PSYCHOMETRY

An often neglected area of paranormality is Psychometry. Allied to clairvoyance, it concerns the intuiting of the history of an object. This can be any object, from a rock, to a piece of clothing, to even a letter.
Psychometry means ‘measure of the soul of things,’ and was defined by Joseph Rhodes Buchanan in 1849. Buchanan, a physiologist, researched the talent when he met a Bishop Leonidas.

INCIDENCES OF A TALENT

The good bishop could detect brass through a metallic taste in his mouth whenever he touched it. Intrigued by this, Buchanan began to test people for the talent. Testing a number of students, one of them, Charles Inman, could describe attributes and emotions of writers by looking at their letters.
Geologist William Denton, an English immigrant to America, became interested in the subject during the 1850s. He discovered his sister, Ann Cridge, could also describe the writers of letters.
He decided to give her certain types of rocks to see if she could intuit their past. Given some volcanic rock from Hawaii, she spoke of fire pouring out of a precipice into the ocean. She also saw sailing ships, leading Denton to argue she had seen the Hawaiian eruption of 1840, from where the rock came.

EMOTIONAL IMPRINTS?

How do we explain such a strange, and seemingly unimportant, talent? The most obvious answer is that lucky guesses are involved. Add this to the fact that we tend to rememeber our successes more than our failures, and a sceptic would leave the subject there.
With regard to the personality of a letter writer, we could invoke graphology. The ‘sensitive’ is simply very good, either knowingly or not, at identifying personality from a person’s handwriting.
Alternatively, we can refer to the supposed process where emotion can be imprinted on an object, and a sensitive can intuit information from it. In one sense, this is an extension of a theory for ghosts, where, again, emotion is said to be recorded on an environment.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD

As we can see, there is a variation of ideas to account for the phenomenon. But I want to suggest, here, an idea that could bring these together into one theoretical package. And it is all to do with heightened senses.
There are various theories used to place scepticism upon the paranormal. Sceptics often point to cryptomnesia, where ‘forgotten’ knowledge rises, such as a book read, to account for, say a past life in reincarantion.
This scepticism then fails to point out that the average person actually holds far more information in the mind than they register having. We only acknowledge information of relevance, the remainder passing straight into the unconscious.

HEIGHTENED SENSES

Due to cryptomnesia, we do infact unconsciously know quite a lot about the world – even the ability to identify rocks, etc, that you would only expect a geologist to know. Simply scanning a report in a magazine can input such information – at least, enough to know you’re holding a lump of volcanic rock even though you didn’t realise you did.
We can say the same for naturally being able to intuit elements of personality from a letter. Similarly, ‘cold reading’ is often used by sceptics to pour scorn on mediums. Some do use it, actively, but can we also do such a thing unconsciously? Think of that little intuitive voice that says, ‘don’t trust this person.’
The reality is, we all have abilities we are unaware we have, many of which can be of use to psychometry, including intuiting from the researcher when we’re on the right track from his subliminal actions. So is it possible that all these unconscious abilities can somehow manifest in something more substantial?

ECOLOGY OF MIND

Such a process is well known to ecologists. An ecosystem is a non-existant thing. Rather, it is a process of placing attention upon one or more lifeforms interacting within an environment. Yet somehow an unmeasurable form of interaction takes place ABOVE what science can tell us.
This is the balance of nature. Science knows it only as ’emergence’. Something occurs that is more than the sum of its parts. And perhaps we can best understand paranormal abilities such as psychometry in a similar way.
Basically, a higher sense can emerge from a combination of our ‘normal’ senses, and unconscious talents we didn’t think we had, but must have if cryptomnesia really exists. Basically, the paranormal is maybe not some ‘supernatural’ ability divorced from our sensory experience, but merely an enhancement of it.

(c) Anthony North, February 2008

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