The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (42 page)

At about the time Freud was studying under Charcot in Paris, an American newspaper editor named Thomson Jay Hudson was also puzzling over the mystery of hypnosis. Hudson had attended a hypnotic performance by the eminent physiologist William B. Carpenter in Washington, D.C., and what he saw amazed him. Carpenter placed a young college graduate under hypnosis and asked him if he would like to meet Socrates. The young man objected that Socrates was dead, and Carpenter told him that he had the power to evoke the spirit of Socrates. Then he pointed to a corner of the room and exclaimed, “There he is”. The young man – whom Hudson called C. – looked awestruck. Carpenter then urged C. to enter into conversation with Socrates and ask
him any question he liked – mentioning that, since the audience could not hear Socrates, C. would have to repeat his replies aloud. For the next two hours the audience witnessed an incredible conversation, in which the replies of Socrates seemed so brilliant and plausible that some of the audience – who were interested in Spiritualism – were inclined to believe that Socrates was actually there.

After this Carpenter introduced C. to the spirits of various modern philosophers, and more brilliant and plausible conversations followed. These were quite different from one another and from the conversation with Socrates – although they usually had nothing whatever in common with the ideas of the philosophers under interrogation. Finally, to convince the audience that they were not listening to the words of spirits, Carpenter summoned a philosophic pig, which discoursed learnedly on Hinduism.

What impressed Hudson was that C. was obviously of fairly average intelligence, whereas the answers of the philosophers were close to genius level. Obviously, C.’s “unconscious mind” – or whatever it was – was far cleverer than
he
was. And as Hudson studied similar cases he came to the conclusion that we possess two minds – what he called the “objective mind”, which copes with everyday reality, and the “subjective mind”, which can become totally absorbed in an
inner
world. C. only became a man of genius under hypnosis, when the operations of his objective mind, like those of his body, were suspended. Then the subjective mind could operate freely. In other words, the objective mind serves as a kind of anchor, or ball-and-chain, on the subjective mind. But men of great genius, Hudson concluded, have an odd faculty for allowing the two to work in harmony – like children. He cited the case of an American orator, Henry Clay, who was once called upon to answer an opponent in the Senate when he was ill. He asked the friend sitting next to him to tug on his coattails when he had been speaking for ten minutes. Two hours later he sank down exhausted – then looked at the clock and asked his friend why he had failed to interrupt. The friend explained that he had not only tugged at Clay’s coattails, he had pinched him repeatedly and even jabbed a pin into his leg. Clay had remained totally oblivious to all this. It would seem that Clay was in the same trancelike state as the child watching television with his thumb in his mouth, and that it was, in fact, a kind of hypnosis.

The theory that Hudson developed in his book
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
(1893) is that the “subjective mind” has virtually miraculous powers. All men of genius – particularly those whose talent seems to burst forth like a wellspring, such as Shakespeare and Mozart – are able
to tune in at will to the enormous powers of the subjective mind. The miracles of Jesus, and of various saints, were simply manifestations of the same mysterious power.

Hudson himself became convinced that he could also perform miracles of healing with the aid of the subjective mind and decided to try to cure a relative of severe rheumatism that had almost killed him. The man lived a thousand miles away. Hudson decided that the best time to send “healing suggestions” was on the edge of sleep, when the “objective mind” is passive – exactly as in hypnosis. On 15 May 1890, he told a number of friends that he meant to start the experiment. A few months later one of the friends met the invalid and found that he was well again; the attacks had ceased and he was working normally. Asked when the attacks ceased, he said, “About mid-May” – exactly when Hudson had started his “experiments”.

Hudson claimed that he went on to cure about five hundred people in the same way. He failed in only two cases and these – oddly enough – were patients who had been told that he intended to try to cure them.

This, Hudson believed, underlined another peculiarity of the subjective mind: its powers have to work
spontaneously
, without self-consciousness. As soon as it becomes self-conscious, it freezes up, like the hand of a schoolboy when the teacher looks over his shoulder as he is writing. This also explains why so many “psychics” fail when they are tested by skeptics. It is like trying to make love in a crowded public square.

Because we have two minds, our powers tend to interfere with one another. In the 1870s a stage hypnotist named Carl Hansen loved to demonstrate a spectacular trick; he would tell the hypnotized subject that he (the subject) was about to become as rigid as a board. The subject was then placed across two chairs, with his head on one and his heels on the other, and several people would sit or stand on his stomach; he never bent in the middle. What happened was that the objective mind had been put to sleep, and the hypnotist then
took over the role of the objective mind
. Normally, “you” tell your body to stand up or sit down. But “you” are often negative or tired or unsure of yourself, so your “orders” are given in a hesitant voice. We are undermined by self-doubt. The hypnotist delivers his orders like a sergeant major, and this has the effect of unlocking the powers of the subjective mind. It obviously follows that if
you
could learn to give orders with the same assurance, you would also be capable of “miraculous” feats.

But in that case, why aren’t self-confident people capable of miraculous feats? Because they have developed the objective mind, the
conscious “self” that copes with reality, rather than the subjective mind. Genius – and miracles – is about
contact
between the two minds.

Hudson was also certain that all so-called psychic phenomena are due to the powers of the subjective mind. He attended a séance at which a pencil wrote of its own accord on a slate, delivering messages that were relevant to Hudson and to the other “sitter”, a general. Yet when thinking it over later, Hudson concluded that nothing was written that could not have emanated from the mind of the medium, if the medium had telepathic powers. He decided that the medium had – unconsciously – read the mind of his sitters and then used the miraculous powers of his own subjective mind to make the pencil write on the slate. And if
that
was possible, Hudson argued, then all psychical phenomena, including ghosts and poltergeists, could be explained in the same way. In fact, Hudson was ahead of his time. It would be several years before psychical researchers came to the conclusion that poltergeists are due to the unconscious minds of disturbed adolescents.

Here it could be argued that Hudson was carried away by his own brilliant insights into the powers of the subjective mind. I have argued elsewhere that the evidence for “spirits” cannot be so easily dismissed. In fact, he was quite definitely wrong when he came to deal with the curious power known as
psychometry
, the ability of certain people to “read” the history of an object they hold in their hands. Some of the most remarkable tests in the history of psychical research were carried out by a professor of geology named William Denton. He would wrap geological and archaeological specimens in thick brown paper packages, shuffle them until he no longer knew which was which, then get his “psychometrists” – his wife and sister-in-law – to describe the contents and history of packages chosen at random. Their accuracy was amazing – for example, a fragment of volcanic lava from Pompeii produced an accurate description of the eruption, while a fragment of tile from a Roman villa produced a description of Roman legions and a man who looked like a retired soldier. However, this latter experiment worried Denton, because the tile came from the villa of the orator Cicero, who was tall and thin, and the “soldier” was described as heavily built. It was only some years later, after publishing his first account, that Denton learned that the villa had also belonged to the Roman dictator Sulla, who
did
correspond accurately to the description.

But all this leaves Hudson’s central insight untouched: that man has two minds and it is because of these two minds impede each other instead of supporting each other that our powers are so limited. His
basic proposition is that if we could learn to tap the powers of the subjective mind, we would develop into supermen.

Hudson’s book became a bestseller and went into edition after edition between 1893 and Hudson’s death in 1903. Why, then, did its remarkable new theory not make a far greater impact? The reason can be summarized in a single word: Freud. The objective and subjective minds obviously correspond roughly to Freud’s ego and id – or conscious and unconscious. But there is a major difference. Freud was a pessimist who saw the unconscious mind as a
passive
force, a kind of basement full of decaying rubbish that causes disease – or neurosis. The conscious mind is the victim of these unconscious forces, which are basically sexual in nature. Hudson would have been horrified at such a gloomy and negative view of the subjective mind. But because Freud was a “scientist” and Hudson was merely a retired newspaper editor, the latter’s achievement was ignored by psychologists.

Yet the “two minds” theory was to receive powerful scientific backing a few decades later. Even in the nineteenth century it had been recognized that the two halves of our brains have different functions. The speech function resides in the left half of the brain; doctors observed that people with left-brain damage became inarticulate. The right side of the brain controls recognition of shapes and patterns, so that an artist who had right-brain damage would lose all artistic talent. One man could not even draw a clover leaf; he put the three leaves of the clover side by side, on the same level.

Yet an artist with left-brain damage only became inarticulate; he was still as good an artist as ever. And an orator with right- brain damage could sound as eloquent as ever, even though he could not draw a clover leaf.

The left brain also governs logic and reason, which are involved in such tasks as adding up a laundry list or doing a crossword puzzle. The right is involved in such activities as musical appreciation or facial recognition. In short, you could say that the left is a scientist and the right is an artist.

One of the odd facts of human physiology is that the left side of the body is controlled by the right side of the brain, and vice versa. No one quite knows why this is, except that it probably makes for greater integration. If the left brain controlled the left side and the right brain the right side, there might be “frontier disputes”; as it is, each has a foot firmly in the other’s territory.

If you removed the top of your head, the upper part of your brain – the cerebral hemispheres – would look like a walnut with a kind of
bridge connecting the two halves. This bridge is a knot of nerves called the
corpus callosum
, or commissure. But doctors learned that there are some freaks who possess no commissure yet seem to function perfectly well. This led them to wonder if they could prevent epileptic attacks by severing the commissure. They tried it on epileptics and it seemed to work. The fits were greatly reduced, and the patients seemed to be unchanged. It led the doctors to wonder what the function of the commissure was. Someone suggested it might be to transmit epileptic seizures; another suggested it might be to keep the brain from sagging in the middle.

In the 1950s experiments in America began to shed a good deal of light on the problem. Someone noticed that if a “split-brain” patient knocked against a table with his left side, he didn’t seem to notice. It began to emerge that the split-brain operation had the effect of preventing one half of the brain from learning what the other half knew. If a cat was taught a trick with one eye covered, then asked to do it with the other eye covered, it was baffled. It became clear that we literally have two brains.
¹⁰

Moreover, if a split-brain patient was shown an apple with the left eye and an orange with the right, then asked what he had just seen, he would reply, “Orange”. Asked to write what he had just seen with his left hand, he would write
Apple
. A split-brain patient who was shown a dirty picture with her right brain blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied truthfully, “I don’t know”. The person who was doing the blushing was the one who lived in the right half of her brain.
She
lived in the left half.

This is true of all of us (except left-handed individuals, whose brain hemispheres are reversed). The person you call “you” lives in the left half – the half that “copes” with the real world. The person who lives in the right is a stranger.

You might object that you and I are not split-brain patients. That makes no difference. Mozart once remarked that tunes were always walking into his head fully fledged, and all he had to do was write them down. Where did they come
from
? Obviously, from the right half of his brain, the “artist”. Where did they
go to
? To the left half of his brain,
where Mozart lived. In other words, Mozart was a split-brain patient. And if Mozart was, then so are the rest of us. The person we call “I” is the scientist. The “artist” lives in the shadows, and we are scarcely aware of his existence, except in moods of deep relaxation or of “inspiration”. We all become more “right brain”, for example, after an alcoholic drink; it makes us more aware of our “other half”. It does this, to some extent, by anesthetizing the left brain (which explains why you find it harder to do a mathematical problem when you have had a few glasses of wine). This is why alcohol is so popular. The same – unfortunately – applies to other drugs.