Note 28 — AUTOMATIC WRITING, OR THE RATIONALE OF PLANCHETTE. BY FREDERICK W. H. MYERS.

In a paper on “The Stages of Hypnotism” in Mind for October 1884, Mr. E. Gurney, describes an experiment where this persistent influence of an impressed idea could in a certain sense, be detected in the muscular system. “A boy’s arm being flexed” (and the boy having been told that he cannot extend it), “he is offered a sovereign to extend it. He struggles till he is red in the face; but all the while his triceps is remaining quite flaccid, or if some rigidity appears in it, the effect is at once counteracted by an equal rigidity in the biceps. The idea of the impossibility of extension—i.e., the idea of continued flexion—is thus acting itself out, even when wholly rejected from the mind.”