Is the Vulcan Mind Meld Real? We Asked an Expert About a Bunch of Paranormal Things

Everyone knows at least one person that claims that they, or someone they know (usually a friend of a friend’s aunt) is psychic, that they’ve seen ghosts, or have had “visions”. Our normal reaction is to back away from the conversation with our hands behind us feeling for the door, but this time we wanted to get to the bottom of this whole paranormal thing. We chatted with Dr. David Luke, President of the Parapsychological Association and Senior Lecturer in Psychology for the Department of Psychology and Counselling at The University of Greenwich in London to show him some movie clips where weird shit happens and asked him two questions: "How likely or realistic is this? “ and “Are there any instances of this happening?"

The prom scene from Carrie, in which Carrie is elected prom queen so that she can be better humiliated by a bucket of pig's blood, sending her into an alienated, telekinetic, murderous rage.

This is a classic film. Carrie’s extreme control of objects with her mind, which we call psychokinesis (or macro-psychokinesis to be precise), is something we are thankfully unlikely to ever see. Some reports of controlled psychokinesis exist, such as the movement of light paper cups, small objects and strain gauges in the laboratory. Occasionally this is caught on film, such as the fascinating video of Nina Kalugina, the Russian psychokinetic star from the cold war era – though we can’t be certain if this was Russian propaganda to frighten those on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Some people have suggested that she has things hidden in her bra. Still, the demonstration of movement inside the glass jar is encouraging.

I think the Carrie’s story probably relates more closely to what we call ‘recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis’ (or RSPK for short), which is one name given to phenomena occurring in supposed poltergeist cases, and is based on the idea that there is a target person, called an ‘agent’, around which the phenomena only occur. In most cases the RSPK agent is a teenager, often transitioning through puberty (like Carrie). Poltergeist or RSPK cases involve the unexplained movement of objects, like chairs moving by themselves, and other odd phenomena including mechanical devices, such as light bulbs failing, phones ringing, electricity power surges, that kind of thing.

The difference between these cases and the stuff we see in Carrie is that the agent is thought not to be consciously causing them to happen and they are often on a much smaller scale. In RSPK cases no one ever gets killed by wild fire hoses, but then they probably wouldn’t in real life anyway, whether paranormal or not. Of course the jury is still out on whether RSPK is real, but many serious researchers who have investigated these cases have often been at a loss to provide conventional explanations for the phenomena, after ruling out a number of feasible non-paranormal possibilities.

The Vulcan mind meld from the old Star Trek, in which Spock can read creatures' minds by placing his hand on them and entering into a sort of psychic union with them.  Of course, Spock is half Vulcan - but are there any human instances of this sort of intense telepathy?

Well, we haven’t had many Vulcans in the parapsychology labs either, but there is some interesting evidence emerging recently for a kind of mind meld effect, called distant brain correlations. It would be hard to rule out ordinary communication channels with people as close together as they are in Spock’s (rather intimate) situation so pairs of people are separated into different rooms whilst having their brains monitored by some imaging technique, such as electroencephalogram (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Then one of the pair has their brain stimulated in a way that produces a predictable brain response, such as flashes of light into the eyes, which causes clear observable changes in the part of brain related to vision. The interesting part is that it is possible to detect the same changes occurring in the brain of the other person in the distant room, although this effect only tends to occur with pairs of people who have some kind of emotional bond, like lovers or twins.

A scene from The Dead Zone, in which Christopher Walken's character accurately senses that his nurse's house is on fire when he touches her hand.  He first gains his psychic abilities after awaking from a coma.

These kinds of visions - called ‘crisis apparitions’ because the person seen is in crisis - do happen, but usually it is the person that is related to the one having the crisis that sees them, not a scary Christopher Walken in bed having a nose bleed. These crisis apparitions were among some of the first phenomena to be studied scientifically when Cambridge University researchers published a large-scale survey of these experiences in 1886 called ‘Phantasms of the Living’. In this book they investigate the occurrence of people seeing apparitions of relatives and friends that they did not know in a state of crisis (and which was later verified to be true). The researchers found that the crisis apparitions were much more frequent than would be expected if these were just ‘ordinary’ hallucinations, say, that happened to be coincidental with the distant person’s illness, accident, or scrape with death.  These days, crisis apparitions are frequently the only time in a person’s life that they can recall having had what they thought was a genuine psychic experience, and may only occur once in a person’s life. Think of the story everyone has heard from someone they know about waking up at three in the morning to see granny standing at the end of the bed, only to find out later that she died during the night at that exact time.

The automatic writing scene from The Changeling, in which correct information unknown to the medium is written down.

The phenomena of automatic writing, where the medium lets their hand write down information supposedly ‘channeled’ through from spirits of the dead, has been difficult to establish as fact. This doesn’t mean that the effect isn’t genuine, but that the feats of mediumship generally have been notoriously difficult to test to complete satisfaction. In some cases of ‘mental mediumship’, fraud has been uncovered, and it’s possible that some mediums are deluding themselves and possibly others. However, there have been exceptional cases in the past, such as Mrs. Piper, who was subjected to the most rigorous security procedures and was still able to produce convincing evidence of obtaining information that she should not have known. The trouble is that even in these cases it is difficult to say it is definitely information from the dead, as it could be ‘ordinary’ clairvoyance or telepathic information from the living, though something psychic would need to be happening to explain what is going on.

Considering automatic writing in particular, some mediums have supposedly written whole books authored by the dead. The famous Brazilian Spiritist, Chico Xavier, who left school at 13 having only attained primary school education went on to ‘write’ over 400 books through automatic writing. Many of the books were supposedly authored by well-known (dead) literary figures and made convincing reads. For instance, one book, a collection of 259 poems, is attributed to 56 different poets, including most every leading figure in Brazilian and Portuguese literary history, and features completions of incomplete works of those writers that would seem extremely difficult to fake - especially by someone partially blind, with hardly any schooling and who had a day job as a manual worker.

One of the leading literary figures alive at that time (1932), called Humberto de Campos, said that the styles were unmistakably like those of the dead poets and they were interested in the same themes as had preoccupied them when alive. Campos himself died shortly after and Xavier rattled off five books via automatic writing supposedly authored by the dead Campos. The books bore such similarity to the style of the dead literary figure that Campos’ widow took Xavier to court in 1944 so that she could receive payment for her husband’s literary output. The Judge decided it was not possible to establish the identity of the genuine author, Xavier or the dead Campos, but seeing as Campos was officially dead the judge ruled he no longer had any rights over new works and the case was dismissed.

Chico was not secretive about his skills either, and would give many demonstrations, writing anything from poetry, children’s books, historical and contemporary novels, as well as treatises on science, philosophy and religion - all in the style of dead writers - even writing in near perfect mirror writing on occasion and in other languages.  Other Brazilian automatic writers have been known to write in languages as diverse as Arabic, Japanese and Hebrew. Attempting to prove one way or the other that these writings are genuine is problematic but in any case Chico Xavier’s feats were extraordinary, even if not paranormal.

Also from The Changeling, the séance scene in which, by unknown means, a cone is moved and a glass is hurled into the wall.

Many of the mediums in the period between the mid 19th century until the early 20th century would perform physical feats, such as the movement of objects, the playing of instruments or the production of flowers out of nowhere. Most of these would perform in dim lighting conditions or total darkness and a number of fraudulent techniques were discovered by researchers and investigators, such as slipping out of security ropes but pretending to remain tied up. These days few ‘physical mediums’, as they are known, remain active but some researchers are still able to find groups producing physical phenomena. As ever, it is difficult to completely rule out fraud outside of laboratory conditions so the verdict is probably still out, because even though some cases in the past were exposed as frauds some spectacular feats, such as D.D. Home’s witnessed levitation out of an open window, have never been explained. Cases such as this leave the door open for speculation, but you are more likely to find glasses flying across the room in my local pub than you are in a séance, although that may be something to do with living in East London.

The opening from Final Destination, in which a character has a vision of his plane exploding in flight, and which he later sees happening in real life and acts to avoid it.  This has the curious effect of causing all the people he saved to start dying in even stranger ways.

Few people have managed to have ‘precognitions’ which, had they not done something about they probably would have come true. Mostly precognitions are like driving forwards but staring in the rear view mirror, people tend to only recognize what was a precognitive vision after they have happened, and these usually tend to occur in dreams or other altered states. There is a case, for instance, of someone having a dream of a road accident and then prevented it from happening just before it occurred when they realized their dream was coming true, but this is not common.  Abraham Lincoln dreamed of his own death by an assassin but was unable to prevent it. Interestingly though, the man who was supposed to join him that evening in the theatre, General Grant, was implored by his wife not to escort Lincoln to the theatre that night because she had a bad feeling and she was right because he would likely have been assassinated too as he was on the assassin’s hit list. In reality though people rarely know they know the future and can only realize their apparent prescience after the fact. Not much good for saving people from crashing planes but definitely a curious glitch in the matrix.

The famous scene from Scanners, in which a scanner (telepath/telekinete) has his head blown up by a rival.

No one has managed this one yet, although I sometime wish I could do this. Traffic wardens would be in big trouble.