Mead believed her own interest in psychical research might be connected with her family history. Mead’s longtime friend Patricia Grinager wrote (1999, p. 195): “Two relatives in the family of her father’s mother possessed psychic abilities: her great-grandmother Priscilla Rees Ramsay and her great-aunt Louisiana Priscilla Ramsay Sanders. Residents who lived around the Winchester, Ohio area a century ago spread word that this mother-daughter team diagnosed illnesses, read people’s thoughts, and levitated tables. Margaret herself had been what her Ramsay kin called ‘a psychic child.’” Mead thought she might be a reincarnated representative of her pair of psychic ancestors (Grinager 1999, p. 195).
Throughout her life, Mead consulted various mediums, psychics, and healers. for example, before she married Gregory Bateson in 1936, she consulted a Harlem medium about him. The medium approved (Howard 1984, p. 187). Toward the end of her life, Mead spent a lot of time with famous psychic Jean Houston and a chilean healer named carmen de Barraza. The first time Mead, accompanied by Houston, met de Barraza, she asked, “do you see more people in the room than we do?” de Barraza said she could. Mead continued, “do you see the tall one and the short one with me?” de Barraza said yes. Mead explained that these were her spirit guides, and that seers in all the tribes she had ever studied had noticed them (Howard 1984, p. 412).
At a conference on holistic medicine in Los Angeles, held shortly before her death, Margaret Mead said: “When I went away to college, I discovered that organized established science objected to the exploration of psychic abilities. Our culture suppresses them. It’s just the opposite in Bali. The Balinese indulge every form of psychic activity: trance, prophecy, finding lost objects, identifying thieves, the whole range from trivial to important” (Grinager 1999, p. 252). Mead went on to say that we should study these capabilities and perhaps find ways to apply them in modern society.
John G. taylor (mathematical Physicist)
In 1974, dr. John G. Taylor, a mathematical physicist at the University of London, appeared with Uri Geller on a BBc television show. Geller had become famous for his ability to bend and move metal in ways that seemed impossible in light of ordinary physics. Taylor’s initial encounter with Geller was deeply upsetting. In his book Superminds, Taylor (1975, p. 49) said: “One clear observation of Geller in action had an overpowering effect on me. I felt as if the whole framework with which I viewed the world had suddenly been destroyed. I seemed very naked and vulnerable, surrounded by a hostile, incomprehensible universe. It was many days before I was able to come to terms with this sensation. Some of my colleagues have even declined to face up to the problem by refusing to attend the demonstrations of such strange phenomena. That is a perfectly understandable position, but one which does not augur well for the future of science.” faced with the challenge of the Geller phenomena, Taylor decided to confront the challenge directly.
On february 2, 1974, Taylor performed carefully supervised tests with Geller in a laboratory. The results were mixed. Geller tried unsuccessfully to bend a metal rod that he was not allowed to touch. Some metal strips, to be used in the experiments, were lying nearby on a tray. “It was then observed,” said Taylor (1975, p. 51), “that one of the aluminum strips lying on the tray was now bent, without, as far as could be seen, having been touched either by Geller or by anyone else in the room.” Taylor then tested Geller’s famous spoon-bending abilities, using one of his own spoons as the test object. Taylor (1975, p. 51) reported: “I held the bowl end while Geller stroked it gently with one hand. After about twenty seconds the thinnest part of the stem suddenly became soft for a length of approximately half a centimeter and then the spoon broke in two. The ends very rapidly hardened up again—in less than a second . . . Here, under laboratory conditions, we had been able to repeat this remarkable experiment. Geller could simply not have surreptitiously applied enough pressure to have brought this about, not to mention the pre-breakage softening of the metal. Nor could the teaspoon have been tampered with—it had been in my own possession for the past year.”
Later in this series of experiments, Geller bent an aluminum strip without touching it. The strip was inside a wire mesh tube. In another experiment, Taylor found that Geller was able to bend a brass strip by ten degrees simply by touching it. He applied a pressure of half an ounce to the strip, but the strip bent in a direction opposite to that of the pressure. Taylor also noticed that the needle of the pressure scale was also bent in the course of the experiment. In another experiment, Geller attempted to bend a copper strip without touching it. He was also attempting to influence a thin wire. nothing happened at first. “We broke off in order to start measuring his electrical output,” said Taylor (1975, p. 160), “but turning round a few moments later I saw that the strip had been bent and the thin wire was broken. Almost simultaneously I noticed that a strip of brass on the other side of the laboratory had also become bent . . . I pointed out to Geller what had happened, only to hear a metallic crash from the far end of the laboratory, twenty feet away. There, on the floor by the far door, was the bent piece of brass. Again I turned back, whereupon there was another crash. A small piece of copper which had earlier been lying near the bent brass strip on the table had followed its companion to the far door. Before I knew what had happened I was struck on the back of the legs by a Perspex tube in which had been sealed an iron rod. The tube had also been lying on the table. It was now lying at my feet with the rod bent as much as the container would allow.” In the course of his experiments, Taylor observed other strange happenings, such as pieces of metal scooting across the lab floor, from one wall to another, and a compass needle rotating. Taylor (1975, p. 163) said, “These events seemed impossible to comprehend; I should certainly have dismissed reports of them as nonsense if I had not seen them happen for myself. I could always take the safe line that Geller must have been cheating, possibly by putting me into a trance . . . Yet I was perfectly well able at the time to monitor various pieces of scientific equipment while these objects were ‘in flight.’ I certainly did not feel as if I was in an altered state of consciousness.”
Taylor also went on to conduct experiments with a number of children who claimed to have metal-bending powers like those of Geller. He found that they were able to bend metal under laboratory conditions (Taylor 1975, p. 79). In one set of experiments, Taylor put straightened paper clips in a box. Two boys were able to make the straightened clips fold into s-shaped curves. Straightened clips were also folded without contact in other experiments. The children were also able to deflect compass needles and rotate metal rods. Taylor (1975, p. 89) thought that electromagnetism offered the best possible explanation, although he was not able to demonstrate it conclusively. He proposed that the mind was an electromagnetic entity that occupied not only the neural circuitry of the brain but an electromagnetic aura that extended outside the skull (Taylor 1975, p. 155).
In his next book, Science and the Supernatural (1980), Taylor underwent a strange transformation. Reviewing various paranormal phenomena, he summarily dismissed most of them, except for remote viewing and telepathy. Acknowledging that the evidence for them seemed strong, he said that this evidence nevertheless contradicted “modern scientific understanding.” How could this contradiction be resolved? Taylor (1980, p.