{"id":329,"date":"2016-01-21T11:09:12","date_gmt":"2016-01-21T11:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/?p=329"},"modified":"2016-01-21T11:09:12","modified_gmt":"2016-01-21T11:09:12","slug":"embodied-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/?p=329","title":{"rendered":"Embodied Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u201cThe Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar\u201d (1845) \u2013 the story by Edgar Allan Poe famously taken for reality by a readership enamored of mesmerism and animal magnetism, and concerning an individual whose life is unnaturally and gruesomely prolonged by these arts \u2013 inspired a piece of enthusiastic correspondence from a certain Dr. Robert Hanham Collyer, a moderately successful traveling lecturer of the sciences and pseudo-sciences. \u201cI have not the least doubt,\u201d he wrote to Poe \u201cof the possibility<\/i> of such a phenomenon; for I did actually restore to active animation a person who died from excessive drinking of ardent spirits.\u201d
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0It was this same Collyer who had, some years earlier in the Sunday edition of the Albany Argus<\/i>, described experiments in which he had caused a lady to perform an example of “the same class of phenomena which is the wonder of travelers in the east.” The lady, in essence, had been asked to gaze into a cup of molasses (though any “dark liquid” would suffice, adds Collyer) in order literally to see the reflection of thoughts and mental images that the doctor was actively beaming into the syrup. \u201cWhen the angle of incidence from my brain,\u201d he explains, \u201c[is] equal to the angle of reflection from her brain, she distinctly [sees] the image<\/i> of my thoughts at the point of coincidence [\u2026] she [sees] persons and things in the fluid only when the angles of thought converge.”<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Collyer further explains this unusual optical phenomenon in his 1843 Psychography, or, the Embodiment of Thought; with an analysis of phreno-magnetism, \u201cneurology,\u201d and mental hallucination, including rules to govern and produce the magnetic state<\/i> \u2013 the \u201cmagnetic state,\u201d which Collyer also calls \u201ccongestive,\u201d being the mesmerized state. The book begins with an aggrieved argument for the author\u2019s priority in the invention and diffusion of the new art of phreno-magnetism \u2013 in which specific phrenological organs (for example amativeness or secretiveness) can be magnetized to produce related behavioral effects \u2013 and a lament on the recent and spurious proliferation of such organs.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Collyer then lays out,\u00a0<\/span>in the book\u2019s main body, the art of psychography: the ability to project a mental picture, or \u201cembodied idea,\u201d upon the brain of another person, and of that other person to observe and describe that picture. It is a form of mind-reading entirely reliant upon the fixed and unmoving image, likened to the results of the \u201cphotographic process of Daguerre,\u201d and enabled by a \u201cconcentrated and undivided effort of the will.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Collyer likens the phenomenon to the optical illusion known as persistence of vision, as when \u201ca lighted stick makes a fiery arc\u201d or a series of discrete sketches appears as an animated cartoon. He also compares psychography to the negative afterimages caused by overstimulation of the eye\u2019s photoreceptors. But the most dominant vocabulary is that of photography, in which the \u201cinternal nervous substance\u201d is the photographic film and the magnetically-enhanced act of attention a kind of chemical bath. Collyer writes: \u201cSuppose attention<\/i> to be a greater than usual development of electric action in the brain, how strangely akin to the recent experiments of Daguerre!\u201d<\/p>\n

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Those who fail to pay sufficient attention, indeed, squander the brain\u2019s electric potential and overlook a dense network of \u201cmessages between objects in the external world and the inner powers of mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Collyer specifies that the sender of the psychographic image must first \u201cembody\u201d in his own mind the image that he wishes to communicate. For example, if the recipient is to describe a person or location she has never seen, the sender\u00a0must first impicture <\/i>it, so that the recipient can relay\u00a0the details of its pictorial composition. What is most fascinating about the process is the question of how much artist\u2019s control, as it were, the sender has in this process of \u201cembodiment\u201d \u2013 especially considering that mental\/emotional image-complexes associated with persons and things are often highly individual\u00a0and eccentric. One of our ESTAR(SER) researchers, for example, insists that his entirely involuntary though deeply-rooted mental image of Plato, for whatever reason, includes the information that he was located not in Greece but somewhere on the Central Asian steppe.<\/p>\n

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A true psychographic transmission would of necessity include such eccentricities \u2013 something of a problem for those wishing to ascertain its veracity, since the correct transmission of the message \u201cPlato\u201d might result in a crystal clear image of Genghis Khan.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0What makes such a transmission possible in the first place, of course, is the \u201cnervous fluid,\u201d the versatile bio-electricity so beloved of the mesmerists. Collyer\u2019s insight was that this substance might be \u201cgoverned by the same code of laws which governed heat, light, &c., as radiation and reflection.\u201d Might it also be subject to the laws of optics? Thus resulted Collyer\u2019s series of experiments with the bowls of molasses.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0On June 22 1841, Collyer repeatedly \u201cdirected his thought into [a] bowl of molasses\u201d before an audience of \u201ctwenty four gentlemen of the three learned professions\u201d at the Masonic Temple in Boston. Present among them, perhaps inevitably, were two delighted members of the Order of the Third Bird.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Collyer\u2019s unpublished autobiography makes no mention of their subsequent invitation to join them in a number\u00a0of experiments opportunistically based on his attempts at psychography \u2013 and one gleans what one can from the W Cache\u2019s vast and disorganized records and transcripts of Actions held in the US between 1804 and the present.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0It appears that, rather than stick with molasses or any other dark or highly reflective liquid, the Boston Birds directed their thoughts into various domestic objects, museum pieces, child\u2019s drawings, classroom busts of Greek philosophers and the like.<\/p>\n

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Action Protocols were thus invented to harness the laws of mental optics as applied particularly to works of art. This probably did not sit well with Collyer.\u00a0What was worse, participants in later Actions\u00a0adopted complex mental and physical \u201cpositions,\u201d using carefully placed mirrors, in order to have the angles of incidence of their respective thoughts coincide with the angle of reflection of the object\u2019s <\/i>mind. The idea was, going from the transcripts, to create a kind of prismatic consciousness, expressing itself through the utterances of each successive group member.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0None of these Protocols appear to be in use today; we would welcome any evidence to the contrary, including descriptions of relevant\u00a0Actions by anonymous informants of the Order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u201cThe Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar\u201d (1845) \u2013 the story by Edgar Allan Poe famously taken for reality by a readership enamored of mesmerism and animal magnetism, and concerning an individual whose life is unnaturally and gruesomely prolonged by these arts \u2013 inspired a piece of enthusiastic correspondence from a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":341,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions\/341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.estarser.net\/communiques\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}