Snake oil peddlers, magicians, and charlatans have been with us since the dawn of humanity. As technology advances, the aforementioned hucksters tend to cloak their trade in the mystique of the novel and contemporary enlightenments. The belief in telekinetic activity and the idea of controlling things intrinsically with thoughts has grown in popularity as we have moved into a world where scientific advancement is providing a sound physical basis for these wonders. Promoters of ESP and psychokinesis would like people to believe that it is possible to un-tap the minds power to perform physical tasks without the exertion of physical activity. The reasons for their adamant belief in these superstitions are manifold and complex, but chief amongst them is likely the profit motive. To be distinguished from the general hocus-pocus that is to be found in several of these theoretical modalities is the idea of ideomotor activity.
The apparently arbitrarily movements of a pendulum in ones hands was long seen as some sort of divinely inspired soothsayer. Beginning in the enlightenment, French rationalists such as Chevreul began to understand that small imperceptible movements of the musculature in fact controlled the movement of the pendulum. These movements are ultimately controlled in the brain and cerebellum through the cortico-spinal tract and are subject to the emotions and feelings that course through a test subjects mind at any given moment. The very idea of performing an action stimulates the brain to begin these motions in a sort of preparation for a signal to actually begin the gross movement. These small imperceptible movements of muscles caused by thoughts are what are properly termed ideomotor activity.
In an experiment conducted by Easton and Shor in 1975, eight male and seven female subjects used a standard pendulum suspended by a string held in front of a blackboard. Three different types of stimulus were used: an oscillating visual stimulus, an auditory stimulus of an ascending-descending tone, and a dichotic presentation made of two amplitude modulated tones. Admitting the subjectivity of the measurement of the quality of the pendulums motion, the experimenters found that the pendulum oscillations were significantly larger when the subjects were given the visual stimuli. The two audio stimuli did not differ significantly from each other but were significantly different than the pendulum swings subject to the visual stimuli or no stimuli. Furthermore, when the actual movements of the pendulum are visualized, the magnitude of its motions tend to be significantly larger. The researchers attribute this finding to the idea that subjects more easily imagine a swinging pendulum when actually seeing it swing. Thus, with stimuli it appears that it is easier to imagine movement, and thus the pendulum begins to have a larger range of movement. The authors concluded that the pendulum effect described by Chevreul is linked to ideomotor theory, visual capture, and the incorporation of stimuli into imagination and cognition.
In another experiment conducted by Easton and Shor in 1976, sixty male and female college students were used to continue studying the Chevreul effect. They found that the pendulum oscillated more when there was undivided attention given to it by the subjects, when higher numbers of muscles were recruited to suspend the pendulum, when oscillating visual or auditory stimuli were present, and amongst women. Once again, using the standard weighted pendulum in front of a mounted blackboard in their methodology and video cameras to record the information, thirty females and thirty male subjects completed the experiment. The subjects were individually instructed to hold the string of the pendulum between their thumb and forefinger over the blackboard while watching the pendulum to imagine it moving back and forth parallel to the blackboard. Once again, the variations in movement of the pendulum were attributed to the subjects being unable to perceive the micro-movements of their musculature. In sum, the series of experiments performed by Easton and Shor in 1975 and 1976 provide a highly reproducible experiment that shows the effect of external stimuli on the micro-movements of the musculature and this is attributed to ideomotor activity.
Shenefeldt takes the idea of ideomotor signaling a step further and discusses its uses in hypnosis and hypnoanalysis in order to control for psychosomatic illnesses. The ideomotor activity can be used during hypnotic states to indicate “yes,” “no,” or “I don’t want to answer.” Siting a long provenance of clinical usage, Shenfeldt highlights the use of hypnoalaytic ideomotor activity to search for psychosomatic disorders and precipitating events. Seven discrete categories are noted that are constant themes in psychosomatic illness: conflicts, motivations, identification, organ language, suggestion, masochism or self-punishment, and past experiences. Ultimately, the use of ideomotor hypnoanalysis in deriving answers to the categories could be used to effectively treat and manage pathologies that hitherto had been resistant to conventional medical therapy and probably had a psychological etiology. Conducting a full patient history and performing hypnoanalysis with ideomotor signaling can usually be done in less than an hour and offers a legitimate treatment option in the appropriate clinical setting.
In contrast to the reproducibility and sound clinical reasoning enunciated by Shenfeldt, and Easton and Shor, Braud discusses the use of direct mental intentions in their interaction with random phenomena and living systems (1994). Braud believes that thinking about various things can has real influences on the outside world. He cites various experiments using dice, radioactive decay, animals, and people in an attempt to show that external actors can “think” of something and the natural world will fall into place in accordance with those thoughts. His analysis suffers some serious defects though. Braud rarely ever discusses methodologies, instead sending readers on wild goose chases to search for out of date literature that is not easily accessible. Thus, none of the experiments he cites are easily reproducible and an independent reviewer can not follow the methodology and come to the same conclusions that he is very keen to push forward. Furthermore, very few of the statistics he cites are ever seem to confirm the power of ‘mind over matter.’
Ideomotor activity is a very real phenomenon where the thoughts of certain types of movements initiate the electrical activity in the brain to perform such movements. Key to the visualization of this phenomenon is that something must be connected to the musculature in order for its effect to be noticed. Ideomotor activity has almost no relation to extrasensory perception or psychokinesis, insofar as ESP or psychokinesis strictly involve the use of the mind to control external factors, without anything being anchored to the body of the controller. Modern technology is bringing us towards a world of psychokinesis, where advanced systems implanted in the brain are taking advantage of neural activity to create life-like movement in artificial limbs, or otherwise control computers. However, these have firm bases in physical science and are not dependent on a belief in superstitions. Indeed, if psychokinesis were possible we would expect that one monkey attached to a typewriter would be able to produce War and Peace within our lifetime simply as we read it aloud to him. Alas, this world has yet to come into being.
Works Cited:
Braud, W.G. (1994). Can Our Intentions Interact Directly With The Physical World?
European Journal of Parapsychology, 10, 78-90.
Easton, R.D. and Shor, R.E. (1975). Information Processing Analysis of the Chevreul
Pendulum Illusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1(3), 231-236.
Easton, R.D. and Shor, R.E. (1976). An Experimental Analysis of the Chevreul
Pendulum Illusion. The Journal of General Psychology, 95, 111-125.
Shenfeldt, P.D. (2011). Ideomotor Signaling: From Divining Spiritual Messages to
Discerning Subconscious Answers during Hypnosis and Hypnoanalysis, a Historical Perspective. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 53(3), 157-167. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00029157.2011.10401754
