Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's October. So we're continuing
Speaker 1: with our Halloween spooky, ghostly kind of theme, and today
Speaker 1: we wanted to explore a somewhat ghostly topic that ties
Speaker 1: into neuroscience to stuff we've talked about recently on the
Speaker 1: Invention podcast with the history of photography. But before we
Speaker 1: get into that, I wanted to start with a question
Speaker 1: to kind of orient us here, and that question is,
Speaker 1: what is it that makes somebody skilled at an art
Speaker 1: like realistic drawing or realistic sculpture. I should say, by
Speaker 1: the way, I am not skilled at this at all.
Speaker 1: I cannot draw realistically for the life of me. In fact,
Speaker 1: when I tried to draw pictures of people, it's the
Speaker 1: it's a source of great amusement to Rachel. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm in the same way. I can. I can draw
Speaker 1: a pretty mean goblin, but um, I can't really draw
Speaker 1: a human. My my son, who seven, is already a
Speaker 1: better that better artist when it comes to depicting actual
Speaker 1: human beings than I. But but obviously so, a huge
Speaker 1: part of what's going on here is is practice, right,
Speaker 1: you gotta learn techniques. But another part of this I
Speaker 1: think could just be thought of as some kind of
Speaker 1: motor power of translation. Like how do you take an
Speaker 1: image represented in your brain and it's in your brain
Speaker 1: either way, whether you're currently looking at it or calling
Speaker 1: up out of a memory or an imagination. Either way,
Speaker 1: the image is coming from your brain, and then it's
Speaker 1: being translated somehow through a series of hand motions into
Speaker 1: a physical object in the world, whether that's a sculpture, painting,
Speaker 1: or drawing. Like, there's some kind of skill there that
Speaker 1: I think remains ineffable to us. It's mysterious. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: even kind of spooky because we don't understand what's happening
Speaker 1: with that translate process. But what if there were no
Speaker 1: translation process? What if there were no way for clumsy
Speaker 1: arms and hands and failures of technique to impede the
Speaker 1: physical manifestation of what you've got in your mind's I
Speaker 1: what if we could just project the objects of the
Speaker 1: mind's eye directly onto the physical world. Would such a
Speaker 1: thing be possible, and if so, would such a power
Speaker 1: be in a way terrifying, sort of godlike in the
Speaker 1: worst and most ancient sense. Ah, and here you're getting
Speaker 1: into the uh, the Halloween aspects of this topic. This
Speaker 1: is the reason that we have decided to approach this
Speaker 1: during the month of October, exactly because this power does
Speaker 1: show up in horror fiction. One place that you might
Speaker 1: have encountered it is in the books or the movies. Uh.
Speaker 1: There have been several different series at this point, but
Speaker 1: The Ring, the story of The Ring, the the scary
Speaker 1: ghost girl who can print media with her brain. You
Speaker 1: can psychically print images onto photographs or onto the wall
Speaker 1: of a barn, or onto a videotape. She can just
Speaker 1: make a videotape without filming it, just straight out of
Speaker 1: her mind's eye. Of course, this is played up for
Speaker 1: horror in the film, and I I sort of stand
Speaker 1: by taking it in that direction. I think if anybody
Speaker 1: actually had this power, it would be horrifying, and it
Speaker 1: would be it would be a little irritating to everyone
Speaker 1: who's has put a lot of time and effort into
Speaker 1: honing their craft. Right. Um, so it's possible. You're you're
Speaker 1: familiar with The Ring via Gore Rabinski's two thousand and
Speaker 1: two remake The Ring. This is where I saw it
Speaker 1: for the first time too, but you also may have
Speaker 1: seen it by watching the original Japanese horror film directed
Speaker 1: by Hideo Nakata. This came out, and I severely hope
Speaker 1: that if you, if you did see the original Japanese
Speaker 1: version back in the late nineties, you watched it on
Speaker 1: a crumb a dubbed VH tape because that would be
Speaker 1: most appropriate, right, because either way, if you haven't seen
Speaker 1: the movies or read see The original Japanese movie was
Speaker 1: also based on a book by by Koji Suzuki, but
Speaker 1: in any case, the story is about a cursed videotape
Speaker 1: that is made by this ghost girl. She uses the
Speaker 1: psychic power of projecting her thoughts directly onto media to
Speaker 1: make a videotape that kills the people who watch it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a curse video tape containing disturbing It is basically a disturbing,
Speaker 1: surrealistic art video kills you in seven days. So there's
Speaker 1: kind of a uh what do you call it in
Speaker 1: medicinal terms? Uh? Delayed react effects effects. Uh. It takes
Speaker 1: that along to work through your system, you know, time
Speaker 1: to release. Sometimes artists like that it's time released. You go,
Speaker 1: you want to see it at the museum, and you're like,
Speaker 1: I don't really know what what I how I feel
Speaker 1: about this or or you know, how I think about
Speaker 1: this piece and how it relates to me, and then
Speaker 1: seven days later it kicks in and you die with
Speaker 1: a weird look kind of fist. But yeah, this is
Speaker 1: basically an update of a very old notion, right of
Speaker 1: a haunted object, or of haunted media. Only instead of
Speaker 1: a dark and magical book, instead of something like you know,
Speaker 1: the Necronomicon or you know the Book of sand or
Speaker 1: any of these other treatments, we have a dark and
Speaker 1: magical video recording and it unleashes a world of terror
Speaker 1: and death. It's an inherently compelling idea. In horror, I
Speaker 1: think actually some piece of media, whether it's a book
Speaker 1: or now a movie, I think there there's some There
Speaker 1: are Stephen King's story with like a painting that kills
Speaker 1: you or something. There's the representage horror, and it's one
Speaker 1: of one of King's best short stories. I highly recommend.
Speaker 1: I agree. Maybe that is what I was thinking of.
Speaker 1: That is a fantastic story. Um, but yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously the idea of like a a work of art
Speaker 1: or something that cannot be experienced without cursing or killing you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's scary. It's also fertile ground for any kind of
Speaker 1: metaphor that the artist wants to sew about, you know,
Speaker 1: about art itself. And and art does have an effect
Speaker 1: on us. I mean there's an old episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind where Julie and I discussed Stendahl
Speaker 1: syndrome and some of its related uh alleged syndromes. You know,
Speaker 1: it deals with the reality that, yes, sometimes great works
Speaker 1: of art, uh, you know, with great works of art
Speaker 1: with appropriate priming, uh can overwhelm us, can have a
Speaker 1: physical reaction on us. So uh, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: not unrealistic. Um. Yeah, you know. I want to say
Speaker 1: about the gor Verbinsky remake of The Ring, Well, I
Speaker 1: don't inherently love the idea of just like American remakes
Speaker 1: of foreign films just to sort of americanize it because
Speaker 1: it had only been like a few years since the
Speaker 1: original film had been made at that point, right, and
Speaker 1: they americanized the heck out of exactly. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, one thing I will defend about it is
Speaker 1: it is a very um visually imaginative film, Like it's
Speaker 1: got great creepy abstract imagery in it. Oh yeah, great,
Speaker 1: great visuals, great performances, uh in, wonderful special effects. Uh
Speaker 1: That remake I remember really had an effect on me.
Speaker 1: Was the last time a horror film like made me
Speaker 1: sleep with the lights on? Uh? So I look back
Speaker 1: fondly on it for that reason. However, I have to
Speaker 1: say certain aspects of the film stuck with me and
Speaker 1: others I kind of forgot about. Like some of you
Speaker 1: might be like, oh, yeah, I guess that girl did
Speaker 1: write video tapes with her mind like that I kind
Speaker 1: of forgot about. I also kind of forgot that it
Speaker 1: had this that it's essentially adoption sploitation horror not the
Speaker 1: only country, yeah, basically, yeah, basically because the whole idea
Speaker 1: is that this this couple that adopts this child, and
Speaker 1: the child is troubled, and I forgot that she was adopted. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So you know, I have a very uh queasy attitude
Speaker 1: towards that kind of horror at this point in my life.
Speaker 1: For sure, totally. But but still, those are the things
Speaker 1: I tend to forget about it. I remember, you know,
Speaker 1: those scenes with Samara um iimbing out of the television
Speaker 1: with the creepy walk where they think they filmed her
Speaker 1: backwards and then made it go forwards. I remember, I
Speaker 1: think Hans Zimmer did the music, and it's very effective
Speaker 1: horror music. Um. And then on and then on to
Speaker 1: the On top of that, you have some great performances. Uh.
Speaker 1: Did you ever see the sequel? I didn't spoil it all.
Speaker 1: I saw it in the theater even um and I
Speaker 1: don't recommend it, but but no, it's a it is
Speaker 1: a film that is still both films are considered classics
Speaker 1: in their own way, and I think they earned that
Speaker 1: that reputation just if nothing else, by just scaring us
Speaker 1: so terribly and really connecting with our relationship with media.
Speaker 1: And at that time it was it was dealing with
Speaker 1: the VHS and uh and and and how we were
Speaker 1: connecting with with this kind of you know, physical media.
Speaker 1: And I should say also you know, getting into that
Speaker 1: idea of finding weird things, finding weird footage. And at
Speaker 1: that point it was most of us through like tape
Speaker 1: trading or I guess to a certain extent, downloads, but
Speaker 1: I definitely remember, uh, you know, ordering up like weird
Speaker 1: dubs of the Japanese laser disc of say um El
Speaker 1: Topo or Holy Mountain, and there was this weird you know,
Speaker 1: like you do. You have not really sure exactly how
Speaker 1: this got to you. You know, what are the hands
Speaker 1: that dubbed it from this format to this format and
Speaker 1: then re dubbed it here and then finally it's in
Speaker 1: my hands. I think that is actually one of my
Speaker 1: favorite types of story forms for horror is the the
Speaker 1: creepy found piece of media. I can remember one of
Speaker 1: my favorite horror short stories I've read in a long
Speaker 1: time was won by Laird Baron. I think it's called
Speaker 1: Mysterium Tremendum, where the narrator of the story you just
Speaker 1: finds this travel guide and I think some weird use
Speaker 1: bookstore or something, but it turns out to be a
Speaker 1: nefarious sort of magic travel guide that leads to very
Speaker 1: dark places. So yeah, I love that nowadays though, and
Speaker 1: and maybe they do this so I think maybe they
Speaker 1: did this in one of the recent Ring movies. It's like,
Speaker 1: essentially it's gotta be on YouTube, which takes the punch
Speaker 1: out of it because it's like you have the dark media,
Speaker 1: but then the dark media is on an even more
Speaker 1: um deplorable social media you know, bummer format. But it
Speaker 1: also takes away the ironic distance that makes the horror
Speaker 1: fun because YouTube just will melt your brain and kill you.
Speaker 1: It doesn't, it doesn't need any like horror upgrades. The real,
Speaker 1: actual YouTube is just waiting to destroy you at the moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: though it is, it is kind of comforting to think
Speaker 1: that that all the commentators at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: Ring video, then YouTube died seven days later. So, like
Speaker 1: the guy says, w TF is disreal? Yes, is real.
Speaker 1: As long as we're just talking about the Ring, though,
Speaker 1: the American remake, we should point out again that that
Speaker 1: cast is tremendous. Um talking about Samara. Her mom is
Speaker 1: played by Shannon cochrane who plays who played Pam's mother
Speaker 1: on the Office, and then her father is played by
Speaker 1: Brian Cox, the legendary Brian Cox. Brian Cox of my
Speaker 1: favorite actors of all time. He he kind of makes
Speaker 1: the movie and in the the the the young actor
Speaker 1: playing Samara herself. I don't know if we said Samara
Speaker 1: is the ghost Girl, the ghost Girl, she's Samara and
Speaker 1: the American version, and she's Sadako in the Japanese version,
Speaker 1: so that the name changes. But anyway, in the in
Speaker 1: the in the remake Devey case Chase, I hope I'm
Speaker 1: saying her name right. Uh. This actor played Samara, and
Speaker 1: she also voiced Lilo in Lilo and Stitching, the Disney
Speaker 1: film about the you know, the the alien visiting Hawaii.
Speaker 1: Going to her IMDb page is hilarious because I found
Speaker 1: out she also is the girl in the Sparkle Dance
Speaker 1: Troupe in Donnie Dark. And she's the voice of the
Speaker 1: main character in the in the English dub of Spirited Away. Ah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Minazaki film great. Okay, So, first of all, the
Speaker 1: idea that Samara can create a surrealistic film that she
Speaker 1: can pour like all the the nihilistic, misanthropic visions in
Speaker 1: her head into a videotape and make it so potent
Speaker 1: that it can kill people, either just through the sheer
Speaker 1: power of the art or you know, probably through some
Speaker 1: sort of supernatural um you know whatever. Uh. That's a
Speaker 1: really cool trick and one that I would think could
Speaker 1: have been put to much more profitable use. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: why isn't there a sequel where like the U. S
Speaker 1: Military ends up acquiring Samara, Like that would be great
Speaker 1: because since she ends up killing all the like the
Speaker 1: evil mk Ultra gate dudes, it basically rights itself. But
Speaker 1: sort of a crossover with The Ring and Stranger Things
Speaker 1: would have been yea. Now to to go a little deeper, though,
Speaker 1: I think in a way this concept really really works though,
Speaker 1: Like you can think of any creative endeavor, especially filmmaking,
Speaker 1: as an attempt to bring that ideal image, that mental
Speaker 1: image in your head into the world, and of course,
Speaker 1: for a number of reasons, we generally don't succeed in
Speaker 1: pulling that off. And part of the reason, of course,
Speaker 1: is that is that the idea in our mind is
Speaker 1: rarely as fully formed as we think it is. I
Speaker 1: think that's exactly right. I mean an experience so I
Speaker 1: definitely have when writing. And I think you've said you
Speaker 1: have this before, is I don't necessarily know what I'm
Speaker 1: going to write until I start writing, Like if I'm
Speaker 1: writing a scene in fiction, you know, like that it's
Speaker 1: the process of writing that helps bring out the content. Yeah, exactly. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know in other issues coming to play as well,
Speaker 1: in the final version perhaps feels a bit lacking, So
Speaker 1: you know, you can forgive a lot of us if
Speaker 1: we we we wonder, you know, imagine how perfect it
Speaker 1: would it would have been if you've been able to
Speaker 1: simply beam your vision directly onto a video tape. You
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about casting it where you're gonna
Speaker 1: film all your weird art, film your artifacts. How are
Speaker 1: you going to get that that chair to go upside down? No,
Speaker 1: you can just beam it directly onto the onto the
Speaker 1: tape um. And so maybe the power then of your
Speaker 1: vision would be so pure and uncut that it would
Speaker 1: just literally slay people. Well, I like that, But on
Speaker 1: the other hand, I mean, I think it's sort of
Speaker 1: trying to imagine. This highlights the unreality of what it
Speaker 1: is you're trying to imagine. I mean, I feel like
Speaker 1: our image of the thing we want to create is
Speaker 1: never really fully formed, even when it seems like it is.
Speaker 1: I wonder if even people who have extremely vivid mental
Speaker 1: imagery can actually see a full completed painting that they
Speaker 1: haven't finished painting yet, uh, and and not just sort
Speaker 1: of like see glimpses of little bits of color and
Speaker 1: shape that that ultimately add up to something concrete and
Speaker 1: finalized once you've you know, translated it through your hand
Speaker 1: movements into that painting. I kind of doubt that people
Speaker 1: can actually see a full painting that they haven't painted yet, right,
Speaker 1: And maybe we may be part of his linguistic you know,
Speaker 1: like we we might tend to say a sculptor might say,
Speaker 1: I see the horse trapped in this block, and I
Speaker 1: wish to free it. I'm just going to remove all
Speaker 1: the pieces around the finished piece that I envisioned within it,
Speaker 1: within reality. It's more like I see the inspiration for
Speaker 1: the thing that I am going to create. Yeah, a
Speaker 1: kind of fuzzy, low resolution suggestion of the thing that
Speaker 1: you will create. Yeah. And then comes the hard work.
Speaker 1: Then comes the talent, uh, and the skill. One more
Speaker 1: one more thing about the ring, and then I'll I'll
Speaker 1: mostly let it go. But ultimately, what is the message
Speaker 1: of this film. It's It's seen because basically the whole
Speaker 1: plot is, oh, this these tapes are killing people. Why
Speaker 1: is it killing people? Oh, it's because of this little
Speaker 1: girl that died. And then they go on this question like, oh,
Speaker 1: well we can set her spirit free, she'll be happy
Speaker 1: and everyone will be saved. And then you realize, oh, no,
Speaker 1: that doesn't work, because she can't be saved. She's just
Speaker 1: evil to the core, and everybody's gonna keep on dying, right, Well,
Speaker 1: but they do figure out a way to get around
Speaker 1: the curse, which is just keep passing it, keeps spreading it.
Speaker 1: So right, if you spread the curse to more people,
Speaker 1: she won't kill you. Yeah, when basically the plot of
Speaker 1: of it follows as well, right, But but ultimately in
Speaker 1: the Ring, well you only get temporarily spirit and it follows, right,
Speaker 1: But then I think in the Ring they acknowledge what
Speaker 1: happens when like you know, that did it might come
Speaker 1: back to them as well. But maybe that's in the sequels. No, No,
Speaker 1: I think that was it was kind of at least
Speaker 1: hinted at in the first book. Yeah, I don't really
Speaker 1: don't trying to think about the sequels. But but ultimately,
Speaker 1: like the messages, don't try to help people, don't try
Speaker 1: and fix the world like everybody's gonna do. That's so
Speaker 1: just so bleak and nihilistic. Maybe it's just too bleak
Speaker 1: and nihilistic for me now. It's the kind of thing
Speaker 1: I would have loved when I was younger. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: that's such a harsh way to land it. Isn't it. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: it's not an inspiring story on close examination. But but
Speaker 1: I do still stand by a lot of the visual
Speaker 1: imagery in the film, which I think holds up really well.
Speaker 1: And Brian Cox is just an absolute treat absolutely. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break when we come back.
Speaker 1: We're going to move on from just discussing the ring
Speaker 1: in general, and we're going to discuss this this thing
Speaker 1: that she is supposed to do, this idea that a
Speaker 1: mind could somehow imprint an image on something or in
Speaker 1: something or in like on tape or on film. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's gonna be one of these top that I
Speaker 1: think you know, draws in from a number of past
Speaker 1: episodes of both stuff to blow your mind and invention.
Speaker 1: Thank alright, we're back. So we're exploring the topic of
Speaker 1: psychic photography, or just generally being able to print the
Speaker 1: mind's eye into some manifestation in the physical world without
Speaker 1: going through any kind of normal motor translation process like
Speaker 1: drawing with your hand or explaining a mental image with
Speaker 1: your mouth, just printing the mind's eye directly onto film
Speaker 1: or onto a piece of paper. Yes, and this is
Speaker 1: a topic that if you're if you're already thinking, well,
Speaker 1: that just sounds silly. Um, we'll hang with us, because
Speaker 1: you know, ultimately, I mean, I think it's pretty safe
Speaker 1: to say this is not actually occurring, This is not
Speaker 1: a power that human beings actually have. But but by
Speaker 1: looking at it and considering, like how we get to
Speaker 1: this point of thinking that it's possible in some cases,
Speaker 1: uh you know, what it reveals as about our relationship
Speaker 1: with our own mind and considerations of our own mind
Speaker 1: and mental states, as well as our understanding of photography itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this episode made me keep thinking back to the series
Speaker 1: on photography that we did on our other podcast, Invention,
Speaker 1: which if you're not subscribed yet, go subscribe to Invention.
Speaker 1: That's right, it's a journey through human techno history. And
Speaker 1: oh yeah, we did a whole series on photography, also
Speaker 1: stuff before photography, like the camera obscura, and then also
Speaker 1: on motion picture technology afterwards. And really, you know, we can't,
Speaker 1: uh you know, overstate the degree to which photography change
Speaker 1: the world. It changed the way we thought about the world,
Speaker 1: how we thought about ourselves. It gave us new metaphors
Speaker 1: for uh, you know, thinking about our own minds and
Speaker 1: how we're perceiving the world and uh also arguably made
Speaker 1: the modern celebrity possible. Uh So we can lay that
Speaker 1: crime at its feet as well, but it also lent
Speaker 1: itself well to a number of pseudo scientific ideas and
Speaker 1: ultimately downright occult notions about what photography was and what
Speaker 1: it might capture. Well. Sure, because if you are, say,
Speaker 1: somebody who is adamant that there is a type of
Speaker 1: reality that we can't normally see, a very commonplace to
Speaker 1: go to try to find bits of evidence of that
Speaker 1: reality that we can't normally see is some kind of
Speaker 1: objective recorded media. I mean, I think about the people
Speaker 1: who do e VP ghost recordings electronic voice phenomena. Again,
Speaker 1: this is not something that I think is real evidence
Speaker 1: of ghosts, but a lot of people think, Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: I take my tape recorder to a haunted graveyard and
Speaker 1: I just leave it going, and then I play it
Speaker 1: back and in through the static and the rustling in
Speaker 1: the wind, I hear voices saying things. If I can
Speaker 1: be psychological for a minute, I think what's mostly going
Speaker 1: on is that drawing from objective recording media like that
Speaker 1: allows people to generate the noise into which they can
Speaker 1: read a signal, yes, And of course photogra raphe when
Speaker 1: it was new, provided a whole new way of doing
Speaker 1: something like this, right, And then other technologies that were
Speaker 1: coming out around, you know, in the same era, we
Speaker 1: also had the X ray, which we also have an
Speaker 1: episode of Invention about which deals with invisible um, you
Speaker 1: know processes, you know, invisible rays, an invisible world and
Speaker 1: and also was a big game changer and how we
Speaker 1: we thought about reality. Sure, so I was reading a
Speaker 1: little more about this, and I ran across a two
Speaker 1: thousand five book titled The Perfect Medium by Shiro at
Speaker 1: All and it it gets into the intersections between the
Speaker 1: occult and photography, which are numerous, numerous, but the author's
Speaker 1: point out that they generally they generally fall into three categories.
Speaker 1: First of all, photographs of spirits, in which a spirit
Speaker 1: entity shows up in the photograph. I think we awph
Speaker 1: movie with the examples of this, uh uh. And then
Speaker 1: another is photographs of mediums in which the spirit medium,
Speaker 1: which is a you know, human like as someone who's
Speaker 1: leading a seance or something, is doing something supernatural. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it might be like a photograph that shows that
Speaker 1: during a seance, this medium was levitating, or that this
Speaker 1: medium during some kind of session, was generating ectoplasm, right,
Speaker 1: And that's the next one, photographs of fluids And and
Speaker 1: this one is interesting because the obvious subject matter here
Speaker 1: is exoplasm, some weird substance emerging from the individual, and
Speaker 1: in reality it's generally wet sheep's cloth or something like that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's easy to just think of this as ghost
Speaker 1: slime and a ghostbuster's fashion. Maybe we should explain ectoplasm
Speaker 1: just a little bit more so. It was this phenomenon
Speaker 1: where a medium would claim that they can generate some
Speaker 1: kind of physical manifestation of the spirit world that shows
Speaker 1: up when you take a picture of them in the dark. Maybe, uh,
Speaker 1: and it would yeah, so it would look like some
Speaker 1: kind of weird cloth or slime beside their head or
Speaker 1: on their body, like like a big like mucus something
Speaker 1: like don't even generally it just looks like some it
Speaker 1: a weird mucacy cloth they got slimed. Yeah, slimber exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's where that comes from. But it's also
Speaker 1: a bit more more complex in the society. You know
Speaker 1: that the fluids in these photographs as sharrow and I'll
Speaker 1: point out, you know, it's dealing with this the idea
Speaker 1: that you're capturing a sense of the vital force, the soul,
Speaker 1: the thoughts, feelings, dreams, etcetera. All of this directly captured
Speaker 1: on a photographic plate without the use of a camera
Speaker 1: in some cases. So it has a strong connection to
Speaker 1: what was going on at the time and observation of
Speaker 1: X rays and radioactivity. They point out that in France,
Speaker 1: so Luis darg and others quote, sought to photograph their
Speaker 1: own vital energy or thoughts simply by placing their fingers
Speaker 1: or foreheads on the censusized plate, despite numerous refutations by
Speaker 1: scientists who demonstrated that the traces thus obtained were no
Speaker 1: more than photographic artifacts arising out of the experimental conditions themselves.
Speaker 1: Attempts to record human fluids continued throughout the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: and so this these fluids would not just be like
Speaker 1: blood or something. That would be these the spiritual fluids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it gets beyond just like mere fluids and into
Speaker 1: also things like horrors. Um. So in other words, and
Speaker 1: the people still do photographing as absolutely, that's like big business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you know, in other words, in the midst of
Speaker 1: all this what was essentially future shock, you know, uh
Speaker 1: at this emerging technology and the hidden worlds exposed through
Speaker 1: X rays. This idea of capturing thoughts through photography carried
Speaker 1: a fair amount of weight, no matter what the science
Speaker 1: said and is still saying about it. So the author's
Speaker 1: point to to uh to a couple of examples, one
Speaker 1: of which is the work of Simion Kurlean in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties. Uh. Kurlean, of course, is where we get
Speaker 1: Kurlean photography. He lived nineteen seventy eight, and it's the
Speaker 1: process in which an image is obtained by the application
Speaker 1: of a high frequency electric field to an object so
Speaker 1: that it radiates a characteristic pattern of luminescence that is
Speaker 1: recorded on photographic film. And it ultimately has to do
Speaker 1: with moisture and other factors. But but claims were made
Speaker 1: that it captured some aspect of an individual's health, their essence,
Speaker 1: or their vital bodily energy. So there's some kind of
Speaker 1: like invisible quality they have this showing up when you
Speaker 1: run this electric current and take a picture, right, And
Speaker 1: I think it's still factors into some sort of to
Speaker 1: some like alternative like new age of systems, and I'm
Speaker 1: not saying there's anything wrong with that. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: ultimately you're you're dealing with something that is perhaps a
Speaker 1: a what you know, a supernatural interpretation of some visual
Speaker 1: data that you've created, which you know, as long as
Speaker 1: you're not not you know, claiming that it's scientific, I
Speaker 1: guess you know, go for it. Um. It just falls
Speaker 1: under the domain of of of of spiritualism and religion.
Speaker 1: They also point to a man by the name of
Speaker 1: ted Sirius, who we will come back to in a bit. Yes,
Speaker 1: because we before we get to Sirius, we have to
Speaker 1: explore the origins of this very act that Samara in
Speaker 1: the Ring is Uh is engaging in. UH, this idea
Speaker 1: that human beings are capable not only of photography, which
Speaker 1: photography in and of itself is an amazing accomplishment. This
Speaker 1: this this much seemed magic when it was new. Oh, absolutely,
Speaker 1: because at least we discussed an invention. You know. It's
Speaker 1: it's this perfect convergence of of optical expertise and chemical
Speaker 1: expertise and artistic expertise, all of it coming together in
Speaker 1: this new way of of of of dealing with the
Speaker 1: visual world. Um. But then we have this added idea
Speaker 1: that people can also engage in thought ptography, right thoughtography. Uh,
Speaker 1: it goes by several names, now psychic photography maybe thoughtography,
Speaker 1: and it's modern origins are I think you could you
Speaker 1: could argue that they are in Japan. So I want
Speaker 1: to talk about a researcher named Fukuai Tomokuchi, who is
Speaker 1: a Japanese psychologist who lived from eighteen sixty nine to
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two. He was educated at Tokyo Imperial University
Speaker 1: in the eighteen nineties. He studied in their philosophy department.
Speaker 1: Because this would have been when psychology was brand new.
Speaker 1: There weren't like psychology departments you know at there would
Speaker 1: have been many if there were any at the time,
Speaker 1: and he received his PhD after doing a dissertation on hypnotism.
Speaker 1: And according to the History of Japanese Psychology by Brian J. McVeigh,
Speaker 1: which is my source on most of this about Fukarai,
Speaker 1: Fukarai played an important role in introducing the work of
Speaker 1: the pioneering American psychologist William James to Japanese scholars. Of course,
Speaker 1: William James would have been a contemporary of fukurais James
Speaker 1: Is The Principles of Psychology came out in eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: and his lectures which became the Varieties of Religious Experience,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about a number of times on the show.
Speaker 1: That those happened around nineteen o one and nineteen o two,
Speaker 1: I think, But so this would have been around the
Speaker 1: same time that Fukarai was working and UH and doing
Speaker 1: his dissertation and doing his early research. And now, according
Speaker 1: to McVeigh, Fukarai also published work on the subject of education,
Speaker 1: and he became a lecturer and an associate professor in
Speaker 1: the field of abnormal psychology, which today we would just
Speaker 1: call the study of mental illnesses. And he so he
Speaker 1: was a lecturer at Tokyo Imperial University on these subjects.
Speaker 1: But from here his interests apparently took a turn for
Speaker 1: the paranormal. So, beginning sometime around nineteen ten, Fukarai became
Speaker 1: extremely interested in spiritualism, especially in the subject of clairvoyance. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, we should note that he would not have
Speaker 1: been alone in this at the time. Interest in spiritualism, mediums,
Speaker 1: and the paranormal enjoyed extreme popularity and elite circles all
Speaker 1: around the world at this time now Today, clairvoyance is
Speaker 1: usually understood to be a special kind of psychic power.
Speaker 1: Common definition of it is quote the supposed faculty of
Speaker 1: perceiving things or events in the future or beyond normal
Speaker 1: sensory contact. Now, like a lot of psychic concepts, I
Speaker 1: see clairvoyance invoked to refer to sort of a broad
Speaker 1: range of things. So I think it can include all
Speaker 1: manner of cases of remote viewing. So like seeing things
Speaker 1: that are behind physical barriers. You know, you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to see through the closed door into the next room,
Speaker 1: but you can seeing things that are far away, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe seeing things that are happening in another country, seeing
Speaker 1: things that are separated in time, in the future or
Speaker 1: the past. Uh. And sometimes, but less often, seeing things
Speaker 1: that can't normally be seen at all, such as spiritual
Speaker 1: essences or the contents of other people's thoughts, or otherwise
Speaker 1: having knowledge that you just couldn't acquire by normal means. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, it's worth noting that all of these things
Speaker 1: as psychic phenomenon, they are basically exaggerations of things that
Speaker 1: the human mind does through um, you know, through a
Speaker 1: mental time travel, for instance, imagining what the future will
Speaker 1: be like a or remembering what the past was. The
Speaker 1: idea of not being able to see through a wall
Speaker 1: into the next room and see what's going on there,
Speaker 1: but perform, but you know, conceiving a mental picture of
Speaker 1: what it might be like. Like for instance, there's another
Speaker 1: recording studio here in the office. I cannot see in
Speaker 1: there with my mind, but with my mind, I can
Speaker 1: imagine that the guys from stuff they don't want you
Speaker 1: to know are in there right now recording something. But
Speaker 1: you cannot imagine what they are doing. But I can
Speaker 1: form a pretty basic idea that you're setting around a
Speaker 1: table talking. It will not fit in your brain, and
Speaker 1: they're doing it's it's it looks just like what we're doing.
Speaker 1: The subject matter is slightly different. But but at any rate,
Speaker 1: what I'm saying is I can form a pretty good idea,
Speaker 1: but I know that that is just my brain creating
Speaker 1: a simulation of my environment, right. But I mean, I
Speaker 1: think a lot of this clairvoyant stuff hinges on the
Speaker 1: concept of generating accurate knowledge. It's like all the stuff
Speaker 1: we can do with our imagination, except they can do
Speaker 1: it to see reality. Um, And the kind of clairvoyants
Speaker 1: that Fukurai was most interested in I think would be
Speaker 1: covered by the first two categories of things I said,
Speaker 1: so mostly like seeing things that are far away and
Speaker 1: seeing across physical barriers. According to McVeigh, he was focused
Speaker 1: on something called toshi, which meant something like seeing through,
Speaker 1: as in seeing through barriers, and on syndrigan, which meant
Speaker 1: the far seeing I And in this para psychology phase
Speaker 1: of his life, Fukurai was aided by another Japanese researcher
Speaker 1: named Imamura Shinkichi. Now Fukuai studied a reputed Japanese clairvoyant
Speaker 1: named Mifuna Chizuko and another named Nagao Ikuko, and McVeigh
Speaker 1: writes that in nineteen ten, Fukurai performed a series of
Speaker 1: experiments in front of a panel of scholars and experts
Speaker 1: that he believed would demonstrate Mifuna Chizuko's power to read
Speaker 1: out written messages even after they'd been sealed inside envelopes
Speaker 1: and then placed inside lead containers, and apparently an attempt
Speaker 1: to rep locate these experiments the following year in nineteen eleven,
Speaker 1: was not as successful as Fukurai and Mifune had hoped,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people considered that Fukarai's research was
Speaker 1: clearly misguided after some failed demonstrations, and he and his
Speaker 1: supposed clairvoyance subjects like Nagau and Mfune were criticized in
Speaker 1: the press. And at least I think it's implied that
Speaker 1: partially as a result of these failures and subsequent criticism,
Speaker 1: McVeigh writes that both Mfuni and Nagaikuko committed suicide in
Speaker 1: the year nineteen eleven, but before I've also seen another
Speaker 1: cause of death attributed to Nagaikuko, so I'm not sure
Speaker 1: about that. But McVeigh says that that she also died
Speaker 1: by suicide. But before she died in nineteen eleven, Nagaikuko
Speaker 1: appeared to demonstrate a novel form of psychic power that
Speaker 1: fascinated Fukurai, and this was apart from traditional clairvoyance. This
Speaker 1: was the power that Fukurai called ninsha, which would have
Speaker 1: roughly translated as thoughtography. That the Japanese term ninha comes
Speaker 1: from the combination of nin meaning like sense or feeling,
Speaker 1: and shah meaning picture, and in concrete terms, this just
Speaker 1: means that Fukura I believe that Negau had the power
Speaker 1: to use her mind's eye to expose a dry plate
Speaker 1: of photographic film, essentially burning her thoughts directly onto the
Speaker 1: physical substrate, the same way that light prints and image
Speaker 1: onto a piece of film. After Mifune and Nagau died,
Speaker 1: Fukurai continued his research, and he published a book about
Speaker 1: clairvoyance and photography in nineteen thirteen, which was widely criticized
Speaker 1: as credulous and unscientific, and Fugura I eventually lost his
Speaker 1: university position moved on to other things that he apparently
Speaker 1: continued to be interested in paranormal research well into his
Speaker 1: retirement in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. UM one
Speaker 1: weird thing is before he was publicly ridiculed and ousted
Speaker 1: from his position, it took you a university. Fugara was
Speaker 1: considered an elite scholar at the head of Japanese psychology.
Speaker 1: He was not you know, just some crank right pamphlets
Speaker 1: in his basement. He was uh. He was a top scholar,
Speaker 1: and his his academic exile had consequences. I was reading
Speaker 1: in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology, Global
Speaker 1: Perspectives by David B. Baker that, in reaction to the
Speaker 1: Fukarai Affair, a new head of the psychology department at
Speaker 1: Tokyo Imperial University, decided that the department could rehabilitate its
Speaker 1: reputation by only focusing on quote normal psychology, ignoring both
Speaker 1: of Fukara's areas of study, meaning parapsychology like the study
Speaker 1: of psychics and quote abnormal psychology, which again would amount
Speaker 1: to the study of mental illness. Uh. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: saying we're not going to study mental illnesses is a
Speaker 1: huge limitation on academic psychology, which the authors right in
Speaker 1: this book a quote stunted the rise of clinical psychology
Speaker 1: and pre war Japan. Yeah, absolutely though, because he had
Speaker 1: studying an mental illness is a way not only of
Speaker 1: understanding how to trade mental illness, but also to understand
Speaker 1: like what, uh you know, how the mind is functioning
Speaker 1: in individuals who are are not experiencing mental illness, right,
Speaker 1: I mean it. It provides a frame of reference. Yeah,
Speaker 1: A lot of the For example, a lot of the
Speaker 1: biggest breakthroughs in the history of psychology have come from
Speaker 1: studying patients who have brain injuries or legions or some
Speaker 1: kind that like they show you how the brain changes
Speaker 1: when certain or how the mind changes and how behavior
Speaker 1: changes when certain physical changes are made to the brain.
Speaker 1: And of course, I I've seen it alleged by a
Speaker 1: number of writers that the stories of people like me,
Speaker 1: Funa Chizuko, and Nagai Kuko inspired the fictional ghost in
Speaker 1: the original Ring by Suzuki Koji. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that's uh correct, but it's at least been alleged that
Speaker 1: there's some threat of inspiration there um. And you know,
Speaker 1: I want to be a little bit sympathetic to Fukurai
Speaker 1: and consider the historical context, Like in the year nineteen ten,
Speaker 1: it was only fifteen years previous that X rays and
Speaker 1: X ray photog graphy had been discovered. We sort of
Speaker 1: alluded to this earlier, right. The German physicist Wilhelm Runkin.
Speaker 1: He discovered X rays by accident in the year eight
Speaker 1: when he was performing experiments with the type of early
Speaker 1: cathode ray tube, which was an electrical device that shoots
Speaker 1: a beam of electrons across space inside and evacuated tube
Speaker 1: from one electrode to another. And Runkin noticed when he
Speaker 1: was running these experiments, he'd put current through the cathode
Speaker 1: ray tube in the darkened room it would make this
Speaker 1: particular screen in the room. It was a screen of
Speaker 1: barium platinum cyanide, which is like a type of photographic plate.
Speaker 1: It would make that glow. And this puzzled him, of course,
Speaker 1: so he tried to run some more experiments, and he
Speaker 1: discovered that he could use the cathode ray tube to
Speaker 1: expose photographic plates inside a completely dark room, except the
Speaker 1: photos were nothing like anybody on Earth had ever seen.
Speaker 1: A human hand placed in front of the tube, between
Speaker 1: the tube and the plate would create an exposed you're
Speaker 1: almost completely ignoring the fleshy parts of the hand, but
Speaker 1: showing the bones hidden underneath the flesh. And when Runkan
Speaker 1: created an X ray exposure of his wife's hand, she
Speaker 1: reportedly looked at the images of her bones and said,
Speaker 1: I have seen my death. Uh yeah. And if you
Speaker 1: want more about this, we talked about this in our
Speaker 1: x ray episode of Invention. But the X ray photo
Speaker 1: was a radically completely new way of imaging the hidden
Speaker 1: reality inside the body. It had been discovered almost completely
Speaker 1: by accident, and it had been only like fifteen years
Speaker 1: before this. Of course, photography itself was maybe like eighty
Speaker 1: to ninety years old at the time. And so you
Speaker 1: add to that the fact that people were proposing all
Speaker 1: kinds of other hypothetical classes of rays at the time.
Speaker 1: You remember we talked about n rays. Those didn't exist,
Speaker 1: but people were just thinking that there were all kinds
Speaker 1: of rays we didn't detect or understand yet invisible forces
Speaker 1: beaming out from one object to another. Um Fukurai was wrong.
Speaker 1: I think. I think he was misguided, But I don't
Speaker 1: think it was crazy the time, or certainly not as
Speaker 1: crazy as it seems now to think that the hidden
Speaker 1: anatomy that governed the mind's eye and the brain might
Speaker 1: leave some kind of print on a piece of film
Speaker 1: via raise projected out of the head. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Does does that make sense to you? Yeah? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean we have to put ourselves in the framework of
Speaker 1: the time, and uh and and and really again in
Speaker 1: that the sense of future shock that would have would
Speaker 1: have still been resonating, and to a certain extent still resonates,
Speaker 1: because I think one of the one of the things
Speaker 1: that we're going to keep seeing in these episodes is
Speaker 1: that and I think this was revealed again in our
Speaker 1: our photography series on Invention, is that photography is a
Speaker 1: complicated process that brings in uh, you know, at least
Speaker 1: two different fields the third if you count the artistic
Speaker 1: world as well, but certainly optics and chemistry, and not
Speaker 1: everyone really has a firm grasp on that like it too.
Speaker 1: For a lot of us, it's still kind of feels
Speaker 1: like magic. A polaroid camera, uh, you know, we're you know,
Speaker 1: instantly gives you the the images sort of magic. Uh.
Speaker 1: And when we when we don't understand something completely, it
Speaker 1: it allows us to engage in uh, unrealistic modes of
Speaker 1: thought about what is going on with the camera, what
Speaker 1: is going on with photography. All right, we're gonna keep
Speaker 1: talking about all this, but we're gonna take one quick
Speaker 1: break first. Alright, we're back. So I want to talk
Speaker 1: just a little bit about this idea of remote viewing,
Speaker 1: which which Fukurai was definitely involved in. This idea that
Speaker 1: you know, you could just you could see what's going
Speaker 1: on in another place, either in another room, another part
Speaker 1: of the world, sealed envelope, sealed envelope, or another planet.
Speaker 1: And you know, another example of an accomplished individual in
Speaker 1: their field who is also a prominent, uh proponent of
Speaker 1: remote viewing is Atlanta's own Courtney Brown, an associate professor
Speaker 1: in the Political Science Department at Emory University. It also
Speaker 1: works in nonlinear mathematics. So we see in fukarai and
Speaker 1: interest in hypnosis uh and then Brown is versed in meditation. UH.
Speaker 1: Meditation induced light experiences can occur and have been linked
Speaker 1: to similar experiences in sensory deprivation UH and and I've
Speaker 1: seen things like that in yoga meditation as well, where
Speaker 1: you will be you know, you're you're you're seeing lights
Speaker 1: or shapes or or some sort of imagery that feels
Speaker 1: as if it is it is arising, and it is
Speaker 1: not called forth you know what I'm saying, Like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like it's something that you are consciously imagining.
Speaker 1: It doesn't feel like something that is dictated by the
Speaker 1: default mode network, you know, it doesn't feel like the
Speaker 1: sort of images um or thoughts that are normally bombarding
Speaker 1: our brain. Well, I think about how often in psychedelic
Speaker 1: experiences people talk about believing they have encountered an other
Speaker 1: where if you just you know, it's impossible to know
Speaker 1: for sure, but it seems like probably what's going on
Speaker 1: is they're having an internal experience with their own brain.
Speaker 1: But there are some types of experiences that we've just
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, feel our exogenous. It feels like it's
Speaker 1: coming from outside you, right. And so with with the
Speaker 1: right amount of of priming, expectation, and ultimately consolidation, like
Speaker 1: any one of these experiences, be it something that is
Speaker 1: due to the use of psychedelics or something that is
Speaker 1: acquired through meditation, hypnosis, etcetera um. Because as we've discussed before,
Speaker 1: like even normal our normal sensory view of the world
Speaker 1: is inherently hallucinatory, you know, it is in its in
Speaker 1: its own way and illusion. It's not the way things are.
Speaker 1: It's just like a useful sort of movie that we
Speaker 1: can interact with the world through. Right. So if you're
Speaker 1: having an experience like that and it feels real, right,
Speaker 1: and then you can see how even like like certainly
Speaker 1: very intelligent people uh can can can come to believe
Speaker 1: that that they are actually perceiving the reality of a
Speaker 1: distant location and become very convinced of it. And then
Speaker 1: certainly if you have a name for this as well,
Speaker 1: you know, it becomes kind of established in parapsychology. Than
Speaker 1: than that also helps that gives you even more like
Speaker 1: priming and conditioning, uh too, in which to frame this experience.
Speaker 1: And and also I mean just to go back to
Speaker 1: psychedelics too, and certainly our episode on psychedelics, like we
Speaker 1: see that trend uh in the twentieth century, right this,
Speaker 1: this counterculture emerged, this idea taking shape that secular individuals
Speaker 1: can have a essentially a mystical experience that is not
Speaker 1: due to the imachinations of gods or angels, you know,
Speaker 1: um and and so you know, it's it's not surprising
Speaker 1: that we see all, you know, cases like this arising. Well,
Speaker 1: I also say on top of that, there's just I
Speaker 1: think there's a very respectable humilitium el that says, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, we should always accept that there may be
Speaker 1: forces at work in our day to day surroundings that
Speaker 1: we don't fully understand. You know, we don't have a
Speaker 1: scientific theory that accounts for them yet. And I think
Speaker 1: that's a good thing to to start from. But I
Speaker 1: think a lot of like parapsychology and paranormal type people
Speaker 1: jump from there too, because we we should acknowledge that
Speaker 1: there are lots of things about the world we don't
Speaker 1: understand yet. Therefore, remote viewing is real you know, or
Speaker 1: like therefore, you know, you can't discount thoughtography and finding
Speaker 1: the right balance there I think is part of the
Speaker 1: difficulty of living the skeptical life. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to live a life of denialism where you're just like,
Speaker 1: anytime something is strange or unexplained, you just say like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's nonsense. But at the same time, you want to
Speaker 1: maintain a high standard of evidence, and that's that's the
Speaker 1: tightrope walk I guess you've got to do if you
Speaker 1: want to be a scientific investigator, if you want to
Speaker 1: try to have the most accurate view you can of
Speaker 1: the world, and they're always going to be these edge
Speaker 1: cases where some he's presenting, you know, evidence that maybe
Speaker 1: maybe seems compelling for some kind of phenomenon that doesn't
Speaker 1: really seem like it like it fits with well tested
Speaker 1: theories that otherwise predict the physical world. And I think
Speaker 1: that's the case that some of these investigators have run
Speaker 1: into with psychic photography, especially in the cases we'll talk
Speaker 1: about with Ted serious. Absolutely, I should also point out
Speaker 1: that we always have to remember that the c i
Speaker 1: A sunk something like twenty million dollars into the stargate
Speaker 1: project in the nineteen nineties and an attempt to ascertain
Speaker 1: the effectiveness and military potential of remote viewing. And this
Speaker 1: project was ultimately terminated in remote viewing was found unfruitful
Speaker 1: to their needs. But maybe it was a conspiracy. No, No,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I I tend to think like if
Speaker 1: there I mean, first of all, I've got major objections
Speaker 1: to remote viewing, just on like a plausibility basis, Like
Speaker 1: you know, again, you can't rule things out just because
Speaker 1: you don't know the mechanism. But if you've got a
Speaker 1: pretty good picture of how physics works and it just
Speaker 1: you know, their power is proposed that don't seem to
Speaker 1: fit in any way with any you know, any physical
Speaker 1: forces that you could identify. That's that should definitely be
Speaker 1: a red flag to start with. And then on top
Speaker 1: of that, I think there are additional plausibility problems with
Speaker 1: remote viewing, which is like if it is, if it
Speaker 1: does exist, why isn't it being taken better advantage of Yeah? Uh,
Speaker 1: and that thing said, I do come back to like
Speaker 1: what I said earlier, like even though it's not scientifically
Speaker 1: feasible as far as we understand it, um, you know,
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that you know, people shouldn't be interested
Speaker 1: in it and uh or even you know, practice it.
Speaker 1: But it needs to be more of I feel like
Speaker 1: it is more definitely in the line of like a
Speaker 1: spiritual or religious practice, you know. Um. But that's my
Speaker 1: just my two cents on it. And I think that's
Speaker 1: one of the problems that and we're going to see
Speaker 1: that with a lot of these these people that that
Speaker 1: are they're claiming these abilities, is they are not presenting
Speaker 1: them as something that is uh, you know, ultimately like
Speaker 1: the domain of the spiritual, something that can't really be
Speaker 1: proven or disproven. But they're but they're agreeing to tests,
Speaker 1: they're agreeing to uh to uh performances of their ability
Speaker 1: and inviting in some cases experts to to see what
Speaker 1: they're doing and to to to try and find the
Speaker 1: problems in it. Uh So, uh, it's something to keep
Speaker 1: in mind as we've moved forward. All Right, So let's
Speaker 1: come back to a figure that we've We've mentioned the
Speaker 1: name already, uh Ted Sirius. That's s c r I O.
Speaker 1: S Is it serious or Sirius Sirius with Sirius, well
Speaker 1: you say that, I'll say Sirius just to be confusing
Speaker 1: like serious black. Um. So Sirius lived through two thousand six,
Speaker 1: and he claimed to be able to create thoutographs on
Speaker 1: polaroid film. So, um, this is an interesting figure, um
Speaker 1: to say the least. So Um, I was reading a
Speaker 1: little bit about this in that in that book The
Speaker 1: Perfect Medium, paras psychologist Stephen E. Broad writes about him.
Speaker 1: Who Broad is also a philosophy professor, uh and he
Speaker 1: contends that sirius Is photography is perhaps the best documented
Speaker 1: and perhaps the most impressive. Does he seem a little
Speaker 1: uh sympathetic to maybe he he did have some psychic powers? Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, I encourage everyone to read uh Broad's work
Speaker 1: for themselves because he Um. He certainly is more inclined
Speaker 1: to to criticize some of the the individuals who have
Speaker 1: been attributed as being like solid debunkers. At the very least,
Speaker 1: he seems to be saying, look, whatever Ciris was doing,
Speaker 1: it's not nearly as debunked as you think it is. Um.
Speaker 1: And I'm and he is a paras psychologist. He is
Speaker 1: a paras psychologist. So so I gonna stress all of that,
Speaker 1: but it's still an interesting read. He does seem to
Speaker 1: be more climbed to um entertain the possibility though. So.
Speaker 1: Sirius was a Chicago bellhop who had experimented with with
Speaker 1: hypnosis and uh. He claims that during this time he
Speaker 1: found that he could use his mind to project images
Speaker 1: onto camera film and later instant polaroid film. And he
Speaker 1: apparently demonstrated this to various folks and was quite convincing.
Speaker 1: And this caught the attention of Denver psychiatrist and researcher
Speaker 1: Jewel Eisenbud, who took a strong interest in his work
Speaker 1: and conducted numerous trials, resulting in hundreds of images. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I've read that Eisenbudd is one of the main
Speaker 1: reasons that people really know about Ted. Seriously, he sort
Speaker 1: of took up the cause like uh, or at least
Speaker 1: from what I read. Eisenbudd claimed he was initially skeptical
Speaker 1: of Ted serious his abilities, but then after spending time
Speaker 1: with him and seeing his photographs, he he came more
Speaker 1: and more to believe that these powers were real and
Speaker 1: that Serious really could project his mind's eye onto a
Speaker 1: piece of holm. Yeah. Eisenbud at one point believed that
Speaker 1: Sirius was seeing the essentially remote viewing the surface of
Speaker 1: the Jovian moon Ghannamed and then using photography to implant
Speaker 1: that image on onto film. And it gets more complex
Speaker 1: than that, actually, because I was reading that so Sirius
Speaker 1: apparently made these images that Eisenbudd later said, oh, this
Speaker 1: is the surface of Ganymede, because he said that serious
Speaker 1: was very interested in space exploration and had been thinking
Speaker 1: about the voyager to probe, and that must have been
Speaker 1: what triggered his generation of this image of the surface
Speaker 1: of of Ghanymede. But at the time he generated the image,
Speaker 1: the photographs from the voyager probe had not been taken yet.
Speaker 1: So I think Eisenbudd is suggesting that if these photos
Speaker 1: are real, serious actually not only projected his thoughts directly
Speaker 1: on the film, but also pre cognitively remote viewed the
Speaker 1: surface of of Wait precognitiant. Well, I guess it wouldn't
Speaker 1: have mattered whether the voyager probe got there yet. He
Speaker 1: was seeing the surface of the moon before the probe
Speaker 1: got there, right, And I've seen this in other, uh
Speaker 1: you know, accounts of remote viewing, where they have they
Speaker 1: have essentially seen other worlds or have encountered historic figures
Speaker 1: that sort of thing, Right, Now, another thing worth noting
Speaker 1: about Cirios here is that is that even eisenbud like
Speaker 1: points out that that that ted it was definitely an
Speaker 1: alcoholic and that's sort of part of the thing, but
Speaker 1: also displayed like a lot of you know, at times
Speaker 1: kind of like irrational behavior and seemed to have you know,
Speaker 1: definite uh you know, psychological issues. So but but anyway,
Speaker 1: this was basically Sirius his process. So he generally he
Speaker 1: needed to be drunk, generally very drunk to perform this art,
Speaker 1: which I mean, I guess that's fair enough, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, really even podcasting, I don't know when when
Speaker 1: when we first started podcasting, um, Jerry told us, like,
Speaker 1: have a little to drink before you go into the
Speaker 1: podcast booth, it'll help. Jerry ever told me that, oh
Speaker 1: well maybe maybe I just look like I needed to
Speaker 1: drink at the time. I don't know. But wait, are
Speaker 1: you serious? I'm serious? Yeah, I mean I think she's joking.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, like the idea that you would
Speaker 1: need a social lubricant too, essentially to perform something um
Speaker 1: either you know, a legitimate psychic ability or to perform
Speaker 1: some sort of a trick, some sort of a um
Speaker 1: an illusion or even a confidence trick, right, um, so
Speaker 1: that's one part of it. Also, he preferred to hold
Speaker 1: a quota he called a gizmo in his hand to
Speaker 1: help him focus his powers. And it was a short,
Speaker 1: open cylinder about an inch in diameter. And of course
Speaker 1: this is highly suspicious. You don't have to be Sherlock
Speaker 1: Holmes to suspect that the gizmo is either the heart
Speaker 1: of the trick that he is going to perform, or
Speaker 1: it's a d e cooy to distract onlookers from the
Speaker 1: actual trick. Because he'd often placed this in front of
Speaker 1: the camera lens, like he'd get up into the into
Speaker 1: the camera lens with the gizmo and then also like
Speaker 1: you know, mugging for the camera, placing his forehead in
Speaker 1: the way and somehow using the gizmo allegedly to focus
Speaker 1: his thoughts into the camera. Yeah, he said he needed
Speaker 1: to connect his body to the camera. Uh. Though there
Speaker 1: are allegations also that he was able to produce the
Speaker 1: autographs and uh and and actually make images on a
Speaker 1: camera while being far away from the camera that at
Speaker 1: least as alleged, But he most of the time, it
Speaker 1: has said, would like put his forehead right on this
Speaker 1: thing and stick it in the camera camera lens. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: raises some red flags, right, But but then the idea
Speaker 1: is that he's essentially taking a snapshot of the mental
Speaker 1: image that he is forming in his mind, be a
Speaker 1: the be it a mental image that is formed via
Speaker 1: memory or just sort of general mental imaging, or it's
Speaker 1: something that is that he has acquired through um uh,
Speaker 1: you know, sending his consciousness to a to the moons
Speaker 1: of Jupiter. Yeah. Now, I read some conflicting reports that
Speaker 1: sometimes it seems like the images he produced, he claimed
Speaker 1: were like not what he was thinking about consciously, but
Speaker 1: just would be these unconscious kind of associative images. That's
Speaker 1: what's suggested by eisenbudd Uh the Galilean moon, right, is
Speaker 1: that he just had the Voyager two probe on his
Speaker 1: mind and happened to generate an image of the surface
Speaker 1: of Ganymede. And so if we're approaching it from the
Speaker 1: you know, the pro psychic side, we can say, well,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. The mind is difficult to control. Mental
Speaker 1: images may form in the mind that you you're not
Speaker 1: trying to summon. Certainly we can all attest to that.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, from a purely skeptical point of view,
Speaker 1: if you're going to be drawn in and put to
Speaker 1: the test by asking, you know, being asked to think
Speaker 1: of a particular thing, how convenient would it be if
Speaker 1: you could say, well, I tried to think of that
Speaker 1: that that bird feeder that you wanted me to imagine,
Speaker 1: but I'm just so obsessed with space travel right now,
Speaker 1: I gave you Ganymede instead, right. I mean that makes
Speaker 1: that suggests that maybe you've already got an image of
Speaker 1: something that looks like a moon's surface on hand with
Speaker 1: you or something, right, And I guess that gets to
Speaker 1: what the actual trick would be, if there is a
Speaker 1: trick here, which I assume there probably is right now now.
Speaker 1: In that article in The Perfect Medium, a Broad certainly
Speaker 1: focuses on the aspects of Ted's art that kind of
Speaker 1: continue to mystify, as he mentions, for instance, that Eisenbudd
Speaker 1: offered a cash reward for anyone able to replicate Ted's
Speaker 1: results quote under conditions similar to those prevailing during the
Speaker 1: during the experiments. Now I've read that there was serious
Speaker 1: dispute about like them negotiating with skeptics about what would
Speaker 1: be acceptable for those uh conditions, Like I think I
Speaker 1: read that James Randy wanted to try to replicate it,
Speaker 1: but that Eisenbudd said, well, you have to be really drunk,
Speaker 1: because Ted is always really drunk when he does it. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the famous debunker James Randy, who we had the privilege
Speaker 1: to meet. Um. But last um, it definitely plays into
Speaker 1: some of this, and it's kind of if you if
Speaker 1: you read some of the more pro serios material, Randy's
Speaker 1: kind of portrayed as a villain. Oh all, Randy is
Speaker 1: always the villain of something written by pro psychic powers people.
Speaker 1: Uh so, uh so, Yeah, some of these account like
Speaker 1: brought accountants to highlight the things that were not you know,
Speaker 1: they're still a little mysterious or or or certainly accounts
Speaker 1: of replications that don't meet the same degree of replication,
Speaker 1: Like you weren't able to do exactly what Sirius is doing,
Speaker 1: therefore you didn't fully debunk him. No, I've I've read
Speaker 1: some of his defenders say, Okay, people have used tricks
Speaker 1: to replicate what Serious was doing, but they couldn't do
Speaker 1: it without those tricks being evident to people who were watching. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean The other way to think about it is,
Speaker 1: can I can I paint the Mona Lisa? No? I cannot.
Speaker 1: Can I demonstrate some of the techniques personally that that
Speaker 1: that the artists used to create the Mona Lisa? Uh? Certainly, Uh,
Speaker 1: we have to take it into account. That's sirius assuming
Speaker 1: again that he's not a psychic, that he's not a
Speaker 1: not capable of photography, that he's just a performer, an illusionist. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a trickster. Uh. There is still an art
Speaker 1: to what he is doing. Uh, there is still a
Speaker 1: performance aspect, of charismatic aspect to it. And there are
Speaker 1: aspects of that that are going to depend in part
Speaker 1: on like innate charisma, but also in in practice, in
Speaker 1: in like sheer devotion to to the trick. And I
Speaker 1: think you can't discount that. And on likewise, you can't
Speaker 1: expect a debunker to rise to that level of performance. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess you can expect them to try. But I
Speaker 1: mean that's one thing that you know, as long as
Speaker 1: we're probing the depths of the unexplained, you could say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, there's some kind of mystical power that this
Speaker 1: person has that we just don't have the power to
Speaker 1: explain it. Or you could say that there's an extreme
Speaker 1: talent this person has for performing a trick that hasn't
Speaker 1: been explained yet. Yeah, because certainly one of the things
Speaker 1: that would come into play is slight of hand, right,
Speaker 1: because the main charge is that is that Sirius had it.
Speaker 1: Kind of varies. Sometimes they talk of just using the
Speaker 1: microfilm um or using microfilm affixed to a marble or
Speaker 1: you know, a film affixed to the end of a
Speaker 1: tiny tube to be like inside the quote gizmo that
Speaker 1: he put up against the camera. Because that's the obvious, right,
Speaker 1: is that the gizmo contains something, and if it contains something,
Speaker 1: some film would be ideal because then you have that
Speaker 1: pre existing photograph that can be the thing that he
Speaker 1: imprints UM. Skeptic Terence Hines also charged that Ted used
Speaker 1: a secondary tube about one inch long with a tiny
Speaker 1: magnifying lens that could hold a small slide, and then
Speaker 1: he would conceal this within the gizmo, but also he
Speaker 1: could use it when the gizmo was taken away. Again
Speaker 1: getting an of that idea that the gizmos not merely
Speaker 1: useful as something to um to hide the trick but
Speaker 1: also can be used as a distraction, can be the
Speaker 1: thing that, oh, when it's taken away, look I can
Speaker 1: still do it. I don't even have the gizmo on me, right,
Speaker 1: And it was alleged that sometimes he could, I mean
Speaker 1: usually he used the gizmo, but it's alleged that sometimes
Speaker 1: he did it without the gizmo. Now, there were a
Speaker 1: number of expose a s at the time that claimed
Speaker 1: to show that Ted Sirius was a fraud. The entry
Speaker 1: in the Skeptics Dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll suggests that
Speaker 1: two amateur magicians and photographers named Charlie Reynolds and David
Speaker 1: Eisendraft exposed Serious as a fraud. Basically, they wouldn't spend
Speaker 1: a weekend with him and jewel Iz and Bud, and
Speaker 1: they saw his stuff and they they came to the
Speaker 1: conclusion that he was a fraud and wrote this up
Speaker 1: in the article. And Reynolds and Eisendraft claimed to have
Speaker 1: spotted Serious quote slipping something inside his little gizmo before demonstrations,
Speaker 1: and they think it was a picture of something that
Speaker 1: Sirius wanted to show up in the camera exposure. They
Speaker 1: also published an article explaining their findings in in October
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven issue of Popular Photography of Photography magazine. Now,
Speaker 1: according to the skeptic investigator Joe Nichols account of Serious
Speaker 1: is confrontation with magicians and sleight of hand experts. Quote,
Speaker 1: at one point during the session, after an exposure was made,
Speaker 1: a magician asked to examine the paper tube to see
Speaker 1: if there was anything inside. This would be the gizmo, right,
Speaker 1: the gizmo. Uh. Serious backed away, putting his hand in
Speaker 1: his pocket. Now that's suspicious behavior. But then, weirdly, during
Speaker 1: this session, Sirius was unable to produce the autographs. So
Speaker 1: apparently he had been using the gizmo. They said, let
Speaker 1: me see the gizmo, he wouldn't show it to them,
Speaker 1: and then none of the pictures came out. Anyway, there
Speaker 1: were no autographs. Uh. And he and Eisenbudd blamed the
Speaker 1: quote hostile atmosphere for interfering with Serious his powers. This
Speaker 1: is always a red flag also, I think. But there's
Speaker 1: still plenty of people, I think, who hold out for
Speaker 1: psychic photography, claiming that Head Serious his powers were real
Speaker 1: and could not be explained. And he's got defenders who
Speaker 1: say that some of his feats are just impossible to explain.
Speaker 1: For example, I was reading claims in an article in
Speaker 1: the Chronicle of Higher Education which was about a gallery
Speaker 1: exhibit of Serious as thotographs, which I would like to
Speaker 1: see that. Oh yeah, I mean they're interesting images, certainly
Speaker 1: when you know the background for them, especially if you
Speaker 1: just think about him as works of art, not as
Speaker 1: like displays of real psychic powers. Um. But to quote
Speaker 1: from this article quote, on occasion, volunteers were asked to
Speaker 1: attend the experiment with a photograph sealed and a cardboard
Speaker 1: back to manila envelope. Serious then managed to reproduce the
Speaker 1: image with no prior knowledge of it. So again, that's
Speaker 1: like double psychic powers. That's not just the thoughtography, which
Speaker 1: would be a feat even if he was looking directly
Speaker 1: at what the photo should be. UM. But also, I
Speaker 1: guess seeing into this envelope if I'm reading that right,
Speaker 1: I don't know. That might also be suggesting that they
Speaker 1: just arrived with its sealed and then showed it to
Speaker 1: him and he reproduced it. Either way, I mean, you
Speaker 1: saw that. I wouldn't say that would prove it was real,
Speaker 1: but that would be impressive, you know, you'd be like, wow,
Speaker 1: that that's either real or some impressive trickery. I'd leaned
Speaker 1: towards the ladder um. But in other cases he apparently
Speaker 1: managed to produce what appeared to be images of landmarks
Speaker 1: from up above, like aerial views that his supporters claimed
Speaker 1: could not be explained through trickery. But it seems like
Speaker 1: he stopped doing his thing after the late nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: which seems a little weird. Yeah, especially consider he lived
Speaker 1: until two thousand and six. You know, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's a lot of time to not at least not
Speaker 1: be publicly doing this displaying this uh this ability. Uh.
Speaker 1: But then again, um, you know, we do have to
Speaker 1: come back to you the fact that Eisenbud himself wrote
Speaker 1: that serious was you know, psychologically disturbed alcoholic. So you know,
Speaker 1: you can come up with various, you know, reasons that
Speaker 1: somebody with that kind of with with with those kind
Speaker 1: of demons would not engage in their art. Now, he
Speaker 1: wasn't the only one in the later twentie tree to
Speaker 1: get in on the psychic photography thing. Over the years,
Speaker 1: a lot of figures, including Uri Geller, got into psychic photography.
Speaker 1: One one of Geller's many demonstrations was that he would
Speaker 1: leave the lens cap on a camera, placed the camera
Speaker 1: to his forehead, and then take a picture, supposedly saying,
Speaker 1: you know the same kind of thing. I'm using my
Speaker 1: mind's eye to imprint upon the film, and then the
Speaker 1: photo would reveal whatever he had been imagining. Again, James
Speaker 1: Randy shows up, as he often does whenever Uri Geller
Speaker 1: claims something. James Randy criticized this and other psychic photography
Speaker 1: is having two main explanations, either using a handheld device
Speaker 1: to project the image into the camera lens as the
Speaker 1: photos taken, or loading the camera with pre exposed film
Speaker 1: already bearing the desired image, and the latter seems to
Speaker 1: be the case with a later twentieth century alleged psychic
Speaker 1: named Matsuaki Kyota, who claimed to be able to produce
Speaker 1: photographs on film again, and skeptical critics such as Joe
Speaker 1: Nicol have pointed out that when Matsuaki Kyota was asked
Speaker 1: to reform his thoughtography under controlled conditions for a TV
Speaker 1: crew in London, he couldn't produce the images, and Nickel
Speaker 1: claims that it was only times when he was able
Speaker 1: uh to get the film and have it alone with him,
Speaker 1: like basically to get hold of the film and have
Speaker 1: it in a private place before the test that he
Speaker 1: could demonstrate his powers, which again makes you think he
Speaker 1: was doing something to the film before it was loaded
Speaker 1: in the camera. Alright, Well, on that note, we are
Speaker 1: going to have to call it for episode one of
Speaker 1: this exploration, but we are going to return in a
Speaker 1: second episode where we're going to continue to explore this idea,
Speaker 1: like how would it work if this were possible? Like
Speaker 1: what what what can we grasp onto in the labyrinth
Speaker 1: of the human mind and the complexity of our our
Speaker 1: our sensory perception, but also what can this question reveal
Speaker 1: about the reality of mental imagery and how that happens
Speaker 1: in the brain, which is fascinating, mysterious, and even spooky
Speaker 1: topic on its own, even though we don't necessarily credit
Speaker 1: the reality of psychic photography, there's a lot of spooky
Speaker 1: stuff going on when you picture something right. And we'll
Speaker 1: probably talk about The Ring a little bit more, and
Speaker 1: we'll probably bring up a few other films such as Scanners,
Speaker 1: So hey, be sure to tune in for that episode,
Speaker 1: and tune in for all of our episodes in October,
Speaker 1: which are going to be Halloween flavored uh and we
Speaker 1: encourage you again to check out Invention if you haven't already,
Speaker 1: can find it wherever you get your podcast. You can
Speaker 1: find out the website at invention pod dot com. If
Speaker 1: you want to support our show, the best thing you
Speaker 1: can do is rate and review it wherever you have
Speaker 1: the power to do so, and make sure you have subscribed.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our awesome audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at contact at stuff to blow
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