In the first part of this article, I described the mystery of Glastonbury Abbey. In 1919, Frederick Bligh Bond, more commonly known as Bligh, published a book in which he claimed that his successful excavations of Glastonbury Abbey had been based upon information provided to him by the spirits of dead monks. This information, he claimed, had been obtained during automatic writing sessions carried out with the assistance of medium John Allan Bartlett (also known as John Alleyne).
His controversial claims led to his dismissal from his post as director of excavations at the Abbey. Critics of his claims pointed out that it was much more plausible to believe that the success of the excavations, which had indeed led to the rediscovery of a number of structures at the site, was due to the fact that Bligh and Bartlett had devoted years of study to learning everything they could about Glastonbury Abbey. This knowledge, combined with clues still visible on the surface at the site, was all that was needed to account for the success of the enterprise.
These criticisms, although perfectly valid, leave open the possibility that Bligh was simply lying in claiming that the spirits of dead monks had provided new information via automatic writing. Obviously, this possibility cannot be ruled out. However, I believe that insights from psychology support the view that Bligh was totally sincere, albeit mistaken, in his claims.
One notable aspect of the technique used by Bligh and Bartlett in their automatic writing sessions was that Bligh:
rested his fingers lightly on the back of Bartlett’s hand as it wrote, as this was found to produce stronger and clearer writing
HOPKINSON-BALL, P. 41
As stated, we can never know for certain if, in fact, one or both men were knowingly controlling the writing hand, but an ingenious study by the late Dan Wegner, in collaboration with colleagues Valerie Fuller and Betsy Sparrow, strongly supports the idea that both men may genuinely have believed that they were not responsible for the movements produced.
Wegner and colleagues were investigating the psychological processes involved in facilitated communication. Facilitated communication is a technique that allegedly allows individuals with severe problems of communication to express themselves with the aid of a third party, referred to as the facilitator. For example, an individual with severe muscle tremors may be unable to operate a keyboard unaided but, it is claimed, if a facilitator simply steadies the hand of the impaired individual, referred to as the communicator, they are in fact able to type out coherent messages.
Sadly, it turned out that the coherent messages produced were not being produced by the ‘communicators’ at all, but were actually being produced, albeit unconsciously, by the facilitators. For example, in some studies the facilitator and the communicator were asked questions via headphones. Unbeknownst to the facilitator, the questions directed to each were not the same. The answers produced always corresponded to the questions asked of the facilitator and not of the ‘communicator’. By now, a vast amount of empirical evidence has accumulated that discredits the validity of facilitated communication. Supporters of the technique have chosen simply to ignore this evidence.
I will describe one of Wegner and colleagues’ studies to you (experiment three of the series of five) based upon a simplified version of facilitated communication. In fact, let us imagine that you had volunteered to take part in the study. When you arrive, you and a fellow participant are given the following introduction (Wegner, Fuller, & Sparrow, 2003, p. 11):
Facilitated communication, or “FC,” is a popular technique invented for the purposes of communicating with people with various developmental disabilities, such as autism and mental retardation. The method that we will be using is a variation of FC. The idea behind FC is that these individuals are capable of communicating at a higher level than thought previously, but lack the language and motor skills with which to speak, write or type. Facilitated communication usually consists of a facilitator who supports the client’s arm or hand while the client presses letters or symbols on a keyboard or picture board. We are interested in finding out if FC can work with different groups of people, including people who do not have any disabilities. So, in this study, we are going to test people’s ability to accurately read each other’s fine muscle movements, much as in the case of what I just explained to you about FC.
The experimenter then asks you to draw a slip of paper from a cup in order to randomly assign your roles. You draw a slip indicating that you will be the facilitator, your fellow participant will be the communicator. The experimenter explains that you will both be presented with a series of questions over headphones in order to minimise any distracting background noise, with answers given by pressing the appropriate keys on a keyboard. You are then given the following instructions (Wegner et al., 2003, p. 11):
Please place the index and middle finger of your right hand on the yes and no keys, like this. Listen to the questions, but make no attempt to answer them yourself. You are trying to sense the communicator’s answers by paying attention to muscle movements in her (his) fingers. Whenever you detect her (his) answers, press the key you sense that she (he) wants to press. Sometimes these muscle movements are very subtle and may be difficult to feel. In fact, many people report that they can’t feel any muscle movements at all. Nevertheless, I encourage you to make your best guess for each question as to what you feel your partner wants to answer. Please provide an answer to each question, even if you think you’re not feeling anything, because you may be tapping into something of which you are not aware.
The experimenter then says to the communicator (Wegner et al., 2003, p. 11):
Please place the index and middle finger of your left hand gently on top of the facilitator’s middle and index fingers, like this. [Experimenter demonstrates.] As you listen to the questions, clearly form the answer to each one in your mind, but make no attempt to press the keys physically. It is the facilitator’s job to sense which key you want to press. After you put on the headphones, I will give you 3 practice questions so that you can learn how to do the task. Once these questions are done, please take off your headphones and wait for instruction.
The experiment continues with you trying your best to sense any subtle muscular movements on the part of the communicator as 50 yes/no questions are presented while avoiding exerting any influence yourself. Twenty of these questions were easy factual questions (eg “Are there 15 months in a year?”).
Once this phase is over, you and your fellow participant are separated and you are given a questionnaire to complete including, amongst other questions, “Who did you feel was influencing the answers that were given to the questions?”. You respond by marking a line anchored at one end with the labels 100% You (0% Other Person) and 100% Other Person (0% You), and with 50% You (50% Other Person) in the middle.
So, what were the results when a number of undergraduates from the University of Virginia were run through this procedure? The first thing to note was that, on average, the correct response was provided for the majority (87%) of the easy factual questions. Clearly, accurate information from somewhere had been used to provide those correct responses. But from where? Were the facilitators picking up on subtle muscular movements from the communicators? Or were the facilitators initiating the movements towards the correct response themselves, perhaps as a result of the ideomotor effect?
The facilitators clearly felt that the communicators had had a considerable influence in providing the answers. On average, they rated the percentage influence at just over 35% (range 5% to 70%) with 6 of 19 facilitators rating the communicators’ influence as being higher than their own.
Now, here’s the twist. What the facilitators did not know was that the ‘communicator’ they were paired with was, in fact, a confederate working with the experimenters. The apparently random assignment of roles was a trick. Both slips of paper in the cup bore the word “facilitator”.
The truth is that the ‘communicator’ could not possibly have had any influence at all in producing the correct answers – because they were never actually presented with the questions! This did not prevent the 19 genuine participants from the feeling that the communicator had had an influence on the movements produced, often of a very considerable magnitude.
The method used by Bligh and Bartlett is obviously very similar to that routinely used in facilitated communication and in Wegner’s experimental set-up. In the first two contexts, facilitators mistakenly believe that they are picking up muscular movements from a living communicator whereas in fact they are unconsciously moving their own muscles. In the context of Bligh and Bartlett’s automatic writing sessions, it is quite conceivable that neither individual believed the movements were generated by the other. Instead, they believed that discarnate spirits were responsible.
Even if we accept that Bligh and Bartlett may have genuinely believed that they were not responsible for the movements producing what they took to be messages from beyond, why did they not realise that these messages were not telling them anything that they did not already know? One plausible answer to this question is provided by the results of a study reported by Hélène Gauchou, Ronald Rensink, and Sidney Fels in 2012 that I will describe in the final part of this article.
