René Warcollier
René Warcollier was a French chemical engineer and psychical researcher. He was associated, as a founder and president, of the Institut Métapsychique, and edited and wrote theoretical and experimental reports for its journal.
Biography
Warcollier was born on April 8, 1881 at Omonville-la-Rouge in Paris. He obtained a degree in chemical engineering in 1903 from the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie. He patented several processes related to the synthetic production of precious stones, and invented special screens for movie projection.[1]
In parapsychology, Warcollier first served as treasurer of the Institut Métapsychique (1929-1938), then editor of its journal, the Revue Métapsychique, (1938-1940), and then as its president (1951-1962).[1] He died on May 23, 1962.
Studies
Warcollier's main parapsychological studies involved experiments using a telepathy design in which one or more "agents" observed a target image while one or more "percipients" attempted to "blindly" reproduce it. Much of his work following from 1922 involved "batteries" of senders and receivers stationed across France; and he also used sender-receiver teams stationed between France and New York, and France and Great Britain. Among those with whom he collaborated in research included the Nobelian Charles Richet, and the American psychologist Gardner Murphy.
Warcollier's experimental method advanced the informativeness of earlier studies using drawings of real objects as target stimuli, given his use of multiple participants and his assessment of inter-individual responses. A major contemporary critic was the British psychical researcher Samuel Soal. He argued that Warcollier's method was sub-optimal as the targets were not sufficiently selected at random, and correspondences between targets and responses were identified without formal and objective limitations.[2]
Warcollier reported his experiments in numerous articles, principally within 56 articles in the Revue Métapsychique published between 1924 and 1962, including "La télépathie expérimentale" (1926) and "Étude de dessins télépathiques de M. Vigneron au cours de vingt ans d'expérimentation" (1951). Results and reflections upon them were also published in his several books, including La Télepathie (1921) and La Métapsychique (1940; 1946). Gardner Murphy arranged to have La Télepathie translated and published in the United States, with additional material from Warcollier's articles, and an address he gave to the Sorbonne in 1946, as Mind to mind (1938).
Theories
Warcollier interpreted "distortions" in what he felt were telepathically-transmitted messages and used these to propose several "laws" of psiological perception. He wrote that images were telepathically transmitted with spatial dissociation of their geometric properties that often stripped them of any functional organisation and that the geometrical properties were recombined through "primitive" rules of organisation such as physical likeness, and equally primitive transformations of features, such as inversion, reduction, fusion, and duplication. Citing Pierre Janet's proposition that "every idea of an object contains the germ of an act appropriate to it" (Mind to mind, p. 22), Warcollier wrote that "primitive" movement was often added to or abstracted from an image, and a subject's ability to describe geometric properties of a target without being able to name it or describe its function was evidence of such "primitive" structuring of perception.
Consistent with the theories of other psychic researchers of the time, Warcollier conceived of his experiments as involving telepathy in which a telepathic signal was transmitted from one mind and received by another. He theorized that the common distortions between the transmitted and received signals were the result of error at the receiving rather than transmission end. He felt that telepathic signals had a "staccato character" due to the need to successively shift attention from the signal to present environmental stimuli, and led to "disassembling" the target in the process of deploying attention towards it. He advocated hypnosis and relaxation as a means to stabilize attention to "telepathic signals".
Warcollier argued against a recency or identity advantage in the contents activated for representation of "telepathic signals". He proposed that recent memories were more likely to be inhibited, and remote memories were more likely to be activated, hence the telepathic product would reflect the "dynamic patterns" that constituted the personality. Warcollier concluded that "telepathy is facilitated when the agent and the percipient scarcely know each other" (Mind to mind, p. 36). He felt that affinity appeared to be facilitative in spontaneous cases of apparent telepathy but could also be problematic, he proposed, as it amplified personal meanings in association to the targets.
Warcollier described his theory of telepathy as the "coupling of agent and percipient into a poly-psychic whole."[3] His communication model of psi included the notion of transmission between senders and receivers. [4] Many of Warcollier's specific propositions have been used by parapsychologists to interpret their own models of "psi". In particular, his interpretation of the role of altered states in "signal transmission" was represented in Charles Honorton's noise-reduction model of psi facilitation, which, in turn, served as a rationale for Ganzfeld methodology.[5] According to parapsychologists and psychical researchers, key components of Warcollier's experimental observations have been confirmed by the Sinclairs and the remote-viewing experiments in the early 1970s conducted at the Stanford Research Institute by Puthoff and Targ.[6] .[7]
Parapsychologists such as Rhea White say that although Warcollier's studies have been superseded by remote-viewing and Ganzfeld paradigms, his attention to the cognitive processes of reproducing targets, with details of introspectionist data in his reports, stood him apart from much of the American research into extrasensory perception. [8] which in turn, inspired the key participant procedures in the remote-viewing and Ganzfeld paradigms.
Key sources/Further reading
Pleasants, H. (Ed.). (1964). Biographical dictionary of parapsychology. New York, NY, US: Helix.
Swann, I. (2001). Preface. In R. Warcollier, Mind to mind (pp. ix-xv). Charlottesville, VA, US: Hampton Roads.
References
- ^ a b Pleasants, H. (Ed.). (1964). Biographical dictionary of parapsychology. New York, NY, US: Helix.
- ^ Soal, S. G. (1932). Experiments in supernormal perception at a distance. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 40, 165-362.
- ^ Warcollier, R. (1948). Suggestions for experiments in parapsychology. Journal of Parapsychology, 12, 119-123.
- ^ Stanford, R. G. (1978). Toward reinterpreting psi events. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 72, 197-214.
- ^ Honorton, C. (1977). Psi and internal attention states. In B. B. Wolman (Ed.), Handbook of parapsychology (pp. 435-472). New York, NY, US: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
- ^ Puthoff, H. E., & Targ, R. (2002). A perceptual channel for information transfer over kilometer distances: Historical perspective and recent research. In C. T. Tart, H. E. Puthoff & R. Targ (Eds.), Mind at large: IEEE symposia on the nature of extrasensory perception (pp. 13-69). Charlottesville, VA, US: Hampton Roads. Originally published 1979.
- ^ Sinclair, U. (2001). Mental radio. Charlottesville, VA, US: Hampton Roads. Originally published 1930.
- ^ White, R. A. (1964). A comparison of old and new methods of response to targets in ESP experiments. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 58, 21-56.