The melancholy of genius and its causes

guest post by Christine Fulcher

Havelock Ellis makes some interesting points about the personality features of geniuses in his book A Study of British Genius (1904).

Discussing the characteristics of men and women of genius, he writes:

This marked tendency to melancholy among persons of intellectual aptitude is no new observation, but was indeed one of the very earliest points noted concerning men of genius. ... It is not altogether difficult to account for this phenomenon. ...

He continues by suggesting that persons of intellectual aptitude tend to be anxious, and ill-adapted to society, and that these factors feed into their melancholy. He also mentions the sedentary and ‘nerve-exhausting’ nature of the kind of work in which they are likely to be engaged, such work producing or exacerbating ‘moods of depression’.

Finally, Ellis mentions one factor which tends to get ignored in modern explanations of the apparent predisposition of genius to suffering from ‘melancholy’:

Another cause that serves largely to accentuate the tendency of men of genius to melancholy is the attitude of the world to them. Every original worker in intellectual fields, every man who makes some new thing, is certain to arouse hostility when he does not meet with indifference.

He sets out on his chosen path ... content to work in laborious solitude and to wait, and when at last he turns to his fellows, saying, ‘See what I have done for you!’ he often finds that he has to meet only the sneering prejudices of the few who might have comprehended, and the absolute indifference of the many who are too absorbed in the daily struggle for bread to comprehend any intellectual achievement.

Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1904, pp.220-222.

Laughter

A young graduate who had read English at Oxford, and with whom I was corresponding, once referred to jokes about ageing. Certainly they are common.

The first thing one notices about them is that they all depend on the implicit or explicit introduction of ‘other people’ into the situation. In some way or another, they all say, ‘I am living out a life-cycle as other people have done before, or as my contemporaries are also doing now.’ I do not think you could make a joke out of being the first or only person to find himself enmeshed in the conditions of mortality.

Two questions arise: what makes this reference to the widespread occurrence of mortality funny, and how is one to account for its sedative effect? (Plainly, the effect of the joke is one of reconciliation to the situation, rather than a spur to action.)

Freud would no doubt claim that the funniness arose from the reference to an underlying anxiety. The behaviourists would no doubt say that a thing was funny if accompanied by the action of laughing. I don’t feel particularly enlightened by either suggestion. There is only one nonsane joke: it is about attempting the impossible. It is extremely hilarious, but I do not think that it resembles any form of sane funniness. There is one other existential form of laughter: this is the laughter of relief. Again, I cannot feel that it sheds light on sane humour.

I will hazard a guess why sane people make jokes about growing old. What the joke means is ‘I am as degraded as everybody else, but at least everybody else is as degraded as I am.’ This is funny in the same way that other references to one’s concealed hatred of other people are funny, and it explains why the joke functions as a sedative. (‘At least I can see everyone else rotting at the same time I do; at least I can hear them screaming while I’m being tortured myself...’)

Come to think of it, does not all sane humour depend on references to one’s concealed hatred of other people? My studies of the Reader’s Digest certainly suggest this. ‘Human relationships’ seem to consist of continual reminders that your ‘friend’ sees you as identified with your most degrading limitations. (But loves you just the same, of course. That is, he wants you to be like that.)

Extract from Advice to Clever Children, pp.74-75.

The cult of creativity

One weakness of the pursuit of creativity is that it focuses attention on what seems to you to be significant (which admittedly is the only way you have of evaluating what might be significant), so that the tension between the subject or observer and external (unknown) reality is relatively weakened.

This is clearly why creativity is so popular as an educational catchword. If everyone tries to do some multiplication exercises, there is an objective standard of what constitutes doing it right. People will succeed differentially, and get some feeling of their limitations vis-a-vis objective reality.

But if everyone is told to paint or write creatively, and express themselves, no comparison with an external standard arises in any obvious way. It is a popular educational position nowadays to ‘encourage’ children to write what they feel, and worry about the niceties of grammar and punctuation when they have become good enough at self-expression. Of course, they never do get round to the grammar or punctuation.

Another drawback of the pursuit of creativity, or ‘interest’, is that there is little scope in life for this sort of ‘interest’, and a population of people who have been persuaded that they should despise everything that isn’t ‘interesting’ is very much at the mercy of society. To get anything purposeful done seldom requires a great deal of inspirational activity, but does require a lot of activity of a kind which is by no means ‘interesting’ in itself. This is the way reality is.

Metachoric experiences

metachoric experience = experience in which the whole of a subject’s visual field is replaced by a hallucinatory one

Our research on lucid dreams, false awakenings and out-of-the-body experiences highlighted the capacity of the brain to generate experiences which provide a convincing replica of normal perceptual experience.

In lucid dreams, the subject appears to be relatively ‘normal’ in terms of cognitive faculties, as evidenced by the fact that he has awareness of his actual state, i.e. that he is asleep and that the experiences he is having are hallucinatory. In false awakenings, the subject appears to ‘see’ a convincing replica of his normal bedroom environment. He may then see monsters or other figures of various kinds, apparently superimposed on this otherwise faithful replica, although in fact the whole of the visual field is of course hallucinatory. In out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) the subject is typically awake but appears to be seeing his environment from the wrong perspective — often as if from a point of view above his head. Again, the brain appears to be generating a highly convincing replica of the normal environment, visually speaking.

In the case of OBEs, there is also the observation that the hallucinatory state can apparently be entered with little or no awareness that a discontinuity has taken place from (a) actually seeing the environment to (b) hallucinating the same environment, albeit from a different perspective.

These experiences suggested a departure from the previous idea of a hallucination as an isolated area of the visual field which was generated erroneously by the brain, and then somehow superimposed on the rest of the visual field which was generated from actual input in the normal way.

Certain features of our research on apparitional cases — cases where an apparitional figure or object is seen against the background of the normal environment — led us to the possibility that many apparitional experiences, and possibly all of them, were analogous to lucid dreams and OBEs in being totally hallucinatory. That is to say, rather than the experience consisting of normal perception plus a finite hallucinatory element (the two elements being integrated in some way), the perceptual environment is entirely replaced by a hallucinatory one, at least as long as the apparitional figure is being perceived.

In our 1975 book Apparitions we proposed the term metachoric to designate such experiences in which the normal perceptual environment is entirely replaced by a hallucinatory one.

Celia Green
Charles McCreery

Read more

Getting one’s eye in at cricket

50 years ago people used to talk about ‘getting one’s eye in’ when playing a game. This was associated with scoring more freely.

My father told me of something that happened to him once when he was playing cricket. Usually the ball came to him so fast that he could not see it at all. On this occasion he suddenly found that he saw the ball floating towards him so slowly that he could see the stitches on its binding, and he found it very easy to hit it with his bat.

I have never heard anyone describing a similar experience. The expression ‘getting one’s eye in’ used to be quite common, at least in cricket, and may sometimes have been used to refer to something similar. My father was not particularly good at games, but he did have a high IQ.

Professor Otto Frisch and psychokinesis

Of course I knew when I was thrown out, to try to do research in the wilderness, that there was no sympathy with my position or predicament. I did not suppose that there was any great motivation in the world for the advancement of science per se, but the absolute negativity of the response to anything I could produce as evidence of my ability to make progress was a constant surprise, even to me, and one concludes that only the most absolute restriction and obstruction is to be expected. That is a simple law of human psychology, although not totally easy to understand.

Professor Otto Frisch FRS
(1904 -1979)

To give one example, the late Professor Otto Frisch of Cambridge University, who had been involved in the development of the atom bomb, once said to me that if there was such a thing as PK (psychokinesis), every physicist in the world should drop whatever they were doing and work on nothing else. This showed a theoretical recognition of its importance, although it would have been a stupid way of tackling the problem.

At that time, Professor Frisch asked me whether, among all the cases of possible PK that I had ever read or heard about, there was one that provided conclusive proof of the existence of PK. Of course I said that there was not, because proof of anything is, strictly speaking, impossible. However cast-iron a case might seem to be, the possibility would always remain that one’s informant was lying or misremembering. Professor Frisch seemed relieved at this, and said he was glad to hear me say that, so that he did not have to feel under pressure to organise any research into PK at all.

Now if somebody with my IQ, who has done enough relevant research of a respectable kind, has a lot of information and ideas about the possible psychology of PK, this would appear to be an opportunity for a scientific breakthrough potentially of such magnitude as to constitute a fairly irrefutable claim on funding. Especially considering the billions that are annually poured into totally futile ‘research’ guaranteed to lead to no outcome of any importance whatever.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Near-death experiences: more obfuscation

This was first published in September. I am re-posting it in connection with an article about a new book on near-death experiences which appeared in Saturday’s Daily Mail. This, as usual, muddies the waters by perpetuating the confusion that the phenomena are either ‘genuine’, in the sense of providing evidence of the afterlife or the paranormal, or, if not ‘genuine’ in this sense, are to be dismissed.
The author of the book, Penny Sartori, appears to have some connection with the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre, currently based in Lampeter but originally part of the University of Oxford. The Centre was set up shortly after we published our initial pioneering research on out-of-the-body experiences, and cleverly succeeded in drawing away any publicity and research funds we might have got, including about OBEs, and getting them for itself. It may well have been set up expressly for this purpose. It certainly never carried out, as far as I am aware, any actual research on OBEs.
The present obsession with near-death experiences, and the false dichotomy that these kinds of phenomena must be either (a) real (meaning paranormal), or (b) dismissable, is to be deplored. It contributes to our being blocked from receiving any funding for research that would actually advance understanding of the phenomena.

There has recently been some more interest in near-death experiences, including a large number of hits on the posts about them on my blog. This is always very irritating, as there is no sign of response to our appeals for funding.

A number of areas of research, on which quite a lot of money is being spent throughout the world, were initiated by us. In some of the cases it could be claimed that the research now being done might have developed independently of our drawing attention to it, as the information was there, although ignored (e.g. the development of distorted interpretations of early forms of Gnostic Christianity).

However, there was no concept of near-death experiences until it arose out of nominal research on out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs). This in turn had developed (with some delay) following the publication of our first book [1] on OBEs, which made these appear as a type of experience that had sufficiently consistent characteristics to justify academic recognition. Our work provided much less justification for relating OBEs to the question of ‘proving’ survival than did the previous associations with spiritualistic beliefs.

The new and spurious category of near-death experiences arose from there being some cases reported of OBEs in hospitals. Eventually the concept of near-death experiences replaced that of OBEs in popular attention, so that the question of ‘proving’ survival or otherwise once again became the issue predominantly associated with such experiences.

However, the resulting association of OBE-type experiences with the idea of extreme states is likely to be highly misleading. In one study conducted by Professor Ian Stevenson [2] of the University of Virginia, for example, it appeared that only about half of the subjects of supposed near-death experiences were in any sense near to death.

My colleague Charles McCreery carried out an experiment, as part of his doctoral research at the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford, in which subjects attempted to induce OBEs in the laboratory. He found that two of his subjects reported subjective phenomena similar to those of so-called near-death experiences. Both subjects referred to ‘tunnels’, and one of them also described having the impression of ‘being on elastic going towards a tiny white light in [the] distance’. Neither of these subjects showed any sign of being near death. The one who reported the white light in the distance was a young female graduate student aged twenty-six. [3]

1. Green, C. (1968). Out-of-the-body Experiences. Institute of Psychophysical Research.
2. Stevenson, I. (1987). Personal communication to Charles McCreery.
3. McCreery, C. and Claridge, G. (1996). ‘A study of hallucination in normal subjects – I. Self-report data’. Personality and Individual Differences, Vol 21, no. 5, pp. 739-747.

‘We are appealing for £200,000 to assist my colleague Dr Charles McCreery in completing the work for his book on out-of-the-body experiences, then publishing it and publicising it. He has received no funding during the writing of this book, which is based on the research he carried out for his Oxford DPhil on out-of-the-body experiences. The book includes the results of both experimental work and extensive analyses of case material.
Dr McCreery’s book is a rigorously scientific analysis of out-of-the-body experiences, with discussions of the philosophical implications of these and related phenomena. It deserves to be completed, published and widely advertised. Those who claim that they want to advance human knowledge should provide us with the financial support required to enable this to happen.’
Dr Celia Green

more about modern ‘research’

The near-death red herring, yet again

One regularly sees articles in the newspapers to the effect that so-called near-death experiences (NDEs) have an explanation that does not involve references to the supernatural. This has been the case now for decades. However many times it is supposed to have been ‘proved’, there always seems to be another research team willing to undertake a research project to prove it again. Each time the papers triumphantly report: NDEs (or whatever other experience they are talking about) are ‘all in the mind’.

The latest such article (Daily Mail, 13th August) refers to a University of Michigan study which looked at the brain activity of rats before and after their hearts were stopped.

Apart from the dubious ethics involved, this research in itself tells one nothing about NDEs, or about any other quasi-perceptual experience. Even if, as the researchers claim, the rat’s brain shows activity after clinical death, this does not get you very far in understanding the hows and whys of the kinds of experience people report in analogous circumstances.

The key issue raised by hallucinatory and quasi-perceptual experiences – whether they occur in sleep, near death, under normal conditions or otherwise – is the question of what they tell us about the way the brain, or mind, generates representations of its environment from external and internal data. This is a fundamental issue in psychology, and therefore ought to be of the greatest interest to psychologists, philosophers and neurophysiologists. However, it has been ignored in favour of whether or not there is an afterlife, ever since I established these phenomena as suitable subjects for scientific study over 40 years ago.

Having placed the phenomenon of out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) on a scientific footing, we should have been provided with finance to take the work further, leading to the possibility of important advances in our understanding of conscious experience and its relation to brain physiology. As we did not have an institutional environment with residential and laboratory facilities, we need funding to set this up in the first instance. Such funding should still be provided now, even more urgently, to prevent the continuing waste of our abilities which could and should be being used in making significant advances. This would be true even if people other than ourselves had shown any sign of adopting a sufficiently analytical and open-minded approach. In fact they have not. The resistance to the possibilities suggested by the phenomena, which had prevented their being recognised by academia before our book on them was published, continues to restrict and distort the work carried out, and leads to the unsatisfactory conclusions drawn from it.

more on out-of-the-body experiences

Professor Colin Blakemore and 'near-death' experiences

‘Near-death experiences’, which have become a staple of popular journalism, were never heard of (or at least I had never heard of them) until a decade or so after the publication of my book on out-of-the-body experiences in 1968, so it may be supposed that they arose in reaction to my having publicised the concepts of out-of-the-body experiences, lucid dreams, and apparitions.

I should explain how it was that I came to publish work on these topics, as it has been widely assumed that I found them particularly interesting.

In fact, I was thrown out at the end of my ruined ‘education’ with no usable qualification, after eleven years of state-funded oppression which was aimed at producing an egalitarian outcome, i.e. at cancelling the advantages which I might have been able to gain as a result of my exceptional ability. I had no research scholarship nor any way of proceeding with the high-flying university career which I needed to have, in any field.

In this shocking situation, serendipity led me to the Society for Psychical Research and I was able to obtain a research studentship (the Perrott Studentship) on account of the relationship of the SPR with Trinity College, Cambridge.

I do not know of any other way in which I could have obtained a grant for postgraduate work in any field in the absence of support from Somerville (my Oxford college).

I had therefore to survey the fields of potential research that fell under the auspices of the Perrott Studentship to find the areas most likely to enhance my claim on a university appointment.

Out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) appeared to me to be the phenomenon which would most readily lend itself to research leading to advances in scientific understanding. They were, however, and perhaps for this reason, ignored by those working or interested in parapsychology. They were predominantly associated with a belief in an afterlife, and the cases compatible with such a belief which were sometimes published by spiritualists or theosophists were supposed by those without such beliefs to be imaginary or dreamlike experiences.

Dr Charles McCreery and I made appeals to the general public for reports of anomalous experiences. As a result of our work, it now appears that such appeals can be expected to produce a substantial number of cases. The cases often had various characteristics in common, which could provide plentiful scope for further research, but we did not see any of this as having any bearing on the question of spiritualistic survival.

We hoped that we had released OBEs as a topic for research from this unrealistic issue. However, the way to our doing further research was blocked by a lack of interest in providing financial support for us to carry it out. (There had all along been hostility to our commencing research in this area, even from members of the SPR.)

After a decade or so, we started to become aware of the previously unknown category of near-death experiences, which began to receive publicity on the television and elsewhere.

For example, a near-death experience was quoted in the Daily Mail recently.

Death was beckoning but I was aware of everything around me. Suddenly, I felt my entire body being sucked up into the white light above. I found myself in a white tunnel — and I knew I had died. Away from the cursing of the medics and the bleeps of the machines, there was a wonderful sense of calm.

But I also became aware of somebody standing a few feet away from me... it was Ruby — wearing her new school uniform and with her hair tied neatly in bunches. She smiled and took my hand. ‘Come with me, Mummy,’ she implored.

At the end stood a gate. I stopped, feeling an urge to walk back down the tunnel, where I was sure my beloved grandmother and other family members who’d passed away would be waiting to greet me.

But little Ruby was insistent. ‘Mummy, step through the gates NOW!’ Her urgency brought me to my senses. I stepped through it and Ruby slammed it shut behind me.

The shock jolted my body — and I am sure it was at this moment that the defibrillator pads being used by the medics shocked my heart back into a rhythm. (Daily Mail, 10 October 2012)

Also recently Professor Colin Blakemore commented in the Daily Telegraph on a book (Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander) about near-death experiences.

... NDEs have taken on a new cloak of respectability with a book by a Harvard doctor. Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, will make your toes wiggle or curl, depending on your prejudices. What’s special about his account of being dead is that he’s a neurosurgeon. ... His, and the multitude of other memories reported by people who have been close to death, have to be seen first through the prism of hard science. The crucial question is not whether such astounding experiences should lead us to abandon materialist accounts of brain function, but whether materialist accounts can possibly explain them. ... Since the lucky survivor can only tell you about them after the event, how can we be sure that these things were perceived and felt at the time that their brains were messed up, rather than being invented afterwards? (Daily Telegraph, 16 November 2012)

And this is what has apparently resulted from our attempts to establish out-of-the-body experiences as a field in which we could carry out further research. The concept of OBEs has been replaced by the new concept of NDEs, and these are seen as only of interest in relation to the question of spiritualist survival.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources.

More on lucid dreams and the BBC

text of a recent letter to an academic

I have just sent you a link to our comments on the BBC’s omission of any mention of me from their history of lucid dreams. This omission is despite the fact that it has always been said that no one has denied my priority in the field of lucid dream research.

Moreover they give a link to Stephen LaBerge’s website, but not to mine. I have got far more information and ideas about what could be done to make real progress in research, and people should want to know about my need for funding to get started on it. Stephen LaBerge, having a salary, research assistants, laboratory facilities, access to college dining facilities, and so on, is in a position to be ‘doing something’ in their eyes, whereas I, who could be making much more progress than he does, with even half as much money as he uses, can only continue to work towards being in a position to get measurements made in a laboratory; so I do not count as ‘doing something’ in the eyes of the BBC or anyone else.

Stephen LaBerge is able to raise money to finance his ideas on ‘virtual reality’, whereas I can get no support at all.

When I met Stephen LaBerge at a conference, he expressed no sympathy with my disastrous situation. By that time he knew that my work on lucid dreams had been motivated by my need to get back into a suitable academic position. There was certainly no indication that this modified his rejoicing at the favourableness of his own position, in which he was well-placed to get money to do (nominal) research in this field which I had opened up, while I could get no money at all and hence could do nothing.

He has continued to publicise the possibilities of lucid dreams ever since, but he has never even had the decency to send me a small fraction of anything he received.

His name is on the list of people who have worked on lucid dreams in America, presumably all salaried, from whom I have requested a donation of £1000 a year each to support my work in my independent academic institution. None of these people have had the decency to send me a small fraction of their salaries, which would have appeared to me natural in the circumstances.

We will make some sort of protest to the BBC, although this is very difficult when our secretarial capacity is already so overloaded.

Another American research worker, Jayne Gackenbach, told me that she had put some money of her own into supporting an organisation of people having lucid dreams, so that they could compare notes and publish a journal. But although she had been prepared to put some of her money into that, she had not been prepared to put even an equivalent amount into supporting the person who had originated this field of research in which she was allegedly working.

I asked Jayne Gackenbach if she could suggest ways in which I could get financial support to carry on my own research. ‘Oh no’, she said, ‘Getting money for research is impossible. I have given up on trying to get any’. She conveniently avoided noticing the great difference between her position and mine, that she had all the advantages of a salaried academic career. Being deprived of this, I needed large-scale funding for research in a specific area, to start making good the lack of money to live on and the lack of an institutional environment to provide the minimum conditions necessary for a tolerable life.

Lucid dreams

My colleague Dr Charles McCreery recently sent the following comment to the BBC in connection with a page about lucid dreaming on their online News Magazine.

I think any article which purports to include even a brief account of the history of scientific research into the phenomenon of lucid dreaming should mention the contribution of Celia Green, whose book Lucid Dreams was first published in 1968. Both Stephen LaBerge and Keith Hearne, whose later contributions are mentioned in the article, have acknowledged in their publications Dr Green’s priority in the field and their indebtedness to her work.

In fact, the subject of lucid dreaming did not exist even as a non-academic field of interest, prior to the publication of Lucid Dreams.

The definitive signal that our work had led to acceptance of two new fields of research as academic subjects was that Oxford University (I gathered) started to list both lucid dreams and out-of-the-body experiences as suitable topics for postgraduate theses, in both Psychology and Lit.Hum.

Professor Jayne Gackenbach, a lucid dream researcher in America, said some years later that Lucid Dreams was still the most referenced work in academic papers on the subject of lucid dreaming.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources. I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

Existential urgency and commercialism

And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness, for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.
And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:
And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?
And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there shall I bestow all my fruits and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry.
But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee; then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?
So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.
And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.
The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.
(Luke 12: 15-23)

Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
(Luke 12: 33-34)

Jesus said:
There was a rich man who had much money. He said: I will use my money that I may sow and reap and plant and fill my storehouses with fruit so that I lack nothing. This was what he thought in his heart. And that night he died. Whoever has ears let him hear.
(Gospel of Thomas, log 63)

Comments

Sayings of this kind are usually taken as being against capitalism, or any kind of commercial activity. The alternative is supposed to be social interactions of a kind favoured by the prevailing religion.

Although my intentions were not obviously commercial, being only to take exams (but as many as possible) and to do research, Mother Mary Angela disapproved of them in a similar way, as being insufficiently people-oriented.

My awareness of the insecurity of finiteness, and the fact that one's life could be terminated at any time by various circumstances over which one would have no control, certainly contributed to my sense of urgency and the need I experienced to get on as fast as possible.

Other people might make plans about how I would not take exams before a certain age, get to university before a certain age, do research before a certain age, and so on, but it seemed to me in no way natural to hang about in a dangerous situation.

So in fact Mother Mary Angela and all concerned were really advocating that I should go in for time-wasting social interactions as if time was no object.

The modern ideology, and human psychology generally, seem to be very much geared against living at all purposefully, or with any sense of urgency. To do so is to behave as if anything one did mattered, or was of any importance, so it is taking oneself too seriously, which is much disapproved of.

The Gnostic form of this parable merely points out (without suggesting any alternative course of action) that all one's plans may come to nothing if one happens to die in the night, so it can really be seen as an incitement to urgency, in the way that I thought my plans for taking exams might be aborted by death or other adverse circumstances, so I had better waste no time with getting on with them as fast as possible.

The concept of moth-free treasure does occur in Thomas, but not as an alternative to commercial planning. It is the pearl of great price, which is worth more than anything else; but one might note that it is bought, and that it is a merchant who buys it.

Jesus said:
The Kingdom of the Father is like a man, a merchant, who possessed merchandise and found a pearl. That merchant was prudent. He sold the merchandise, he bought the one pearl for himself.
Do you also seek for the treasure which fails not, which endures, there where no moth comes near to devour and where no worm destroys.
(ibid., log 76)

Out-of-the-body experiences

Some recent articles about out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) in the Daily Mail demonstrate the usual confusions about the topic. Research allegedly shows that these experiences are not (A) ‘paranormal’, or evidence for survival, but (B) associated with brain malfunction. This simple dichotomy is supposed to cover all possibilities, and – the presumption seems to be – once we have satisfied ourselves that it is indeed a brain malfunction, by narrowing it down to a particular area of the brain or a particular brain process, we can stop regarding it as a question to be resolved by research, and relegate it to the realm of minor curiosities.

There has always been tremendous resistance to the concept of out-of-the-body experiences, so much so that before Dr Charles McCreery and I started to work on them in 1964, they were not accepted either by the Society of Psychical Research, who were supposedly ‘interested’ in experiences beyond the normal range, nor by the academic world outside of the SPR, which was already firmly reductionist.

It is therefore not surprising that the fear of any progress in the scientific understanding of them continues in the form of attempts to dismiss them as ‘imaginary’ in the sense of by-products of brain malfunction. Before we made our first appeals for cases, senior academics associated with the SPR told us that we should not do so; we would be destroying our academic reputations and branding ourselves as spiritualists. OBEs were, they asserted, imaginary.

Now that our first appeals have been followed up by other appeals, and OBEs have had to be accepted as an acceptable topic for academic theses and for work in laboratories by persons with salaried academic appointments, correlations with neurological events are seen as ways of restoring OBEs to the ‘imaginary’ category, which, as before, means ‘of no interest for further research’.

When my colleagues and I published our pioneering study on OBEs in 1968 (the first scientific examination of the topic) we looked at the detailed phenomenology of the experience, i.e. its subjective features, without trying to correlate it with some set of physical conditions, anomalous or otherwise. This was largely because of lack of funding, and absence of an institutional environment – if we had had both, we certainly would have looked first at the electrophysiological correlates. However anomalous or ‘pathological’ OBEs might be, their interest to us was not in classifying them as ‘pathologies’, but as shedding light on normal processes such as perception and consciousness, which could be done only by considering psychological and physiological correlations.

Four decades on, in spite of much ostensible research into these and other phenomena by people other than ourselves, to which we were prevented from contributing by a rigorous lack of financial support, understanding of neither OBEs, nor the normal processes I have mentioned, has advanced much. Merely being able to point out parts of the brain which may be involved does not get one very far.

Grasping the mechanics of waking vs sleeping consciousness, or of the top-down, hypothesis-forming processes of perception, calls for models of a kind which we are no nearer to having than we were forty years ago. Not surprising, given the continuing obsession with exclusively physicalist methods and explanations: those which refer only to things that can be directly measured with the apparatus of physics and chemistry. (I mean in contrast to explanations that involve analyses of subjective mental states.)

Many researchers have looked at OBEs, since our original study, in the attempt to explain them away. None have been able to provide a conclusive account – such as that they are always caused by lack of oxygen, or by failure of a particular cortical structure. None of them seem to have appreciated the more important feature of the phenomenon, namely their potential role in the elucidation of normal mental processes. It seems likely that this will continue to be the case.

Having placed the phenomenon of OBEs on a scientific footing, we should have been provided with finance to take the work further, leading to the possibility of important advances in our understanding of conscious experience and its relation to brain physiology. As we did not have an institutional environment with residential and laboratory facilities, we need funding to set this up in the first instance. Such funding should still be provided now, even more urgently, to prevent the continuing waste of our abilities which could and should be being used in making significant advances. This would be true even if people other than ourselves had shown any sign of adopting a sufficiently analytical and open-minded approach. In fact they have not. The resistance to the possibilities suggested by the phenomena, which had prevented their being recognised by academia before our book on them was published, continues to restrict and distort the work carried out, and the unsatisfactory conclusions drawn from it.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide support both for fund-raising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Modern theories of intelligence

It is difficult to believe how completely what was formerly accepted about IQ has been rejected and replaced by an entirely different set of assumptions.

The people who were positive factors in my early life were no doubt familiar with the view of general ability which was expressed at the time, and with which I was familiar myself from my father's educational books and general conversation. The g factor (g for general) was of predominant importance. If your g factor was high enough you could do anything, that is, the idea was widely accepted that ability was transferable from one area to another. If a person showed very great ability in some area, one might expect them to excel in others. This corresponded to what I observed in my own case. I could see that the mental functions that went into picking up any new subject quickly were much the same. When I got a distinction mark in Further Maths in 3½ days, I thought I was showing that I could also pick up to a high level any subject which I had not previously studied very quickly, so I should not be prevented from taking exams in chemistry, physics, languages or anything else just because I had not been studying them previously.

So, of course, when I started to make breakthroughs in topics formerly associated with parapsychology as soon as I started to know anything about the phenomena involved, I thought I was demonstrating clearly enough that I should not be prevented from entering an academic career in any subject, whether or not I had a paper qualification in it, and whether or not I had prior knowledge of it. Which I probably had not, because what went on in most areas at Oxford was rubbish which one would not want to know much about unless it contributed to some specific purpose, such as passing an exam (i.e. obtaining a qualification for social purposes), or teaching and writing papers in a salaried university career.

The idea that ability shown in one area was indicative of underlying ability which would be likely to show itself in another was, however, far more prevalent when I was very young than it is now. When I was at Oxford and afterwards, any relative success in a particular area was regarded as evidence of some peculiar kind of ‘interest’ in it, which was not supposed to require being set up to carry out well-financed research in it.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources. I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

The human psychosis

Extract from Advice to Clever Children

The human psychosis is extremely simple. Hatred of reality (originally caused, it is to be supposed, by a traumatic experience or experiences of objective impotence) has become displaced onto other human beings. This state of affairs is expressed by attitudes of indifference to reality and of interest in human society. The latter interest is usually rationalised as altruism.

The other day I was talking to a human being. I said: 'No one is interested in reality.' He said, 'Well, reality, what's that? Nothing exciting. That chair, this carpet.' 'There is the uni­verse out there,' I said. 'Well, what's the universe?' he said. 'Some stars. Some of them we know about, some of them we don't. Well, what about it?'

It is instructive to observe that this particularly overt case of the human psychosis was in full agreement with John Robinson* that God was something you found deep down in human relationships.

He (the human being) could also be made to assert that any reality human beings did not know about was unimportant, in fact unreal, because human beings did not know about it.

To complete this cameo of the human psychosis it is only necessary to observe that a study of this person's human relationships would undoubtedly have revealed a continuous indulgence in concealed sadism.

(I use the word 'sadism' for convenience, because there is no other – unless perhaps Schadenfreude – to express a psychological tendency to derive pleasure or gratification from damage done to other people, or suffering experienced by them. I do not, however, mean to imply that I suppose the pleasure or gratification involved to be sexual in origin.)

* author of Honest to God

Reflections on maths and autism

Copy of a letter to an academic

One of the last times I saw you I remember saying that ____ who got a First in maths was very unaware of her social surroundings, calling herself asocial, and that I supposed this was necessary to get a First in maths. You seemed to be indicating agreement with this idea, so I wondered if I had supported an implication which I did not intend. Actually I meant that people needed very specific psychological insulation to do abstract intellectual activities, particularly maths, successfully in the social environment of the modern ‘educational’ system, because that system is so inimical to high IQ. I think, in general, that doing anything in that context of social hostility is by no means the same thing as doing it in other contexts.

I know there is a wish to associate ‘abstract’ intellectual activities requiring a high IQ, such as maths and theoretical physics, with autism and introversion. I have seen this explained as due to a habituated concentration of emotional energy towards abstractions, at the (supposedly unnatural and unhealthy) expense of extraverted social interactions.

It is not that individuals with an exceptional aptitude for high-IQ activities are any more incapable of dealing with other people than anyone else, but that it is difficult (if not impossible) to be sufficiently focused on such activities to be able to do them well, while simultaneously having to maintain awareness of the complex conventions and other intricacies of ‘successful’ social interaction. This, I suspect, is realised by those hostile to high IQ and exploited, both to make life difficult for individuals with a strong drive to do intellectual things, and to belittle them as ‘socially inadequate’ or (in more recent lingo) ‘autistic’.

I saw at the Woodford County High School that the psychological hostility of the teachers and headmistress was directed at all and sundry. Not only at me but at anyone who wished to work harder in order to improve their performance in some area.

Everyone was to be made to feel inadequate, out of control, and at the mercy of the judgements of their ability, which were hinted at critically by the teachers. Apart, that is, from one girl with a moderately high but unthreatening IQ (130-140) who constantly demonstrated her total devotion to doing the right thing on social terms.

There are many similar examples of ideology on which critical analyses could be being published by Oxford Forum if it were provided with adequate funding to do so. Meanwhile, ideas such as the supposed link between high IQ and autism are likely to receive further reinforcement from pseudo-research published by the universities.

In the psychiatrist's chair

Why are people hostile to us?

It appears that social approval is very important to people. When they see someone aiming to do something without social approval, even something perfectly legal and respectable, because he or she has not given up on what they originally wanted to do, it makes them angry. Why is this? Is it because it reminds them that at some time in their lives they gave up on something important to them, perhaps gave up their original ideals and aspirations, lowered their standards and became uncritical of socially approved goings-on, in order to go with the flow and take advantage of the reduced and rather mouldy pickings that were on offer?

Perhaps so, and perhaps it is so even when people have no conscious awareness of having done this.

We here are trying to build up an institutional environment in order eventually to fulfil the same functions as intellectual writers and researchers (in the sense of heads of research departments) as we should have been able to fulfil within the context of the recognised universities, but found ourselves blocked in working towards doing so.

When people see us doing this it evidently arouses no sympathy or inclination to help us move even a little faster towards our goals. Rather, it arouses anger and energetic opposition. Perhaps this is because it reminds them of the aims and aspirations that they have themselves given up. Probably they have a predominant underlying anger, resentment, and sense of loss; some very obviously so. If people are reminded of what they have given up, the anger is aroused, but it is directed against individuals who have not given up, and practically never against the society that has ruined their lives, or the agents of that society who made things difficult for them at crucial times in their lives.

Comments on modern psychology – comparison of Princess Diana with the Queen Mother (continued)

To make the obvious explicit in the case of Princess Diana contrasted with the Queen Mother, the reason I say I find modern psychology incomprehensible is that I can quite easily imagine myself behaving as the Queen Mother did, and never giving away anything that the royal family would not consider it to be in their interests to have given away. But I cannot imagine at all the psychological events that went into Diana's very damaging public discussion of Prince Charles, to whom she was married. And yet I suppose a lot of people can imagine this, since such betrayals of confidence appear to go on all the time in modern society, at all social levels, so I suppose that there is no longer any such thing as a concept of something being in confidence between individuals.

From the television dramas one gathers that it is considered interesting and attractive to promise not to give something away, and then to do so, which shows there is an awareness that you do not have to keep your word, although you may have led someone to believe (more fools they) that they can rely on you to do so.

When people do insist on not giving away information about someone, this is virtually always portrayed as misguided. They are covering up for a criminal or pervert in withholding information from police or doctors, setting other people at risk and preventing the criminal or pervert from getting the punishment he deserves or the "help" which he needs.

Cases almost never occur in the television dramas in which an individual is protected by discretion from wrongful persecution by agents of the collective.

I say "almost" never because there was a case recently in which a policeman threw away a cassette which might have incriminated someone. But the "someone" was a doctor, hence "good". The crime of which the doctor might have been convicted was (so far as I could gather from a very inattentive observation of the unattractive episode) that of assisting a suicide in framing someone on whom he wished to take revenge, so that they would be supposed to have murdered him when he was found dead.

Anger and stress

A note on ‘anger’

If a person is angry at the way they have been treated by society (schools, hospitals, etc) this is regarded as demonstrating the weakness of their position. For example, when I have given some account of the damaging ways in which I have been treated, as an explanation of how I could have been forced into my present quite unacceptable and unsuitable situation, people are very liable to tell me that I sound angry, which is apparently automatically pejorative, as there is no concept of justified anger for someone like me. Then they are liable to tell me that I am wasting my time by being angry at my position and by continuing to try to get back into a realistic social role. ‘Life isn’t long enough’, they say, with would-be sympathy, but when it is clear that they have not succeeded in influencing me to change or conceal my real viewpoint, their ‘sympathy’ quickly turns to outright anger.

This is a curious paradox. Anger on the part of an individual victim is contemptible and seen as an invitation to intrude into his life to ‘help’ or ‘counsel’ him. On the other hand, an individual who complains of maltreatment at the hands of agents of the collective, and who does not give up on attempting to remedy his position, arouses an unconcealed (and often quite frenzied) rage in all right-thinking persons, and this sort of anger is regarded as perfectly healthy.

I have already written about some of the situations which aroused anger after I was thrown out at the age of 21. The overt anger that has surrounded me in adult life sheds light on the anger that always stormed around me at school and at Somerville, although then the anger was ostensibly focused on my father, thus destroying his health at the same time as destroying my career prospects.

‘Experts’ hold forth on stress

Salaried academics have been holding forth on ‘stress’ (among all sorts of other rubbishy things) in the papers, in which they are described as ‘experts’.

‘Stress is an engineering term to describe the force brought to bear on an object. Now it’s being applied to any human emotion to frighten people witless and sell them therapy and products,’ says Angela Patmore ... a former research fellow investigating stress at the University of East Anglia ... ‘For the more unscrupulous members of the stress industry, this is mission accomplished: the industry creates the condition, then sells “calmdowns” to cure it.’

Professor Stephen Bloom, an expert in stress at Imperial College [says] ‘Perhaps because of the nanny state we have an inability to face our problems, and too much time to dwell on them ... Maybe we’re not stressed at all.’ (Daily Mail 12 May 2009, ‘Stress is good for you’ by Marianne Power.)

Funding continues to be rigorously denied to all departments of my unrecognised but genuine university which might make some real contribution to understanding, if only by publishing critical analyses of the fatuous ‘studies’ being produced by socially accredited ‘universities’.

No one will work for us because, once they know that I do not regard the way society treats me and has treated me as in any way acceptable, they become too angry at my still trying to make something of my life and needing help in doing so. ‘Move on!’ they shout, as they leave the house.

Outliers

Another book (Outliers – The story of success by Malcolm Gladwell) has been published on how there is no such thing as genius or ‘a born scientist’, supposedly proved by the fact that the Beatles put in a lot of time performing and star hockey players practise a lot. This book is receiving a lot of critical attention, far more so than any of our books ever do. Our books are always as far as possible suppressed and ignored.

On a very unpleasant TV police drama series about a serial killer, of which I watched only a few fragments as it was so unpleasant, I saw a father being interviewed about his daughter who had been murdered. The father was saying that his daughter had been ‘very focussed’ on her studies and believed in working hard so as to have no difficulties in later life. This was evidently regarded as indicative of wicked attitudes on the part of the father, and putting him in line to be suspected of murdering her.

I am afraid that when I was at school and until his health broke down, my father played into the hands of my enemies in the local educational community in this sort of way. I was always very angry at him discussing me with people behind my back if I knew about it. I thought that both my father and any educational expert should seek my permission before saying anything that was supposed to be representing my interests, and ascertain that I accepted their views as doing so. In fact I did not trust my father nor anyone he might talk to about me to represent my interests at all. I think my father was wrong to be drawn into discussing me behind my back, or even in my presence, but I blame the wicked agents of the collective far more than I blame him for allowing them to influence him against me.

At a recent seminar I said to a fairly young ‘psychologist’ that there used to be this theory about ambition and a desire to get on in young people being the result of ‘pushy’ parents, and he said this idea was still held and it was certainly true, according to his own observations, of every young person he had ever known.

I do not know of any case in which I would be so confident as that of being able to identify the causes of someone’s attitudes.

In the same police drama, discussing a girl who had been murdered who was said to have taken a cheap method of transport, the investigator asked, ‘Why did she do that?’
‘So as to save money’,
‘Why would she want to save money? She did not have a family.’

When I went to the Society for Psychical Research after being thrown out (thrown out of academia and hence, in fact, out of organised society) I saw that saving money was the only thing I could do to help myself, and I worked on it every day. Could I add a few extra shillings to my capital at the end of the day? From then until now, increasing my capital, however slightly, by saving out of negligible income has remained the centre of my life. Saving money is not acceptable, as I discovered, and no one was prepared to make concessions for the fact that, needing the best sort of university career as badly as I did, and deprived of all normal means of progressing towards a tolerable life, I had to start building up capital towards the cost of setting up an independent university for myself, with at least one residential college with dining facilities, at least one research department, and a university press for publishing books.

Within four years of leaving college I had saved £2,000; I could not conceal this from W.H. Salter and Sir George Joy when they were ostensibly supporting me in making plans for setting up my first mini research department cum residential college in the Coombe-Tennant house. It aroused shock and disapproval, even in Salter, who had lived off a private income all his life, and from then on everyone united in attempts to squeeze me to death and force me to sell the small house in Kingston Road, Oxford, which was the first house I bought.

So when I announced to Sir George that I had bought the freehold of a larger house in Banbury Road, that was the end of decades of building up capital by saving, against opposition which took the form of trying to squeeze me to death.

It was, and still is, very like a siege. No supplies or relief of any kind are allowed to reach the beleaguered garrison.