In the 70s of the 19th century, the English physicist William Barrett was the first to try to scientifically test the reality of telepathic communication. And his experiments (with the mental suggestion of taste) were extremely successful. Later, the outstanding French physiologist, Nobel Prize winner Charles Richet took up the telepathic transmission of numbers and words. And who in Russia was the pioneer of such studies?
Mind reading
His name is known. In the spring of 1901, Izvestia of Kiev University published an article by the laboratory assistant of the Physics Department, Yakov Nikolayevich Zhuk, entitled "Transmission of Visual Sensations." It dealt, as the author of the article himself wrote, about "mind reading." The study of the works of foreign scientists allowed him to conclude: the percentage of correct transmission of mental suggestion indicates that "this phenomenon cannot be explained by chance."
Alas, there were a lot of doubters, and Zhuk decided to check the doubts by his own experiments. He conceived a cycle of telepathic experiments with the mental transmission of various drawings. The procedure was straightforward. Dozens of drawings of two kinds were made in advance - simple ones, for example, images of a cross, a heart, a ladder, a rake, and more complex ones - a landscape, a hand, a clock, any animal. The drawings were folded into an envelope made of thick, opaque paper. Before the experiment, the inductor ("emitter" of the image) randomly removed the drawing from the envelope, carefully peered at it, and the second participant in the experiment (the perceptor) tried to reproduce it on a piece of blank paper.
Subtle phenomenon
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Both before and during the experiments, the Beetle thought a lot about the optimal conditions for telepathic communication. Very soon he became convinced how telepathy is a subtle, capricious, unpredictable phenomenon. The environment, the nature of the participants in the experiment, their mood, and even the time of day influenced the result. "The slightest ill health, concern, or just disagreement," Zhuk noted, "greatly interfere with the successful course of the experiments." There were many who wanted to participate in unusual experiments. Some have already encountered telepathy in their lives. For example, Zhuk's colleague A. Sheremetyev told how he once telepathically received an alarming message from a distant village.
Even one academician, a young talented painter Nikolai Losev was a participant in the experiments. Probably, his profession attracted the attention of Ya. N. A beetle who worked with drawings. "Together with several persons," wrote Yakov Nikolaevich, "I have carried out over two hundred experiments under various conditions." He himself was both in the role of the suggestible and in the role of the suggested. While conducting these experiments, the Beetle stumbled upon an extremely curious effect, previously unnoticed by anyone. I came across, one might say, by accident.
Paper "mirror"
Usually the suggested would draw the answer on paper on the table. But there were experiments when the sheet lay on a soft notebook, which the percipient held in his hand. Naturally, the notebook and the piece of paper were bent. The beetle was surprised: all the response drawings in these cases did not at all resemble those given! For example, the drawing of a cross was suggested. In response, a loop was drawn.
A Kiev researcher came up with the happy idea to see what kind of reflection the picture of the cross has in a curved mirror. It turned out that the shape of the loop is almost the same as in the response drawing. And then Zhuk suggested that the mysterious telepathic "rays" were reflected from the curved sheet of paper, as if from a mirror, were distorted and already in this altered form were received by the perceptor. This is why he drew a noose and not a cross.
Having studied more than two hundred answers, Beetle selected 169 for analysis, dividing them into five groups. To the first group he attributed telepathic drawings, the similarity of which with the originals was very great, as he wrote, "as if directly copied from the given ones." To the second group - only to some extent similar to the transmitted. To the third - those where the original picture was drawn incompletely or broken into several parts. The fourth group included drawings, in which only the idea of the task was preserved. Finally, the last, fifth, group was made up of all the unsuccessful answers.
Super mysterious phenomena
Of the 169 drawings, 86, that is, over 51 percent, were considered quite successful. Thus, there were one percent more correct answers than incorrect ones. And this excess, according to Zhuk, testified to the manifestation of a telepathic connection.
University Izvestia, which published an article on telepathy, was addressed to specialists. And although in the same 1901 article by Ya. N. Zhuka came out as a separate print, Yakov Nikolaevich nevertheless decided to publish materials about his experiments in some Petersburg magazine, designed for a wide range of readers. He chose the popular science and literary magazine "Peace of God". In its sixth, June issue of 1902, a new article by Ya. N. Beetle "Mutual communication between organisms".
At that time, Yakov Nikolaevich was no longer a laboratory assistant, but an assistant professor at the Department of Physics at Kiev University, then. is a part-time teacher who taught an independent course. Strictly speaking, his new article was about more than just mind reading. Beetle also wrote in it about such phenomena as clairvoyance, prophetic dreams, the appearance of ghosts, and even divination in mirrors. But, talking about these super-mysterious phenomena, Zhuk tried to find a scientific explanation for them too.
He himself in telepathy adhered to, so to speak, "induction theory." The beetle believed that when the suggestive, inductor, looks at the drawing, the current arising in its optic nerve is excited and induced in all surrounding conductors tuned to resonance. If the optic nerve of the suggested person turns out to be such a conductor, then the latter can experience the same visual sensations as the suggestible. Zhuk believed that with the help of his theory, the riddles of telepathy would be revealed, and at the dawn of the 20th century he urged "to stop mocking at what seems incomprehensible to us at first sight."
The scientist's telepathic experiments did not go unnoticed. At a conference of specialists from the Institute for the Study of the Brain in 1920, Academician V. M. Bekhterev. And already in our time, in the 60s of the last century, they were analyzed and highly appreciated by Professor L. L. Vasiliev, founder of the first laboratory of parapsychology in our country at the Leningrad State University.
It is not known how the fate of the pioneer of Russian telepathy developed further, whether he continued his experiments. Even his portrait has not yet been found. Perhaps the readers know something about Ya. N. Zhuk and will be able to complement our story about this remarkable scientist.