Burned from the Mind’s Eye, Part 1

Invention podcast with the history of photography. But before we get into that, I wanted to start with a question to kind of orient us here, and that question is, what is it that makes somebody skilled at an art like realistic drawing or realistic sculpture. I should say, by the way, I am not skilled at this at all. I cannot draw realistically for the life of me. In fact, when I tried to draw pictures of people, it's the it's a source of great amusement to Rachel. Oh yeah, yeah,

I'm in the same way. I can. I can draw a pretty mean goblin, but um, I can't really draw a human. My my son, who seven, is already a better that better artist when it comes to depicting actual human beings than I. But but obviously so, a huge part of what's going on here is is practice, right, you gotta learn techniques. But another part of this I think could just be thought of as some kind of

motor power of translation. Like how do you take an image represented in your brain and it's in your brain either way, whether you're currently looking at it or calling up out of a memory or an imagination. Either way, the image is coming from your brain, and then it's being translated somehow through a series of hand motions into a physical object in the world, whether that's a sculpture, painting, or drawing. Like, there's some kind of skill there that

I think remains ineffable to us. It's mysterious. Sometimes it's even kind of spooky because we don't understand what's happening with that translate process. But what if there were no translation process? What if there were no way for clumsy arms and hands and failures of technique to impede the physical manifestation of what you've got in your mind's I what if we could just project the objects of the

mind's eye directly onto the physical world. Would such a thing be possible, and if so, would such a power be in a way terrifying, sort of godlike in the worst and most ancient sense. Ah, and here you're getting into the uh, the Halloween aspects of this topic. This is the reason that we have decided to approach this during the month of October, exactly because this power does show up in horror fiction. One place that you might

have encountered it is in the books or the movies. Uh. There have been several different series at this point, but The Ring, the story of The Ring, the the scary ghost girl who can print media with her brain. You can psychically print images onto photographs or onto the wall of a barn, or onto a videotape. She can just make a videotape without filming it, just straight out of her mind's eye. Of course, this is played up for horror in the film, and I I sort of stand

by taking it in that direction. I think if anybody actually had this power, it would be horrifying, and it would be it would be a little irritating to everyone who's has put a lot of time and effort into honing their craft. Right. Um, so it's possible. You're you're familiar with The Ring via Gore Rabinski's two thousand and two remake The Ring. This is where I saw it for the first time too, but you also may have seen it by watching the original Japanese horror film directed

by Hideo Nakata. This came out, and I severely hope that if you, if you did see the original Japanese version back in the late nineties, you watched it on a crumb a dubbed VH tape because that would be most appropriate, right, because either way, if you haven't seen the movies or read see The original Japanese movie was also based on a book by by Koji Suzuki, but in any case, the story is about a cursed videotape

that is made by this ghost girl. She uses the psychic power of projecting her thoughts directly onto media to make a videotape that kills the people who watch it. Yeah, a curse video tape containing disturbing It is basically a disturbing, surrealistic art video kills you in seven days. So there's kind of a uh what do you call it in medicinal terms? Uh? Delayed react effects effects. Uh. It takes that along to work through your system, you know, time

to release. Sometimes artists like that it's time released. You go, you want to see it at the museum, and you're like, I don't really know what what I how I feel about this or or you know, how I think about this piece and how it relates to me, and then seven days later it kicks in and you die with a weird look kind of fist. But yeah, this is basically an update of a very old notion, right of

a haunted object, or of haunted media. Only instead of a dark and magical book, instead of something like you know, the Necronomicon or you know the Book of sand or any of these other treatments, we have a dark and magical video recording and it unleashes a world of terror and death. It's an inherently compelling idea. In horror, I think actually some piece of media, whether it's a book or now a movie, I think there there's some There are Stephen King's story with like a painting that kills

you or something. There's the representage horror, and it's one of one of King's best short stories. I highly recommend. I agree. Maybe that is what I was thinking of. That is a fantastic story. Um, but yeah, I mean, obviously the idea of like a a work of art or something that cannot be experienced without cursing or killing you. Yeah, that's scary. It's also fertile ground for any kind of metaphor that the artist wants to sew about, you know, about art itself. And and art does have an effect

on us. I mean there's an old episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind where Julie and I discussed Stendahl syndrome and some of its related uh alleged syndromes. You know, it deals with the reality that, yes, sometimes great works of art, uh, you know, with great works of art with appropriate priming, uh can overwhelm us, can have a physical reaction on us. So uh, you know, it's it's

not unrealistic. Um. Yeah, you know. I want to say about the gor Verbinsky remake of The Ring, Well, I don't inherently love the idea of just like American remakes of foreign films just to sort of americanize it because it had only been like a few years since the original film had been made at that point, right, and they americanized the heck out of exactly. But at the same time, one thing I will defend about it is it is a very um visually imaginative film, Like it's

got great creepy abstract imagery in it. Oh yeah, great, great visuals, great performances, uh in, wonderful special effects. Uh That remake I remember really had an effect on me. Was the last time a horror film like made me sleep with the lights on? Uh? So I look back fondly on it for that reason. However, I have to say certain aspects of the film stuck with me and

others I kind of forgot about. Like some of you might be like, oh, yeah, I guess that girl did write video tapes with her mind like that I kind of forgot about. I also kind of forgot that it had this that it's essentially adoption sploitation horror not the only country, yeah, basically, yeah, basically because the whole idea is that this this couple that adopts this child, and the child is troubled, and I forgot that she was adopted. Yeah.

So you know, I have a very uh queasy attitude towards that kind of horror at this point in my life. For sure, totally. But but still, those are the things I tend to forget about it. I remember, you know, those scenes with Samara um iimbing out of the television with the creepy walk where they think they filmed her backwards and then made it go forwards. I remember, I think Hans Zimmer did the music, and it's very effective horror music. Um. And then on and then on to

the On top of that, you have some great performances. Uh. Did you ever see the sequel? I didn't spoil it all. I saw it in the theater even um and I don't recommend it, but but no, it's a it is a film that is still both films are considered classics in their own way, and I think they earned that that reputation just if nothing else, by just scaring us so terribly and really connecting with our relationship with media.

And at that time it was it was dealing with the VHS and uh and and and how we were connecting with with this kind of you know, physical media. And I should say also you know, getting into that

idea of finding weird things, finding weird footage. And at that point it was most of us through like tape trading or I guess to a certain extent, downloads, but I definitely remember, uh, you know, ordering up like weird dubs of the Japanese laser disc of say um El Topo or Holy Mountain, and there was this weird you know, like you do. You have not really sure exactly how

this got to you. You know, what are the hands that dubbed it from this format to this format and then re dubbed it here and then finally it's in my hands. I think that is actually one of my favorite types of story forms for horror is the the creepy found piece of media. I can remember one of my favorite horror short stories I've read in a long

time was won by Laird Baron. I think it's called Mysterium Tremendum, where the narrator of the story you just finds this travel guide and I think some weird use bookstore or something, but it turns out to be a nefarious sort of magic travel guide that leads to very dark places. So yeah, I love that nowadays though, and and maybe they do this so I think maybe they

did this in one of the recent Ring movies. It's like, essentially it's gotta be on YouTube, which takes the punch out of it because it's like you have the dark media, but then the dark media is on an even more um deplorable social media you know, bummer format. But it also takes away the ironic distance that makes the horror fun because YouTube just will melt your brain and kill you. It doesn't, it doesn't need any like horror upgrades. The real,

actual YouTube is just waiting to destroy you at the moment. Yeah, though it is, it is kind of comforting to think that that all the commentators at the bottom of the Ring video, then YouTube died seven days later. So, like the guy says, w TF is disreal? Yes, is real. As long as we're just talking about the Ring, though, the American remake, we should point out again that that

cast is tremendous. Um talking about Samara. Her mom is played by Shannon cochrane who plays who played Pam's mother on the Office, and then her father is played by Brian Cox, the legendary Brian Cox. Brian Cox of my favorite actors of all time. He he kind of makes the movie and in the the the the young actor playing Samara herself. I don't know if we said Samara is the ghost Girl, the ghost Girl, she's Samara and the American version, and she's Sadako in the Japanese version,

so that the name changes. But anyway, in the in the in the remake Devey case Chase, I hope I'm saying her name right. Uh. This actor played Samara, and she also voiced Lilo in Lilo and Stitching, the Disney film about the you know, the the alien visiting Hawaii. Going to her IMDb page is hilarious because I found out she also is the girl in the Sparkle Dance Troupe in Donnie Dark. And she's the voice of the main character in the in the English dub of Spirited Away. Ah. Yeah,

the Minazaki film great. Okay, So, first of all, the idea that Samara can create a surrealistic film that she can pour like all the the nihilistic, misanthropic visions in her head into a videotape and make it so potent that it can kill people, either just through the sheer power of the art or you know, probably through some sort of supernatural um you know whatever. Uh. That's a really cool trick and one that I would think could

have been put to much more profitable use. Um, Like, why isn't there a sequel where like the U. S Military ends up acquiring Samara, Like that would be great because since she ends up killing all the like the evil mk Ultra gate dudes, it basically rights itself. But sort of a crossover with The Ring and Stranger Things

would have been yea. Now to to go a little deeper, though, I think in a way this concept really really works though, Like you can think of any creative endeavor, especially filmmaking, as an attempt to bring that ideal image, that mental image in your head into the world, and of course, for a number of reasons, we generally don't succeed in pulling that off. And part of the reason, of course, is that is that the idea in our mind is rarely as fully formed as we think it is. I

think that's exactly right. I mean an experience so I definitely have when writing. And I think you've said you have this before, is I don't necessarily know what I'm going to write until I start writing, Like if I'm writing a scene in fiction, you know, like that it's

the process of writing that helps bring out the content. Yeah, exactly. Uh, you know in other issues coming to play as well, in the final version perhaps feels a bit lacking, So you know, you can forgive a lot of us if we we we wonder, you know, imagine how perfect it would it would have been if you've been able to simply beam your vision directly onto a video tape. You don't have to worry about casting it where you're gonna film all your weird art, film your artifacts. How are

you going to get that that chair to go upside down? No, you can just beam it directly onto the onto the tape um. And so maybe the power then of your vision would be so pure and uncut that it would just literally slay people. Well, I like that, But on the other hand, I mean, I think it's sort of trying to imagine. This highlights the unreality of what it

is you're trying to imagine. I mean, I feel like our image of the thing we want to create is never really fully formed, even when it seems like it is. I wonder if even people who have extremely vivid mental imagery can actually see a full completed painting that they haven't finished painting yet, uh, and and not just sort of like see glimpses of little bits of color and shape that that ultimately add up to something concrete and finalized once you've you know, translated it through your hand

movements into that painting. I kind of doubt that people can actually see a full painting that they haven't painted yet, right, And maybe we may be part of his linguistic you know, like we we might tend to say a sculptor might say, I see the horse trapped in this block, and I wish to free it. I'm just going to remove all the pieces around the finished piece that I envisioned within it, within reality. It's more like I see the inspiration for

the thing that I am going to create. Yeah, a kind of fuzzy, low resolution suggestion of the thing that you will create. Yeah. And then comes the hard work. Then comes the talent, uh, and the skill. One more one more thing about the ring, and then I'll I'll mostly let it go. But ultimately, what is the message of this film. It's It's seen because basically the whole plot is, oh, this these tapes are killing people. Why is it killing people? Oh, it's because of this little

girl that died. And then they go on this question like, oh, well we can set her spirit free, she'll be happy and everyone will be saved. And then you realize, oh, no, that doesn't work, because she can't be saved. She's just evil to the core, and everybody's gonna keep on dying, right, Well, but they do figure out a way to get around the curse, which is just keep passing it, keeps spreading it. So right, if you spread the curse to more people,

she won't kill you. Yeah, when basically the plot of of it follows as well, right, But but ultimately in the Ring, well you only get temporarily spirit and it follows, right, But then I think in the Ring they acknowledge what happens when like you know, that did it might come back to them as well. But maybe that's in the sequels. No, No, I think that was it was kind of at least hinted at in the first book. Yeah, I don't really

don't trying to think about the sequels. But but ultimately, like the messages, don't try to help people, don't try and fix the world like everybody's gonna do. That's so just so bleak and nihilistic. Maybe it's just too bleak and nihilistic for me now. It's the kind of thing I would have loved when I was younger. But but yeah, that's such a harsh way to land it. Isn't it. Yeah, Um,

it's not an inspiring story on close examination. But but I do still stand by a lot of the visual imagery in the film, which I think holds up really well. And Brian Cox is just an absolute treat absolutely. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break when we come back. We're going to move on from just discussing the ring in general, and we're going to discuss this this thing that she is supposed to do, this idea that a mind could somehow imprint an image on something or in

something or in like on tape or on film. Uh. And it's gonna be one of these top that I think you know, draws in from a number of past episodes of both stuff to blow your mind and invention.

Thank alright, we're back. So we're exploring the topic of psychic photography, or just generally being able to print the mind's eye into some manifestation in the physical world without going through any kind of normal motor translation process like drawing with your hand or explaining a mental image with your mouth, just printing the mind's eye directly onto film or onto a piece of paper. Yes, and this is a topic that if you're if you're already thinking, well,

that just sounds silly. Um, we'll hang with us, because you know, ultimately, I mean, I think it's pretty safe to say this is not actually occurring, This is not a power that human beings actually have. But but by looking at it and considering, like how we get to this point of thinking that it's possible in some cases, uh you know, what it reveals as about our relationship with our own mind and considerations of our own mind

and mental states, as well as our understanding of photography itself. Yeah, this episode made me keep thinking back to the series on photography that we did on our other podcast, Invention, which if you're not subscribed yet, go subscribe to Invention. That's right, it's a journey through human techno history. And oh yeah, we did a whole series on photography, also stuff before photography, like the camera obscura, and then also

on motion picture technology afterwards. And really, you know, we can't, uh you know, overstate the degree to which photography change the world. It changed the way we thought about the world, how we thought about ourselves. It gave us new metaphors for uh, you know, thinking about our own minds and how we're perceiving the world and uh also arguably made

the modern celebrity possible. Uh So we can lay that crime at its feet as well, but it also lent itself well to a number of pseudo scientific ideas and ultimately downright occult notions about what photography was and what it might capture. Well. Sure, because if you are, say, somebody who is adamant that there is a type of reality that we can't normally see, a very commonplace to go to try to find bits of evidence of that reality that we can't normally see is some kind of

objective recorded media. I mean, I think about the people who do e VP ghost recordings electronic voice phenomena. Again, this is not something that I think is real evidence of ghosts, but a lot of people think, Okay, you know, I take my tape recorder to a haunted graveyard and I just leave it going, and then I play it back and in through the static and the rustling in

the wind, I hear voices saying things. If I can be psychological for a minute, I think what's mostly going on is that drawing from objective recording media like that allows people to generate the noise into which they can read a signal, yes, And of course photogra raphe when it was new, provided a whole new way of doing something like this, right, And then other technologies that were coming out around, you know, in the same era, we also had the X ray, which we also have an

episode of Invention about which deals with invisible um, you know processes, you know, invisible rays, an invisible world and and also was a big game changer and how we

we thought about reality. Sure, so I was reading a little more about this, and I ran across a two thousand five book titled The Perfect Medium by Shiro at All and it it gets into the intersections between the occult and photography, which are numerous, numerous, but the author's point out that they generally they generally fall into three categories. First of all, photographs of spirits, in which a spirit entity shows up in the photograph. I think we awph

movie with the examples of this, uh uh. And then another is photographs of mediums in which the spirit medium, which is a you know, human like as someone who's

leading a seance or something, is doing something supernatural. Okay, so it might be like a photograph that shows that during a seance, this medium was levitating, or that this medium during some kind of session, was generating ectoplasm, right, And that's the next one, photographs of fluids And and this one is interesting because the obvious subject matter here is exoplasm, some weird substance emerging from the individual, and

in reality it's generally wet sheep's cloth or something like that. Uh. And it's easy to just think of this as ghost slime and a ghostbuster's fashion. Maybe we should explain ectoplasm just a little bit more so. It was this phenomenon where a medium would claim that they can generate some kind of physical manifestation of the spirit world that shows

up when you take a picture of them in the dark. Maybe, uh, and it would yeah, so it would look like some kind of weird cloth or slime beside their head or on their body, like like a big like mucus something like don't even generally it just looks like some it a weird mucacy cloth they got slimed. Yeah, slimber exactly. I mean, that's where that comes from. But it's also

a bit more more complex in the society. You know that the fluids in these photographs as sharrow and I'll point out, you know, it's dealing with this the idea that you're capturing a sense of the vital force, the soul, the thoughts, feelings, dreams, etcetera. All of this directly captured on a photographic plate without the use of a camera in some cases. So it has a strong connection to what was going on at the time and observation of

X rays and radioactivity. They point out that in France, so Luis darg and others quote, sought to photograph their own vital energy or thoughts simply by placing their fingers or foreheads on the censusized plate, despite numerous refutations by scientists who demonstrated that the traces thus obtained were no more than photographic artifacts arising out of the experimental conditions themselves.

Attempts to record human fluids continued throughout the twentieth century, and so this these fluids would not just be like blood or something. That would be these the spiritual fluids. Yeah, and it gets beyond just like mere fluids and into also things like horrors. Um. So in other words, and

the people still do photographing as absolutely, that's like big business. Yeah, So you know, in other words, in the midst of all this what was essentially future shock, you know, uh at this emerging technology and the hidden worlds exposed through X rays. This idea of capturing thoughts through photography carried a fair amount of weight, no matter what the science

said and is still saying about it. So the author's point to to uh to a couple of examples, one of which is the work of Simion Kurlean in the nineteen forties. Uh. Kurlean, of course, is where we get Kurlean photography. He lived nineteen seventy eight, and it's the process in which an image is obtained by the application of a high frequency electric field to an object so that it radiates a characteristic pattern of luminescence that is recorded on photographic film. And it ultimately has to do

with moisture and other factors. But but claims were made that it captured some aspect of an individual's health, their essence, or their vital bodily energy. So there's some kind of like invisible quality they have this showing up when you run this electric current and take a picture, right, And I think it's still factors into some sort of to some like alternative like new age of systems, and I'm

not saying there's anything wrong with that. I mean, it's ultimately you're you're dealing with something that is perhaps a a what you know, a supernatural interpretation of some visual data that you've created, which you know, as long as you're not not you know, claiming that it's scientific, I guess you know, go for it. Um. It just falls under the domain of of of of spiritualism and religion. They also point to a man by the name of

ted Sirius, who we will come back to in a bit. Yes, because we before we get to Sirius, we have to explore the origins of this very act that Samara in the Ring is Uh is engaging in. UH, this idea that human beings are capable not only of photography, which photography in and of itself is an amazing accomplishment. This this this much seemed magic when it was new. Oh, absolutely,

because at least we discussed an invention. You know. It's it's this perfect convergence of of optical expertise and chemical expertise and artistic expertise, all of it coming together in this new way of of of of dealing with the visual world. Um. But then we have this added idea that people can also engage in thought ptography, right thoughtography. Uh, it goes by several names, now psychic photography maybe thoughtography, and it's modern origins are I think you could you

could argue that they are in Japan. So I want to talk about a researcher named Fukuai Tomokuchi, who is a Japanese psychologist who lived from eighteen sixty nine to nineteen fifty two. He was educated at Tokyo Imperial University in the eighteen nineties. He studied in their philosophy department. Because this would have been when psychology was brand new.

There weren't like psychology departments you know at there would have been many if there were any at the time, and he received his PhD after doing a dissertation on hypnotism. And according to the History of Japanese Psychology by Brian J. McVeigh, which is my source on most of this about Fukarai, Fukarai played an important role in introducing the work of

the pioneering American psychologist William James to Japanese scholars. Of course, William James would have been a contemporary of fukurais James Is The Principles of Psychology came out in eighteen ninety and his lectures which became the Varieties of Religious Experience, which we've talked about a number of times on the show. That those happened around nineteen o one and nineteen o two, I think, But so this would have been around the same time that Fukarai was working and UH and doing

his dissertation and doing his early research. And now, according to McVeigh, Fukarai also published work on the subject of education, and he became a lecturer and an associate professor in the field of abnormal psychology, which today we would just call the study of mental illnesses. And he so he was a lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University on these subjects. But from here his interests apparently took a turn for the paranormal. So, beginning sometime around nineteen ten, Fukarai became

extremely interested in spiritualism, especially in the subject of clairvoyance. Now, of course, we should note that he would not have been alone in this at the time. Interest in spiritualism, mediums, and the paranormal enjoyed extreme popularity and elite circles all around the world at this time now Today, clairvoyance is usually understood to be a special kind of psychic power. Common definition of it is quote the supposed faculty of perceiving things or events in the future or beyond normal

sensory contact. Now, like a lot of psychic concepts, I see clairvoyance invoked to refer to sort of a broad range of things. So I think it can include all manner of cases of remote viewing. So like seeing things

that are behind physical barriers. You know, you shouldn't be able to see through the closed door into the next room, but you can seeing things that are far away, you know, maybe seeing things that are happening in another country, seeing things that are separated in time, in the future or the past. Uh. And sometimes, but less often, seeing things that can't normally be seen at all, such as spiritual essences or the contents of other people's thoughts, or otherwise

having knowledge that you just couldn't acquire by normal means. Now, of course, it's worth noting that all of these things as psychic phenomenon, they are basically exaggerations of things that the human mind does through um, you know, through a mental time travel, for instance, imagining what the future will

be like a or remembering what the past was. The idea of not being able to see through a wall into the next room and see what's going on there, but perform, but you know, conceiving a mental picture of what it might be like. Like for instance, there's another recording studio here in the office. I cannot see in there with my mind, but with my mind, I can imagine that the guys from stuff they don't want you to know are in there right now recording something. But

you cannot imagine what they are doing. But I can form a pretty basic idea that you're setting around a table talking. It will not fit in your brain, and they're doing it's it's it looks just like what we're doing. The subject matter is slightly different. But but at any rate, what I'm saying is I can form a pretty good idea, but I know that that is just my brain creating a simulation of my environment, right. But I mean, I think a lot of this clairvoyant stuff hinges on the

concept of generating accurate knowledge. It's like all the stuff we can do with our imagination, except they can do it to see reality. Um, And the kind of clairvoyants that Fukurai was most interested in I think would be covered by the first two categories of things I said, so mostly like seeing things that are far away and

seeing across physical barriers. According to McVeigh, he was focused on something called toshi, which meant something like seeing through, as in seeing through barriers, and on syndrigan, which meant the far seeing I And in this para psychology phase of his life, Fukurai was aided by another Japanese researcher

named Imamura Shinkichi. Now Fukuai studied a reputed Japanese clairvoyant named Mifuna Chizuko and another named Nagao Ikuko, and McVeigh writes that in nineteen ten, Fukurai performed a series of experiments in front of a panel of scholars and experts that he believed would demonstrate Mifuna Chizuko's power to read out written messages even after they'd been sealed inside envelopes and then placed inside lead containers, and apparently an attempt

to rep locate these experiments the following year in nineteen eleven, was not as successful as Fukurai and Mifune had hoped, and a lot of people considered that Fukarai's research was clearly misguided after some failed demonstrations, and he and his supposed clairvoyance subjects like Nagau and Mfune were criticized in

the press. And at least I think it's implied that partially as a result of these failures and subsequent criticism, McVeigh writes that both Mfuni and Nagaikuko committed suicide in the year nineteen eleven, but before I've also seen another cause of death attributed to Nagaikuko, so I'm not sure about that. But McVeigh says that that she also died by suicide. But before she died in nineteen eleven, Nagaikuko appeared to demonstrate a novel form of psychic power that

fascinated Fukurai, and this was apart from traditional clairvoyance. This was the power that Fukurai called ninsha, which would have

roughly translated as thoughtography. That the Japanese term ninha comes from the combination of nin meaning like sense or feeling, and shah meaning picture, and in concrete terms, this just means that Fukura I believe that Negau had the power to use her mind's eye to expose a dry plate of photographic film, essentially burning her thoughts directly onto the physical substrate, the same way that light prints and image

onto a piece of film. After Mifune and Nagau died, Fukurai continued his research, and he published a book about clairvoyance and photography in nineteen thirteen, which was widely criticized as credulous and unscientific, and Fugura I eventually lost his university position moved on to other things that he apparently continued to be interested in paranormal research well into his

retirement in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. UM one weird thing is before he was publicly ridiculed and ousted from his position, it took you a university. Fugara was considered an elite scholar at the head of Japanese psychology. He was not you know, just some crank right pamphlets in his basement. He was uh. He was a top scholar,

and his his academic exile had consequences. I was reading in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology, Global Perspectives by David B. Baker that, in reaction to the Fukarai Affair, a new head of the psychology department at Tokyo Imperial University, decided that the department could rehabilitate its reputation by only focusing on quote normal psychology, ignoring both of Fukara's areas of study, meaning parapsychology like the study

of psychics and quote abnormal psychology, which again would amount to the study of mental illness. Uh. Now, of course, saying we're not going to study mental illnesses is a huge limitation on academic psychology, which the authors right in this book a quote stunted the rise of clinical psychology

and pre war Japan. Yeah, absolutely though, because he had studying an mental illness is a way not only of understanding how to trade mental illness, but also to understand like what, uh you know, how the mind is functioning in individuals who are are not experiencing mental illness, right,

I mean it. It provides a frame of reference. Yeah, A lot of the For example, a lot of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of psychology have come from studying patients who have brain injuries or legions or some kind that like they show you how the brain changes when certain or how the mind changes and how behavior changes when certain physical changes are made to the brain.

And of course, I I've seen it alleged by a number of writers that the stories of people like me, Funa Chizuko, and Nagai Kuko inspired the fictional ghost in the original Ring by Suzuki Koji. I don't know if that's uh correct, but it's at least been alleged that there's some threat of inspiration there um. And you know, I want to be a little bit sympathetic to Fukurai and consider the historical context, Like in the year nineteen ten, it was only fifteen years previous that X rays and

X ray photog graphy had been discovered. We sort of alluded to this earlier, right. The German physicist Wilhelm Runkin. He discovered X rays by accident in the year eight when he was performing experiments with the type of early cathode ray tube, which was an electrical device that shoots a beam of electrons across space inside and evacuated tube

from one electrode to another. And Runkin noticed when he was running these experiments, he'd put current through the cathode ray tube in the darkened room it would make this particular screen in the room. It was a screen of barium platinum cyanide, which is like a type of photographic plate.

It would make that glow. And this puzzled him, of course, so he tried to run some more experiments, and he discovered that he could use the cathode ray tube to expose photographic plates inside a completely dark room, except the photos were nothing like anybody on Earth had ever seen. A human hand placed in front of the tube, between the tube and the plate would create an exposed you're almost completely ignoring the fleshy parts of the hand, but

showing the bones hidden underneath the flesh. And when Runkan created an X ray exposure of his wife's hand, she reportedly looked at the images of her bones and said, I have seen my death. Uh yeah. And if you want more about this, we talked about this in our x ray episode of Invention. But the X ray photo was a radically completely new way of imaging the hidden reality inside the body. It had been discovered almost completely by accident, and it had been only like fifteen years

before this. Of course, photography itself was maybe like eighty to ninety years old at the time. And so you add to that the fact that people were proposing all kinds of other hypothetical classes of rays at the time. You remember we talked about n rays. Those didn't exist, but people were just thinking that there were all kinds of rays we didn't detect or understand yet invisible forces beaming out from one object to another. Um Fukurai was wrong.

I think. I think he was misguided, But I don't think it was crazy the time, or certainly not as crazy as it seems now to think that the hidden anatomy that governed the mind's eye and the brain might leave some kind of print on a piece of film via raise projected out of the head. I don't know.

Does does that make sense to you? Yeah? Yeah, I mean we have to put ourselves in the framework of the time, and uh and and and really again in that the sense of future shock that would have would have still been resonating, and to a certain extent still resonates, because I think one of the one of the things that we're going to keep seeing in these episodes is that and I think this was revealed again in our our photography series on Invention, is that photography is a

complicated process that brings in uh, you know, at least two different fields the third if you count the artistic world as well, but certainly optics and chemistry, and not everyone really has a firm grasp on that like it too. For a lot of us, it's still kind of feels like magic. A polaroid camera, uh, you know, we're you know,

instantly gives you the the images sort of magic. Uh. And when we when we don't understand something completely, it it allows us to engage in uh, unrealistic modes of thought about what is going on with the camera, what is going on with photography. All right, we're gonna keep talking about all this, but we're gonna take one quick break first. Alright, we're back. So I want to talk just a little bit about this idea of remote viewing,

which which Fukurai was definitely involved in. This idea that you know, you could just you could see what's going on in another place, either in another room, another part of the world, sealed envelope, sealed envelope, or another planet. And you know, another example of an accomplished individual in their field who is also a prominent, uh proponent of remote viewing is Atlanta's own Courtney Brown, an associate professor in the Political Science Department at Emory University. It also

works in nonlinear mathematics. So we see in fukarai and

interest in hypnosis uh and then Brown is versed in meditation. UH. Meditation induced light experiences can occur and have been linked to similar experiences in sensory deprivation UH and and I've seen things like that in yoga meditation as well, where you will be you know, you're you're you're seeing lights or shapes or or some sort of imagery that feels as if it is it is arising, and it is not called forth you know what I'm saying, Like, it

doesn't feel like it's something that you are consciously imagining. It doesn't feel like something that is dictated by the default mode network, you know, it doesn't feel like the sort of images um or thoughts that are normally bombarding

our brain. Well, I think about how often in psychedelic experiences people talk about believing they have encountered an other where if you just you know, it's impossible to know for sure, but it seems like probably what's going on is they're having an internal experience with their own brain. But there are some types of experiences that we've just for whatever reason, feel our exogenous. It feels like it's

coming from outside you, right. And so with with the right amount of of priming, expectation, and ultimately consolidation, like any one of these experiences, be it something that is due to the use of psychedelics or something that is acquired through meditation, hypnosis, etcetera um. Because as we've discussed before, like even normal our normal sensory view of the world is inherently hallucinatory, you know, it is in its in its own way and illusion. It's not the way things are.

It's just like a useful sort of movie that we can interact with the world through. Right. So if you're having an experience like that and it feels real, right, and then you can see how even like like certainly very intelligent people uh can can can come to believe that that they are actually perceiving the reality of a distant location and become very convinced of it. And then certainly if you have a name for this as well,

you know, it becomes kind of established in parapsychology. Than than that also helps that gives you even more like priming and conditioning, uh too, in which to frame this experience.

And and also I mean just to go back to psychedelics too, and certainly our episode on psychedelics, like we see that trend uh in the twentieth century, right this, this counterculture emerged, this idea taking shape that secular individuals can have a essentially a mystical experience that is not due to the imachinations of gods or angels, you know, um and and so you know, it's it's not surprising

that we see all, you know, cases like this arising. Well, I also say on top of that, there's just I think there's a very respectable humilitium el that says, like, Okay, you know, we should always accept that there may be forces at work in our day to day surroundings that we don't fully understand. You know, we don't have a scientific theory that accounts for them yet. And I think

that's a good thing to to start from. But I think a lot of like parapsychology and paranormal type people jump from there too, because we we should acknowledge that there are lots of things about the world we don't understand yet. Therefore, remote viewing is real you know, or like therefore, you know, you can't discount thoughtography and finding the right balance there I think is part of the

difficulty of living the skeptical life. You know, you don't want to live a life of denialism where you're just like, anytime something is strange or unexplained, you just say like, oh,

that's nonsense. But at the same time, you want to maintain a high standard of evidence, and that's that's the tightrope walk I guess you've got to do if you want to be a scientific investigator, if you want to try to have the most accurate view you can of the world, and they're always going to be these edge cases where some he's presenting, you know, evidence that maybe maybe seems compelling for some kind of phenomenon that doesn't really seem like it like it fits with well tested

theories that otherwise predict the physical world. And I think that's the case that some of these investigators have run into with psychic photography, especially in the cases we'll talk about with Ted serious. Absolutely, I should also point out that we always have to remember that the c i A sunk something like twenty million dollars into the stargate project in the nineteen nineties and an attempt to ascertain

the effectiveness and military potential of remote viewing. And this project was ultimately terminated in remote viewing was found unfruitful to their needs. But maybe it was a conspiracy. No, No, I mean, yeah, I I tend to think like if there I mean, first of all, I've got major objections to remote viewing, just on like a plausibility basis, Like you know, again, you can't rule things out just because

you don't know the mechanism. But if you've got a pretty good picture of how physics works and it just you know, their power is proposed that don't seem to fit in any way with any you know, any physical forces that you could identify. That's that should definitely be a red flag to start with. And then on top of that, I think there are additional plausibility problems with remote viewing, which is like if it is, if it

does exist, why isn't it being taken better advantage of Yeah? Uh, and that thing said, I do come back to like what I said earlier, like even though it's not scientifically feasible as far as we understand it, um, you know, that doesn't mean that you know, people shouldn't be interested in it and uh or even you know, practice it. But it needs to be more of I feel like it is more definitely in the line of like a spiritual or religious practice, you know. Um. But that's my

just my two cents on it. And I think that's one of the problems that and we're going to see that with a lot of these these people that that are they're claiming these abilities, is they are not presenting them as something that is uh, you know, ultimately like the domain of the spiritual, something that can't really be

proven or disproven. But they're but they're agreeing to tests, they're agreeing to uh to uh performances of their ability and inviting in some cases experts to to see what they're doing and to to to try and find the problems in it. Uh So, uh, it's something to keep in mind as we've moved forward. All Right, So let's come back to a figure that we've We've mentioned the

name already, uh Ted Sirius. That's s c r I O. S Is it serious or Sirius Sirius with Sirius, well you say that, I'll say Sirius just to be confusing like serious black. Um. So Sirius lived through two thousand six, and he claimed to be able to create thoutographs on polaroid film. So, um, this is an interesting figure, um to say the least. So Um, I was reading a little bit about this in that in that book The Perfect Medium, paras psychologist Stephen E. Broad writes about him.

Who Broad is also a philosophy professor, uh and he contends that sirius Is photography is perhaps the best documented and perhaps the most impressive. Does he seem a little uh sympathetic to maybe he he did have some psychic powers? Um. I mean, I encourage everyone to read uh Broad's work for themselves because he Um. He certainly is more inclined to to criticize some of the the individuals who have

been attributed as being like solid debunkers. At the very least, he seems to be saying, look, whatever Ciris was doing, it's not nearly as debunked as you think it is. Um. And I'm and he is a paras psychologist. He is a paras psychologist. So so I gonna stress all of that, but it's still an interesting read. He does seem to be more climbed to um entertain the possibility though. So. Sirius was a Chicago bellhop who had experimented with with

hypnosis and uh. He claims that during this time he found that he could use his mind to project images onto camera film and later instant polaroid film. And he apparently demonstrated this to various folks and was quite convincing. And this caught the attention of Denver psychiatrist and researcher Jewel Eisenbud, who took a strong interest in his work and conducted numerous trials, resulting in hundreds of images. Yeah, and I've read that Eisenbudd is one of the main

reasons that people really know about Ted. Seriously, he sort of took up the cause like uh, or at least from what I read. Eisenbudd claimed he was initially skeptical of Ted serious his abilities, but then after spending time with him and seeing his photographs, he he came more and more to believe that these powers were real and that Serious really could project his mind's eye onto a

piece of holm. Yeah. Eisenbud at one point believed that Sirius was seeing the essentially remote viewing the surface of the Jovian moon Ghannamed and then using photography to implant

that image on onto film. And it gets more complex than that, actually, because I was reading that so Sirius apparently made these images that Eisenbudd later said, oh, this is the surface of Ganymede, because he said that serious was very interested in space exploration and had been thinking about the voyager to probe, and that must have been what triggered his generation of this image of the surface

of of Ghanymede. But at the time he generated the image, the photographs from the voyager probe had not been taken yet. So I think Eisenbudd is suggesting that if these photos are real, serious actually not only projected his thoughts directly on the film, but also pre cognitively remote viewed the surface of of Wait precognitiant. Well, I guess it wouldn't

have mattered whether the voyager probe got there yet. He was seeing the surface of the moon before the probe got there, right, And I've seen this in other, uh you know, accounts of remote viewing, where they have they have essentially seen other worlds or have encountered historic figures that sort of thing, Right, Now, another thing worth noting about Cirios here is that is that even eisenbud like points out that that that ted it was definitely an

alcoholic and that's sort of part of the thing, but also displayed like a lot of you know, at times kind of like irrational behavior and seemed to have you know, definite uh you know, psychological issues. So but but anyway,

this was basically Sirius his process. So he generally he needed to be drunk, generally very drunk to perform this art, which I mean, I guess that's fair enough, right, I mean, I mean, really even podcasting, I don't know when when when we first started podcasting, um, Jerry told us, like, have a little to drink before you go into the podcast booth, it'll help. Jerry ever told me that, oh well maybe maybe I just look like I needed to drink at the time. I don't know. But wait, are

you serious? I'm serious? Yeah, I mean I think she's joking. But at any rate, like the idea that you would need a social lubricant too, essentially to perform something um either you know, a legitimate psychic ability or to perform some sort of a trick, some sort of a um an illusion or even a confidence trick, right, um, so that's one part of it. Also, he preferred to hold a quota he called a gizmo in his hand to help him focus his powers. And it was a short,

open cylinder about an inch in diameter. And of course this is highly suspicious. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to suspect that the gizmo is either the heart of the trick that he is going to perform, or it's a d e cooy to distract onlookers from the

actual trick. Because he'd often placed this in front of the camera lens, like he'd get up into the into the camera lens with the gizmo and then also like you know, mugging for the camera, placing his forehead in the way and somehow using the gizmo allegedly to focus his thoughts into the camera. Yeah, he said he needed

to connect his body to the camera. Uh. Though there are allegations also that he was able to produce the autographs and uh and and actually make images on a camera while being far away from the camera that at least as alleged, But he most of the time, it has said, would like put his forehead right on this

thing and stick it in the camera camera lens. So, yeah, raises some red flags, right, But but then the idea is that he's essentially taking a snapshot of the mental image that he is forming in his mind, be a the be it a mental image that is formed via memory or just sort of general mental imaging, or it's something that is that he has acquired through um uh, you know, sending his consciousness to a to the moons

of Jupiter. Yeah. Now, I read some conflicting reports that sometimes it seems like the images he produced, he claimed were like not what he was thinking about consciously, but just would be these unconscious kind of associative images. That's what's suggested by eisenbudd Uh the Galilean moon, right, is that he just had the Voyager two probe on his mind and happened to generate an image of the surface

of Ganymede. And so if we're approaching it from the you know, the pro psychic side, we can say, well, that makes sense. The mind is difficult to control. Mental images may form in the mind that you you're not trying to summon. Certainly we can all attest to that.

On the other hand, from a purely skeptical point of view, if you're going to be drawn in and put to the test by asking, you know, being asked to think of a particular thing, how convenient would it be if you could say, well, I tried to think of that that that bird feeder that you wanted me to imagine, but I'm just so obsessed with space travel right now,

I gave you Ganymede instead, right. I mean that makes that suggests that maybe you've already got an image of something that looks like a moon's surface on hand with you or something, right, And I guess that gets to what the actual trick would be, if there is a trick here, which I assume there probably is right now now.

In that article in The Perfect Medium, a Broad certainly focuses on the aspects of Ted's art that kind of continue to mystify, as he mentions, for instance, that Eisenbudd offered a cash reward for anyone able to replicate Ted's results quote under conditions similar to those prevailing during the

during the experiments. Now I've read that there was serious dispute about like them negotiating with skeptics about what would be acceptable for those uh conditions, Like I think I read that James Randy wanted to try to replicate it, but that Eisenbudd said, well, you have to be really drunk, because Ted is always really drunk when he does it. Yeah. Yeah, the famous debunker James Randy, who we had the privilege

to meet. Um. But last um, it definitely plays into some of this, and it's kind of if you if you read some of the more pro serios material, Randy's kind of portrayed as a villain. Oh all, Randy is always the villain of something written by pro psychic powers people.

Uh so, uh so, Yeah, some of these account like brought accountants to highlight the things that were not you know, they're still a little mysterious or or or certainly accounts of replications that don't meet the same degree of replication, Like you weren't able to do exactly what Sirius is doing, therefore you didn't fully debunk him. No, I've I've read some of his defenders say, Okay, people have used tricks to replicate what Serious was doing, but they couldn't do

it without those tricks being evident to people who were watching. Right. Um, I mean The other way to think about it is, can I can I paint the Mona Lisa? No? I cannot. Can I demonstrate some of the techniques personally that that that the artists used to create the Mona Lisa? Uh? Certainly, Uh, we have to take it into account. That's sirius assuming again that he's not a psychic, that he's not a not capable of photography, that he's just a performer, an illusionist. Uh,

you know, a trickster. Uh. There is still an art to what he is doing. Uh, there is still a performance aspect, of charismatic aspect to it. And there are aspects of that that are going to depend in part on like innate charisma, but also in in practice, in in like sheer devotion to to the trick. And I think you can't discount that. And on likewise, you can't expect a debunker to rise to that level of performance. Well,

I guess you can expect them to try. But I mean that's one thing that you know, as long as we're probing the depths of the unexplained, you could say, well, you know, there's some kind of mystical power that this person has that we just don't have the power to explain it. Or you could say that there's an extreme talent this person has for performing a trick that hasn't

been explained yet. Yeah, because certainly one of the things that would come into play is slight of hand, right, because the main charge is that is that Sirius had it. Kind of varies. Sometimes they talk of just using the microfilm um or using microfilm affixed to a marble or you know, a film affixed to the end of a tiny tube to be like inside the quote gizmo that

he put up against the camera. Because that's the obvious, right, is that the gizmo contains something, and if it contains something, some film would be ideal because then you have that pre existing photograph that can be the thing that he imprints UM. Skeptic Terence Hines also charged that Ted used a secondary tube about one inch long with a tiny magnifying lens that could hold a small slide, and then he would conceal this within the gizmo, but also he

could use it when the gizmo was taken away. Again getting an of that idea that the gizmos not merely useful as something to um to hide the trick but also can be used as a distraction, can be the thing that, oh, when it's taken away, look I can still do it. I don't even have the gizmo on me, right, And it was alleged that sometimes he could, I mean usually he used the gizmo, but it's alleged that sometimes

he did it without the gizmo. Now, there were a number of expose a s at the time that claimed to show that Ted Sirius was a fraud. The entry in the Skeptics Dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll suggests that two amateur magicians and photographers named Charlie Reynolds and David Eisendraft exposed Serious as a fraud. Basically, they wouldn't spend a weekend with him and jewel Iz and Bud, and they saw his stuff and they they came to the conclusion that he was a fraud and wrote this up

in the article. And Reynolds and Eisendraft claimed to have spotted Serious quote slipping something inside his little gizmo before demonstrations, and they think it was a picture of something that Sirius wanted to show up in the camera exposure. They also published an article explaining their findings in in October nineteen sixty seven issue of Popular Photography of Photography magazine. Now, according to the skeptic investigator Joe Nichols account of Serious

is confrontation with magicians and sleight of hand experts. Quote, at one point during the session, after an exposure was made, a magician asked to examine the paper tube to see if there was anything inside. This would be the gizmo, right, the gizmo. Uh. Serious backed away, putting his hand in his pocket. Now that's suspicious behavior. But then, weirdly, during this session, Sirius was unable to produce the autographs. So

apparently he had been using the gizmo. They said, let me see the gizmo, he wouldn't show it to them, and then none of the pictures came out. Anyway, there were no autographs. Uh. And he and Eisenbudd blamed the quote hostile atmosphere for interfering with Serious his powers. This is always a red flag also, I think. But there's still plenty of people, I think, who hold out for psychic photography, claiming that Head Serious his powers were real

and could not be explained. And he's got defenders who say that some of his feats are just impossible to explain. For example, I was reading claims in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which was about a gallery exhibit of Serious as thotographs, which I would like to see that. Oh yeah, I mean they're interesting images, certainly when you know the background for them, especially if you just think about him as works of art, not as

like displays of real psychic powers. Um. But to quote from this article quote, on occasion, volunteers were asked to attend the experiment with a photograph sealed and a cardboard back to manila envelope. Serious then managed to reproduce the image with no prior knowledge of it. So again, that's like double psychic powers. That's not just the thoughtography, which would be a feat even if he was looking directly

at what the photo should be. UM. But also, I guess seeing into this envelope if I'm reading that right, I don't know. That might also be suggesting that they just arrived with its sealed and then showed it to him and he reproduced it. Either way, I mean, you saw that. I wouldn't say that would prove it was real, but that would be impressive, you know, you'd be like, wow, that that's either real or some impressive trickery. I'd leaned

towards the ladder um. But in other cases he apparently managed to produce what appeared to be images of landmarks from up above, like aerial views that his supporters claimed could not be explained through trickery. But it seems like he stopped doing his thing after the late nineteen sixties, which seems a little weird. Yeah, especially consider he lived until two thousand and six. You know, I mean, that's that's a lot of time to not at least not

be publicly doing this displaying this uh this ability. Uh. But then again, um, you know, we do have to come back to you the fact that Eisenbud himself wrote that serious was you know, psychologically disturbed alcoholic. So you know, you can come up with various, you know, reasons that somebody with that kind of with with with those kind of demons would not engage in their art. Now, he wasn't the only one in the later twentie tree to

get in on the psychic photography thing. Over the years, a lot of figures, including Uri Geller, got into psychic photography. One one of Geller's many demonstrations was that he would leave the lens cap on a camera, placed the camera to his forehead, and then take a picture, supposedly saying, you know the same kind of thing. I'm using my mind's eye to imprint upon the film, and then the

photo would reveal whatever he had been imagining. Again, James Randy shows up, as he often does whenever Uri Geller

claims something. James Randy criticized this and other psychic photography is having two main explanations, either using a handheld device to project the image into the camera lens as the photos taken, or loading the camera with pre exposed film already bearing the desired image, and the latter seems to be the case with a later twentieth century alleged psychic named Matsuaki Kyota, who claimed to be able to produce photographs on film again, and skeptical critics such as Joe

Nicol have pointed out that when Matsuaki Kyota was asked to reform his thoughtography under controlled conditions for a TV crew in London, he couldn't produce the images, and Nickel claims that it was only times when he was able uh to get the film and have it alone with him, like basically to get hold of the film and have it in a private place before the test that he could demonstrate his powers, which again makes you think he was doing something to the film before it was loaded

in the camera. Alright, Well, on that note, we are going to have to call it for episode one of this exploration, but we are going to return in a second episode where we're going to continue to explore this idea,

like how would it work if this were possible? Like what what what can we grasp onto in the labyrinth of the human mind and the complexity of our our our sensory perception, but also what can this question reveal about the reality of mental imagery and how that happens in the brain, which is fascinating, mysterious, and even spooky topic on its own, even though we don't necessarily credit the reality of psychic photography, there's a lot of spooky

stuff going on when you picture something right. And we'll probably talk about The Ring a little bit more, and we'll probably bring up a few other films such as Scanners, So hey, be sure to tune in for that episode, and tune in for all of our episodes in October, which are going to be Halloween flavored uh and we encourage you again to check out Invention if you haven't already, can find it wherever you get your podcast. You can

find out the website at invention pod dot com. If you want to support our show, the best thing you can do is rate and review it wherever you have the power to do so, and make sure you have subscribed. Huge thanks as always to our awesome audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow

your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart Radios. How stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.