, which, of course, would have ruined the experiment.
The researchers found that once the subject was in a state of deep hypnosis, her eyes tightly closed or bandaged, she usually made the movement suggested to her, and no others. When she was asked why she had made a particular movement, she replied, "I was told to by Dr. Finne," or giving the name of whoever acted as experimenter. She nearly always identified the sender correctly. Among the movements suggested in this way were: raising a hand or leg, putting out her tongue, crossing her arms, sitting up, putting her hands under her head, scratching her nose, and so forth. Kouzima not only responded to instructions from her hypnotist and other experimenters she knew well, but also to suggestions from visiting scientists. One of the visitors, Professor A. A. Koulbashov, mentally suggested that she scratch her left cheek. She scratched her right cheek instead, complaining that "Professor Koulbashov" had made the right side of her face "itch horribly."
The subject carried out ten of nineteen tasks correctly; six were partly right, while three were wrong or not obeyed at all. Additional experiments, carried out during the following years, incorporated slight variations in procedure and were made with different subjects. Only certain individuals were found to be responsive to such "mental suggestion." Some of them were mental patients, while others came from various walks of life. The research technique had one major drawback: it faded with repetition; as time went on, results became less and less convincing. During the first hypnosis sessions the subjects were passive, almost immobile. But the longer the experiments continued, the more restless the subjects became. They made spontaneous movements not suggested by the researchers. This made it difficult to be sure that crucial movements had actually been made in response to suggestions, rather than in the course of general, random movements.
The experimenters tried to find out whether mental influencing could be effective in inducing not only voluntary movements, but such involuntary movements as the unconscious swaying of the body when one is standing still. For this purpose Dr. A. I. Bronstein designed a platform that permitted the automatic recording of a subject's swaying movements, without his knowledge that this unconscious behavior was being measured. Everyone has a characteristic swaying pattern of which he is unaware.
This setup was first tested on three students and laboratory assistants aged eighteen to twenty. First, their swaying patterns were recorded. Then the experimenter attempted to compel them, by mental suggestion, to sway back and forth. Nothing whatever happened: the recording remained the same before, during and after the mental suggestion. When, however, the subjects were told that they would not be able to stand still and would feel as though pulled forward and backward, they responded in a measurable and recordable manner. As the experiments were carried out with a wider selection of subjects, it was found that characteristic response (or nonresponse) patterns to verbal suggestion could be obtained from all of them. But few responded to merely thought or mental suggestions.
The investigators then tried their new apparatus and technique on one of their earlier subjects, whose initials were I. M., a mental patient who had given what they felt to be reasonable results in response to mental suggestions of voluntary acts. When I.M. was put on the platform, she displayed marked, sharp swaying movements in response to wordless "willing" on the part of experimenters. During one experiment her swings became so pronounced that she lost her balance. When questioned, she said she had felt nothing during experiments. No spontaneous forward and backward swayings were ever recorded in the absence of mental suggestion.
The conclusions drawn by Vasiliev and his colleagues at this stage were threefold: the data supported the possibility of influencing conscious voluntary movements by mental suggestion; it supported the possibility of influencing unconscious and involuntary movements by mental suggestion; and involuntary and unconscious movement could only be induced in subjects actually susceptible to mental suggestion of voluntary and conscious movements.
A number of scientists in Russia also attempted to discover whether "mental suggestion" causing subjects to move could be inhibited by the type of screening that stops electromagnetic radiation. Different groups of investigators were involved. These groups were led by B. B. Kazhinsky, T. V. Gurstein, and S. I. Turlygin. Their experiments, it seems, were too sporadic, too few in number, and not sufficiently well enough controlled to yield even tentative conclusions.
In addition to experiments with human body movements, Russian investigators sought to find out whether the movement of animals, both voluntary and involuntary, can be affected by mental suggestion. The best known are those conducted under the direction of V. M.
Bekhterev, who enjoyed a considerable standing in Russia and abroad. Bekhterev became interested in the claims of Vladimir Durov, a circus performer who entertained a huge public with a celebrated telepathy act in which he "mentally" influenced his dogs to carry out numerous maneuvers.
Durov, an immensely successful man, was a star performer before the Revolution; old Russian emigrés of my acquaintance still recall the grand style in which he lived. After the Revolution he became an established authority on animal behavior. Durov trained his dogs to respond to the signals of a "Galton whistle," which makes supersonic sounds too high for adult human ears but perfectly audible to dogs. Durov became convinced, however, that his dogs occasionally responded to purely mental commands on his part. He said that during his circus act he was able to compel his dogs to bark several times, simply on the basis of mental orders. He also believed that he could make them respond to commands to bring him an object, again by reacting to his thoughts only.
Bekhterev attempted to subject Durov's claims to more rigorous scientific examination. He organized experiments under these conditions: (1) the dog's owner, Durov, was absent during the tests; (2) there was to be no audience; (3) the dog was brought into the room only just before the experiment; (4) after making his mental suggestion, the experimenter was to hide from the dog; (5) the assistant, who alone supervised the dog while it was to carry out the mentally suggested task, had no idea what this task was going to be.
Bekhterev concluded that effects by means of mental suggestion could indeed be elicited in dogs especially trained to obedience. He considered that this effect was produced without direct contact between sender and dog, and that it was not hampered by bandaging the sender's eyes or by placing wooden or metal screens between sender and dog. It seems doubtful, however, that Bekhterev's experiments can be accepted without reservations. Even in cases specifically described by him, the animal frequently did not carry out the task precisely, and control experiments seem not to have been made. When, for example, a dog was mentally instructed to pick up one of three paper balls, we are not told whether the dog tended to pick up new objects of great canine interest in an otherwise bare experimental room, whether he was "willed" to do so or not; nor are we told the relative position of the three paper balls: were they close to the dog, in light or shadow, against the wall, or in the center of the room?
Vasiliev does not seem to have considered it worth his while to continue the attempts to produce motor reactions in dogs through mental suggestion. He did, however, pursue another interesting avenue of investigation. Unfortunately, this project was apparently abandoned when V. S. Steblin Kaminsky, the young researcher in charge of it, was killed during the siege of Leningrad in 1942. The work grew from observations made by Rudolf Reutler, director of the Malaria Institute at Rosh Pina in Israel. Reutler noticed that when the temperature was sufficiently high, the exposed inner organs of grasshoppers were apparently directly affected by the mere bodily presence of the experimenter, contracting violently while the experimenter was quietly sitting by, and reverting to a slow rhythmic movement in his absence. Attempts were made to make sure that the contractions were not due to changes in temperature or humidity. The effect on the intestinal muscles of the grasshoppers varied with the breathing movements of the experimenter, who was quietly looking through a microscope. The effect was more marked when the observer sharply contracted a group of voluntary muscles, such as suddenly bending a leg or moving his fingers rapidly.
Professor Vasiliev asked Steblin Kaminsky in 1940 to repeat these experiments at the Brain Research Institute at Leningrad University. Using the same methods as Reutler, locusts and cockroaches were used in these tests. Steblin Kaminsky achieved the same results as Reutler, although more regularly in the summer than the winter. For instance, a deep sigh on his part or a sudden contraction of his leg muscles seemed to effect strong contractions in the insects' intestines.
To us, used as we are to thinking of psychic phenomena as acts of non sensory perception, such experiments may seem to have little to do with parapsychology. If it were firmly established that one organism can somehow directly produce muscular changes in another, a whole new avenue of research would be opened up. And if it were shown that muscular contraction can directly affect the involuntary muscular contraction of another organism, then an "influencing" would have been established that might well be relevant to more patently "psychic” claims. If such experiments were pursued in a rigorous and systematic manner in physiological and psychological laboratories, they could be found to have a bearing on some of the least reputable psychic claims: those of influencing at a distance, and of healing or harming by a "force of will" alone.
(*MOT Note: They have been, and they can kill a motherfucker with it by inducing heart attacks, etc. The more you know...)
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