Psychology and Social Sanity

by Hugo Münsterberg

We find the same lack of seeing or hearing or feeling in many cases of hypnotism. But it is not necessary to go to such extreme happenings. All of us can remember experiences when impressions reached our eyes or ears and yet were not noticed at the time, although they guided our actions. We may have been on the street in deep thought or in an interesting conversation so that we were not giving any attention whatever to the way, and yet every step was taken correctly under the guidance of our eyes. We saw the street, although we were not conscious of seeing it. We do not hear a clock ticking in our room when we are working, and yet if the clock suddenly stops we notice it. This indicates that the ticking of the clock reached us somehow and had an effect on us in spite of our not being conscious of it. The scientists are still debating whether it is best to say that these not conscious processes are going on in our subconscious mind or whether they are simply brain processes. For all practical purposes, this makes no difference. We may say that our brain gets an impression through our eyes when we see the street, or through our ears when we hear the clock, or we may say that our subconscious mind receives these messages of eye and ear. In neither case does the scientist find anything mysterious or supernatural.

I am convinced that all the experiences with Beulah Miller may ultimately be understood through those two principles. She has unusual gifts and her performances are extremely interesting, but I think everything can be explained through her subconscious noticing of unintended signs. Where no signs are given which reach her senses, she cannot read any one's mind. But the signs which she receives are not noticed by her consciously. She is not really aware of them; they go to her brain or to her subconscious mind and work from there on her conscious mind.

What speaks in favour of such a skeptical view? I mention at first one fact which was absolutely proved by my experiments—namely, that Beulah Miller's successes turn into complete failures as soon as neither the mother nor the sister is present in the room. All the experiments which I have conducted in which I alone, or I together with the minister and the judge, thought of words or cards or letters or numbers did not yield better results than any one would get by mere guessing. In one series, for instance, in which we all three made the greatest effort to concentrate our minds on written figures, she knew the first number correctly only in two out of fourteen cases. In another series of twelve letters she did not know a single one at the first trial. Sometimes when she showed splendid results with her sister Gladys present, everything stopped the very moment the sister left the room. Sometimes Beulah knew the first half of a word while Gladys stood still in the same room, and could not get the second half of the word when Gladys in the meantime had stepped from the little parlour to the kitchen. Beulah was helpless even when a wooden door was between her and the member of her family. She herself did not know that it made such a difference, but the records leave no doubt. I may at once add here another argument. The good results stop entirely when Beulah is blindfolded. Even when both her mother and sister were sitting quite near her, her mind-reading became pure guesswork when her eyes were covered with a scarf. Again, she liked to make the experiment under this condition and was not aware that her knowledge failed her when she did not see her mother or sister. Her delight in being blindfolded spoke very clearly for her naïve sincerity, but her failure indicated no less clearly that she must be dependent upon unintentional signs for her success.

Let me say at once that some of the observers would probably object to my statement that the presence of the family was needed and that she had to be in such direct connection with them. The newspapers told wonderful stories of her success with strangers, and even the judge and the minister felt certain that they had seen splendid results under most difficult conditions. Yet I have to stick to what I observed myself. It may be objected—and it is well known that this is the pet objection of the spiritualists against the criticism of scholars—that the results come well only when the child is in full sympathy with those present and that I may have disturbed her. But this was not the case. I evidently did not disturb her, inasmuch as we saw that the experiments which I made with her when the sister or the mother was present were most satisfactory. Moreover, she was evidently very much at ease with me when we had become more acquainted, and just those entirely negative results were mostly received on a morning when I had fulfilled the dearest wishes of the two children, a watch for the one and a ring for the other, besides all the candy with which my pockets were regularly stuffed. She was in the happiest frame of mind and most willing to do her best. But if I rely exclusively on my own observation, it is not only because I suppose that the experiments yielded just as good results as those of other observers. It is rather because I know how difficult it is to give reliable accounts from mere memory and to make experiments without long training in experimental methods. All those publicly reported experiments had been made without any actual exact records, and, moreover, by persons who overlooked the most evident sources of error. As a matter of course, I took notes of everything which happened, and treated the case with the same carefulness with which I am accustomed to carry on the experiments in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.

To give some illustrations of sources of error, I may mention that the earlier observers were convinced that Beulah could not see slight movements of the persons in the room when she was looking fixedly at the ceiling, or that she could not notice the movements of the sister or the mother when she was staring straight into the eyes of the experimenter. Any psychologist, on the contrary, would say that that would be a most favourable condition for watching small signs. He knows that while we fixate a point with the centre of our eye we are most sensitive to slight movement impressions on the side parts of our eye, and that this sensitiveness is often abnormally heightened. Just when the child is looking steadily into our face or to the ceiling, the outside parts of her sensitive retina may bring to her the visible unintentional signs from her sister or mother. The untrained observer is also usually unaware how easily he helps by suggestive movements or utterances to the other observers. When Beulah gave a six instead of a nine, one of our friends whispered that she may have seen it upside down in her mind, or when she gave a zero instead of a six that it looked similar. In short, they keep helping without knowing it. Very characteristic is the habit of unintentionally using phrases which begin with the letters of which they are thinking. The letter in their minds forces them to speak words which begin with it. If they start at a C, we hear “Come, Beulah,” if at a T, “Try, Beulah,” if at an S, “See, Beulah.” It is very hard to protect ourselves against such unintended and unnoticed helps. It is still more difficult to keep the failures in mind. The eager expectancy of hearing the right letter or number from the lips of the child gives such a strong emphasis to the right results that the wrong ones slip from the mind of the hearer. The right figure may be only the third or the fourth guess of the child, but if then the whole admiring chorus around say emphatically at this fourth trial that this is quite right, those three wrong efforts which preceded fade away from the memory. I may acknowledge for myself that I was mostly inclined to believe that the number of the correct answers had been greater than they actually were according to my exact records. For all these reasons I had the very best right to disregard the reports of all those who relied on their amateur art of experimenting and on their mere memory account.

What kind of signs could be in question? It may seem to outsiders that the most wonderful system of signs would be needed for every content of one mind to be communicated to another. But here again we must first reduce the exaggerated claims to the simpler reality. When Beulah makes card experiments, the whole words jack, queen, king, spade, club, heart, diamond, come to her mind, but when she makes word experiments, never under any circumstances does a real word come to her consciousness, but only single letters. Why is this? If king and queen can be transmitted from mind to mind, why not dog and cat? Yet when the mother thinks of dog, it is always only first D, and after a while O, and finally G which creeps into her mind. This difference seems to me most characteristic, because it indicates very clearly that the whole performance is possible only when the communicated content belongs to a small list which can be easily counted. There are only three face cards, only four suites, only ten numbers, and only twenty-six letters, but there are ten thousand words and more. It is easy to connect every one of the ten numbers or every one of the twenty-six letters with a particular sign, but it would be impossible to have a sign for every one of the ten thousand words. Yet if we had to do with real mind-reading, it ought to make no difference whether we transmit the letter D or the word dog. This fact that she can recognize words only by slow spelling, while the faces and the suites of the cards and the names of the numbers come as full words, seems to me to point most clearly to the whole key of the situation. Anything which cannot be brought into such a simple number series, for instance, a colour impression, can never be transmitted. If the mother looks at the ace of diamonds, Beulah says that she sees the red of the diamond before her in her mind, but if the mother looks at the picture of a blue lake, this blue impression can never arise in Beulah's mind, but only the letters B-L-U-E.

Moreover, I observed that for Beulah the letters of the alphabet were indeed connected with numbers, as in seeking a letter she has a habit of going through the alphabet and at the same time moving one finger after another. Thus she feels each letter as having a definite place in her series of finger movements, and the finger movements themselves are often counted by her, so that each letter is finally connected with a special number. This, indeed, reduces the situation to rather a simple scheme. She succeeds only if her mother or sister is present and if her eyes are open, and she succeeds only with material which can be easily counted. A very short system of simple signs would thus be entirely sufficient to communicate everything which her mind-reading brings to her. As to the particular signs, I do not yet feel sure. It would probably take months of careful examination before I should find them out, just as in Germany it has taken months for scholars to discover the unintentional signs which the owner of a trick horse made, from which the horse was apparently able to calculate. I have no time to carry on such an investigation in this case, the more as I do not see that any new insight could be gained by it.

Once I noticed distinctly how in the card experiments the mother without her own knowledge made seven movements with her foot when she thought of the figure seven. That gave me the idea that the signs might be given by very slight knocking on the floor which Beulah's oversensitive skin might notice. What speaks against such a view is that the results stop when she is blindfolded. Yet in this connection I may mention another aspect. It is quite possible that the covering of her eyes may destroy her power, and that nevertheless she may receive her signs chiefly not through the eyes, but through touch and ear. It may be that she needs her eyes open because the seeing of the members of the family may heighten by a kind of autosuggestion her sensitiveness for the perception of the slight signs. I have no doubt that this kind of autosuggestion plays a large rôle in her mind. She can read a card much better when she is allowed to touch with her fingers the rear of the card. She herself believes that she receives the knowledge through her finger tips. In reality it is, of course, a stimulus by which she becomes more suggestible and by which accordingly her sensitiveness to the slight signs which her mother and sister give her becomes increased. We must, however, never forget that these signs, whatever they may be, are not only unintentional on the part of her family, but also not consciously perceived by Beulah. If she stares at the ceiling, and her mother, without knowing it, makes seven slight foot movements, Beulah gets through the side parts of her eye a nerve impression, but she does not think of the foot. This nerve impression, as we saw, works on the subconscious mind, or on the brain, and the idea of seven then arises in her conscious mind like a picture which she can see.

Such a system of signs, completely unknown to those who give them and to her who receives them, cannot have been built up in a short while. But we heard how it originated. At first Beulah recognized the queen in the hands of her sister and mother, when they were playing “Old Maid.” There are many who have so much power to recognize the small signs. But when they began to make experiments with cards, probably definite family habits developed; there was much occasion to treat each card individually, to link some involuntary movement with the face cards and some with each suite, and slowly to carry this system over to letters. They all agree that Beulah recognizes some frequent letters much more easily than the rare letters. What the observers have now found was the result of two years' training with mother and sister. Yet all this became possible only because Beulah evidently has this unusual, supernormal sensitiveness together with this abnormal power to receive the signs without their coming at once to consciousness. Her mental makeup in this respect constantly reminds the psychologist of the traits of a hysteric woman.

We have to add only one important point. Some startling results have surely been gained by another method. The same sensitiveness which makes Beulah able to receive signs which others do not notice, evidently makes her able to catch words spoken in a low voice within a certain distance, while she is not consciously giving her attention to them. She picks up bits of conversation which she overhears and which settle in her subconscious mind, until they later come to her consciousness in a way for which she cannot account. All were startled when at the end of our first day together I took a bill in my closed hand and asked her what I had there, and she at once replied a “ten-dollar bill,” while they all agreed that the child had never seen a ten-dollar bill before. This result surprised the minister and the judge greatly, and only later did I remember that I had whispered to the judge in the next room, with the door open, that I should ask her to tell the figures on a ten-dollar bill. In the same way the greatest sensation must be explained, which the experiments before my arrival yielded. The New York lady who came with the minister's family and others to the house was overwhelmed when Beulah spelled her name, which, as the affidavit said, was not known to any one else present. This affidavit was as a matter of course given according to the best knowledge of all concerned. Yet when later I came to Warren, one of the participants who told me the incident strengthened it by adding that he was the more surprised when the child spelled the name correctly with a K at the end, as he had understood that it was spelled with a T. In other words, some of those present did know the name, and the lady had evidently either been introduced or addressed by some one, and this had slipped from their minds because Beulah was not in the room. But she was probably in the other room and caught it in her subconscious mind. At her first début before the minister, too, by her same abnormal sensitiveness she probably heard when he told the mother that he had a glass of honey in his pocket. In short, the two actions of her subconscious mind, or of her brain, always go together, her noticing of family signs from her mother and sister and her catching of spoken words from strangers, both under conditions under which ordinary persons would neither see nor hear them. We have therefore nothing mysterious, nothing supernatural before us, but an extremely interesting case of an abnormal mental development, and this unusual power working in a mind which is entirely naïve and sincere.