The world of Ted Serios : "thoughtographic" studies of an extraordinary mind

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Ted Serios and thoughtography were highlighted in a 2014 episode of Mysteries at the Museum (Season 6, Episode 13). Braude’s conclusion about the evidence for survival is perhaps a bit less certain in his BICS essay than it was eighteen years previously in Immortal Remains, though it is not easy to tell, given how qualified his conclusions are in both cases. However, perhaps this sentence from the final paragraph of his BICS essay best sums up his most recent views on the matter: ‘even if the best actual evidence does not warrant a reassuring confidence in the reality of survival, at the very least it encourages optimism on the matter’. 40 Criticism In Immortal Remains, Braude finds the best evidence for survival to be certain highly impressive cases of mediumship and reincarnation/possession, so he understandably focuses his analysis on these. His discussion of mediumship centers on trance mediumship, and in particular the well-documented historical investigations of Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard. His discussion of reincarnation and possession ranges over several historical cases investigated by Ian Stevenson and others, including the Thompson-Gifford case investigated by James Hyslop in the early twentiethcentury. It should be noted, however, that in his 2021 BICS essay, Braude reports no longer being as enthusiastic about the evidence from apparent past-life memories, which he says is plagued by the ‘Problem of Investigative Intricacy’, among other issues. 38 These initial experiments were done with an ordinary camera and film. He finally bought himself a Polaroid camera and started working day and night, occasionally getting “hits.” He continued these exhausting experiments for many months but came up empty in the treasure department.

Weiner, D.H. & Nelson, R.D. (1987) (eds.). Abstracts and Papers from the Twenty-Ninth Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, 1986. Metuchen, New Jersey, USA & London: Scarecrow Press. EndnotesIn 1986 Peter Popoff, a televangelist and self-described faith healer, was definitively exposed by Randi and others by means of a radio scanner at a public event. This revealed that the information about audience members which he appeared miraculously to know was being fed to him by his wife through an earpiece. Recordings of the deception were played by Johnny Carson on his The Tonight Show, leading to Popoff’s (temporary) disgrace and bankruptcy. 12 Public Hoaxes Wagenmakers, E.J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., & Maas, H. (2011). Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of psi: Comment on Bem (2011). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100/3 (March), 426-32.

The trials produced around one thousand Polaroid photographs, all of which have been preserved in the Special Collections section of the University of Maryland in Baltimore. More than four hundred of these Polaroids contain specific images; that is, images chosen by Eisenbud and his team to be the specific target of the experiment. Typically, Eisenbud would choose an image at random (from a copy of National Geographic, for example) and conceal it in a sealed envelope so that Serios could not see it. The target images were usually of buildings. Typically, Serios would manifest Polaroid images that were blurry and rather distorted, but that were all recognizable as variants of the target image. I use the term “variants” because one of the most peculiar aspects of these particular experiments was that the images Serios produced seemed to be from perspectives that were considerably different than the original image. For example, many of Serios’s images of the target buildings appear to be from a perspective that would be physically impossible in the real world, and were certainly different from the angle at which the target images were taken. It is as if Serios’s images were registered by someone floating in space or circumnavigating the structure in a hot air balloon. Even stranger, when Eisenbud concealed an image of one of the barns on his property in an envelope, Serios, who was certainly familiar with the barn as it existed, produced an image of the barn that resembled the appearance of the barn twenty years in the past, with various contemporary additions missing—an image that he could not possibly have been familiar with. [3] Some of Serios’s images closely resemble the target images, except his photographs have significant differences: a door is on the wrong side of a building, for example, or windows are missing. It is as if these are images of the structures as they exist in an alternative reality, in another dimension that resembles our own but with significantly different details, or that distorts within a non-Euclidean space. Successful stunts created by Randi to fool investigators and the media are often cited by admirers. Project Alpha a b Robert Todd Carroll. (2003). The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. Wiley. p. 313. ISBN 978-0471272427Braude, S.E. (2007). The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Colin Brookes-Smith. (1968). Review of The World of Ted Serios by J. Eisenbud. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 44: 260-265. The term ‘thoughtography’ was introduced in 1910 by Tomokichi Fukurai, a Japanese psychology professor who encountered the phenomenon accidentally, while working with a clairvoyant. 1 He conducted some interesting experiments, but his work was severely criticized, and eventually he was forced to abandon his research and resign his university position. Although thoughtographic experiments continued in America and Europe, allegations of fraud eventually helped snuff out this form of research for several decades. Retrocausation – causal influence of the future on the past – is often invoked to explain apparent precognition: the knowing of something before it happens. In Chapter 5 of The Limits of Influence, 46 Braude argues that retrocaus Harris, Frank (1993). Debates on the Meaning of Life, Evolution and Spiritualism. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books. p. 77. ISBN 9780879758288. Charles Reynolds. (1967). "An Amazing Weekend with Ted Serios. Part I". Popular Photography (October): 81–84, 136–40, 158.Pilkington, R. (2006). The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof: The Enigma of Séance Phenomena. San Antonio: Anomalist Books. Endnotes Eisenbud, J. (1977). Paranormal photography. In Handbook of Parapsychology, ed. by B. Wolman, 414–32. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Randi, J. (1982). The Truth About Uri Geller. New York: Prometheus Books. [Originally published 1975 as The Magic of Uri Geller; New York: Ballantine Books].

Thoughtography (also known as psychic photography) first emerged in the late 19th century due to the influence of spirit photography. [1] Thoughtography has no connection with Spiritualism, which distinguishes it from spirit photography. [3] One of the first books to mention "psychic photography" was the book The New Photography (1896) by Arthur Brunel Chatwood. In the book Chatwood described experiments where the "image of objects on the retina of the human eye might so affect it that a photograph could be produced by looking at a sensitive plate." [4] The book was criticized in a review in Nature. [5]Decades later, the story Randi would tell was that these researchers were completely fooled, refused several of Randi’s offers to help them detect fakes, and published several papers about the “psychic” boys. In fact, the researchers were sort of fooled, eventually did ask for Randi’s help, and never published any peer-reviewed papers (though they did give one credulous talk at a conference). 43 Archives Processing Manual: Description (2015): The processing manual used in Special Collections for all descriptive platforms, including Kripal, Jeffrey J. (2011). Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press. p.285. ISBN 9780226453897 . Retrieved 6 December 2017. Randi, J. (1986). The Columbus poltergeist case, in Science Confronts the Paranormal, ed. byK. Frazier. Buffalo, New York, USA: Prometheus Books. Jon and a Mrs. Morris, who had escorted Ted there, excitedly urged Serios to shoot some more but Eisenbud called a halt to the proceedings when he discovered that Ted’s pulse rate was 132 and “pounding like an angry surf.”