Discovery Lab Answers

Frederic W. H. Myers: Experiments and Data

Myers was not primarily a laboratory experimenter in the modern sense — he was a theorist, a case-collector, and a field investigator who also participated in controlled trials. His empirical work falls across several overlapping categories.

Thought-Transference (Telepathy) Experiments

From early in his work at the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Myers took part in and reported on experiments designed to test whether mental impressions could be transmitted between an “agent” and a “percipient” without normal sensory contact. ^[5] records him describing — at the October 1886 General Meeting — experiments conducted with Edmund Gurney and his brother A. T. Myers at the Salpêtrière in Paris, under Dr. Babinski, as well as experiments with card-guessing and written-name transmission ^[6].

The card and name experiments were explicitly designed to exclude contact and reduce the possibility of guessing, though Myers himself acknowledged the difficulty of eliminating all normal cues where “the possible modifications of movement are, comparatively speaking, so few” ^[6]. One planchette experiment, described in ^[6], produced an apparently correct written name — but Myers noted in that same account that a lady present had that name “painfully impressed on her mind” for unrelated personal reasons, which he recorded as a contaminating circumstance rather than suppressing it.

In ^[5], Myers also translated and published Pierre Janet’s manuscript account of experiments on a subject designated “Madame B.,” involving hypnotic suggestion and automatic writing — presented as bearing on telepathy under hypnotic conditions.

Hypnotic and Automatism Experiments

A substantial portion of Myers’s experimental program involved hypnosis and automatic writing, which he regarded as methods for accessing what he called the subliminal self. ^[5] describes experiments on hypnotized subjects’ writing, including the work of Binet and Féré on the influence of a magnet on script direction. Myers used these as comparative data when arguing that automatic writing in unhypnotized subjects showed structural similarities to hypnotic phenomena — implying, in his theoretical framework, a common underlying stratum of mental activity.

^[3] records that at the first International Congress of Experimental Psychology (Paris, August 1889), Myers personally described experiments conducted by SPR members to test “the possibilities of thought-transference when the recognised means of communication through the senses were excluded.” The Congress proceedings note that the unconscious self was observed “noting, treasuring, and reproducing certain information, conveyed indeed through the channel of the ordinary senses” but not accessible to waking consciousness — a finding Myers framed as support for subliminal-self theory rather than purely as a psi result.

Apparitions and Case Collection

Myers’s most quantitatively ambitious project was Phantasms of the Living (1886, with Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore), which compiled and analyzed over 700 cases of apparent crisis apparitions — perceptions of a person at the moment of their death or serious danger, reported by someone at a distance. The evidential framework Myers applied was explicit: he graded cases by whether the percipient’s account was recorded before learning of the agent’s crisis, whether independent witnesses corroborated it, and whether the correspondence could be explained by coincidence alone.

In ^[2], Myers laid out a five-stage hierarchy of evidential quality for automatism and spontaneous phenomena — ranging from hypnotic suggestion through to what he considered evidence for post-mortem survival — and argued that apparitions of the dead warranted a place in that evidential sequence, not merely as isolated curiosities. His 1890 paper “A Defence of Phantasms of the Dead” ^[2] directly engages critic Frank Podmore’s objections to this classification.

^[4] reproduces Myers’s completion of Edmund Gurney’s unfinished paper “On Apparitions Occurring Soon After Death,” presented to the SPR in March 1889. The paper examines cases where an apparition appeared within twelve hours of the agent’s death — a temporal window Myers argued was too narrow to be explained by coincidence under the null hypothesis that apparitions are random hallucinations.

Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903)

Myers’s two-volume posthumous work ^[1] synthesized decades of case-collection and experimental data into a unified theoretical account. Its evidential sections include a tiered classification of automatic writing and trance messages by quality:

• Lowest tier: messages containing only information the percipient already knew
• Higher tiers: messages containing information the percipient verifiably could not have known through normal means, corroborated by independent witnesses

Myers included verbatim testimony, corroborating witness statements, and his own assessments of where normal explanations remained available. The “Morton Ghost” case ^[1] — a haunting investigated by R. C. Morton and corroborated by multiple witnesses — is one example of the multi-witness, longitudinal format Myers used to argue that certain apparition cases resist purely subjective explanation.

Methodological Standards Myers Applied

Across these programs, Myers consistently emphasized:

• Prior recording: percipient accounts needed to predate knowledge of the event
• Independent corroboration: solo accounts were ranked lower than multi-witness ones
• Exclusion of normal channels: experiments were designed, if imperfectly, to remove sensory contact between agent and percipient
• Acknowledgment of contamination: he documented confounding circumstances in individual cases rather than omitting them

Skeptical Critiques and Discussion

What critics argued. Frank Podmore — Myers’s SPR colleague and the most rigorous internal critic — argued in his own publications that the apparitions-of-the-dead case was not established, that the surviving-the-crisis cases in Phantasms of the Living were explicable by memory distortion and selection bias (reports filed after the fact tending to cluster around memorable events), and that the statistical argument for veridical crisis apparitions rested on unreliable base-rate estimates for both hallucinations and coincidental deaths ^[2].

What the experimental data show. Myers directly addressed Podmore’s objections in “A Defence of Phantasms of the Dead” ^[2], arguing that the five-stage parallelism across experimental and spontaneous phenomena — running from hypnotic suggestion through automatism to full apparitional cases — constituted cumulative evidence that no single class of case could be made to bear alone. His response acknowledged the force of the coincidence objection for any individual case, but argued the pattern across classes was not reducible to it.

On the thought-transference experiments, the card-guessing and name-writing protocols Myers and Gurney used were criticized at the time as insufficiently controlled — the possibility of unconscious cueing, leakage through normal sensory channels, or collusion in séance-room settings was raised by contemporaries. Myers himself acknowledged in ^[6] that contact between agent and percipient “vitiates these as telepathic experiments.”

Analysis. Myers’s data collection was unusually systematic for its era, and his tiered evidential standards were an explicit attempt to apply scientific rigor to phenomena that resisted laboratory isolation. At the same time, the protocols he used — field cases, semi-controlled hypnosis sessions, planchette experiments — do not meet the blinding and pre-registration standards that later parapsychology adopted. Independent replication of his specific experimental findings, under modern controls, was not conducted during his lifetime. Edward F. Kelly has produced scholarly work recovering and reinterpreting Myers’s theoretical contributions [see the Edward F. Kelly page], situating them within contemporary debates about the limits of physicalism — but that is interpretive recovery, not experimental replication of Myers’s original data.

For Myers’s theoretical framework — the subliminal self — see the ESP-Nexus page The Subliminal Self.