"Suppose the psychic is a visual and the communicator an audile, might not that difference make a marked…
- Date of account
- Published 1921
- Source
- The Problems of Psychical Research Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal
- Reference
- The Problems of Psychical Research Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal · selected passage 84
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
"Suppose the psychic is a visual and the communicator an audile, might not that difference make a marked difficulty in the adjustment necessary for communicating clearly?
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention only"Suppose the psychic is a visual and the communicator an audile, might not that difference make a marked difficulty in the adjustment necessary for communicating clearly?... A visual might see apparitions more easily, and have more difficulty in automatic writing; and an audile might easily hear voices and write with more difficulty, etc.... A proper name is purely an auditory concept. It has no visual equivalent whatever, except the letters which form it. If, then, the process of communication at any time involves a dominant dependence on visual functions of the mind, the sudden attempt to interpose an auditory datum might meet with the difficulty of prompt adjustment to auditory conditions for its transmission, and it might even be that the psychic could not, from habit in visual methods, adjust herself to all the needs of a proper name, except by converting it readily into visual terms, as the spelling of the name would express....
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis comes from historical psychical research. Methods, witness handling and standards of evidence differ from present-day research and should be assessed from the cited passage and edition.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThe passage can support a history of claims and recurring descriptions. It does not establish a paranormal mechanism, and competing psychological, social and physical explanations remain relevant.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.