Thinking Allowed

The Subscript
by Jon Thompson

This month, I want to tell you about a little known, but very interesting condition.

All day long, we have minor, almost unperceivable flashes of inspiration. These tiny pieces of cogitation are the subconscious thinking, and then making us aware of the result. We might be typing away and suddenly realise that we’re late for an appointment, or suddenly realise who the murderer is after ten minutes of our favourite detective show. We don’t consciously think these things through; they just pop into our heads. We’re never privy to the train of thought that happens in these situations, only the result.

Correctly called Subconscious Cognitive Events (SCEs), these insights often take on a far more interesting and even creative role in our lives. While pondering a crossword, for instance, one clue might completely elude us. Suddenly, possibly hours later, the answer rushes up from the subconscious like a steam train, and we wonder why we didn’t think of it earlier. When tying to design the method for a new effect, we might struggle for a while and give up, only to have a viable solution suddenly announce its presence some time later.

A good way of encouraging creative SCEs is to describe the problem you’re working on to yourself in as much detail as possible, then simply forget it. The tendency is for the subconscious to continue mulling it over. If an answer does become available, it’s usually when you least expect it. So, SCEs happen all the time, but for some they can be troublesome and even frightening.

This is because some SCEs are precognitive, in the sense that the subconscious is reasoning not about the answer to a problem, but about future events. We all have tiny, insignificant precognitive SCEs (P-SCEs) when we reason about the outcome of events, or suddenly have a bad feeling about a course of action, and there’s a very good evolutionary principle behind them. Being able to extrapolate events in our imaginations can give us a head start in avoiding danger. For some, however, they happen with alarming clarity and accuracy, and are accompanied by a huge rush of negative emotion, almost like a panic attack.

First written up by the famous parapsychologist J.B Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s, P-SCEs were thought to be simple instances of either panic disorder or the now discredited Freudian notion of “female hysteria”. When taking histories from subjects, Rhine noticed that some would talk of flashes of insight about future events and how they would unfold with frightening clarity. An appendix in one of Rhine’s published papers puts these down to “mean average chance” – coincidence, in other words. This is perhaps because he was interested in conducting repeatable tests that could show a definite ability at work. P-SCEs were vague and could not be predicted. As he wrote in a 1936 article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, “When apparent, they are apparent, but when absent, they are absent. They provide no solid basis for the design of a method to capture the essence of their own ephemeral nature.”

By now however, individuals the world over, perhaps emboldened by the prevailing inter-war spiritualist revival, began to emerge with startling predictions that can now be seen as evidence of people suffering particularly strong P-SCEs. Psychologists and parapsychologists alike now regard one such individual as British medium Helen Duncan.

In Portsmouth, during the run up to D-Day in 1944, Duncan held several public séances in which she passed on information that had been deliberately kept from the public by the Admiralty. One such item was news of the sinking of HMS Barham. The air of secrecy surrounding the invasion of Normandy was such that Duncan could never have known any of the details she passed on. The Admiralty sought to first discredit her, then pressed for charges ranging from conspiracy to contravene the 1735 Witchcraft Act (the last ever case under this legislation, in fact), and causing a public nuisance when it became clear that she wasn’t a Nazi sympathiser. Today, it’s widely regarded that Duncan was in fact a sufferer of what’s become known as “Precognitive Disorder”, the modern term for debilitating P-SCEs. At the time, however, no such label existed and P-SCE’s were little documented outside of Rhine’s brief notes.

Despite here being little more than anecdotal evidence for them, P-SCEs found themselves becoming the plot for several movies, notably the 1956 film “The Unseen House” and 1959’s “Sticks and Stones”, the latter featuring a young Karl Malden as a Chicago cop who faces both charges of corruption and a mob hit man when he can’t explain his high arrest rate. Pulp fiction writer Jeff Lint also used P-SCEs in his work during the 1960s. Notably in his novel, “Prepare to Learn” (Lancer Books, 1966), and again in the now largely forgotten cartoon “Catty and the Major” (NBC, 1965). But it would be another decade before serious study of P-SCEs began, thanks to new brain imaging technology.

The study that changed attitudes to P-SCEs and led to the coining of the term Precognitive Disorder took place at Johns Hopkins University in the summer of 1976. Professor James Marwood and research student Dr. Rowan Black had attended a psychiatric conference in Baltimore earlier that year, at which was presented a paper about a about a young girl called Jess Marley, whose P-SCEs had taken on terrifying proportions. She had been prescribed major anti-psychotic drugs to control the anxiety accompanying her attacks, but these did nothing to dull her flashes of insight.

Marwood and Black had pioneered the use of EEG monitoring to image the electrical activity in the brain. EEG had become widely available after 1974 thanks to the introduction of the cheap 741 operational amplifier integrated circuit, which could amplify the tiny electromagnetic signals generated by cranial sensors. The researchers studied Marley over a three-month period and discovered that the moments leading up to an attack were accompanied by a cascade of activity that took in brain areas known to be implicated in memory, problem solving, and also creative thought. Her subconscious was doing what a few research neurologists had begun to suspect: using what she knew about the present to run forwards to where it might all lead, just like pressing fast forward on a videotape to run time forwards.

This result didn’t set the world of neurology on fire because Precognitive Disorder was thought to be so rare, and so Marwood and Black’s work was soon forgotten. Other than a few lurid headlines reporting that “boffins” had found a part of the brain that made people “psychic”, it was twenty five years before anyone further investigated the condition.

Then in 2001 came a new study conducted at Kings College in London. With the introduction of fMRI, PET and CAT scanners, researchers could finally capture both the structure of the brain, and the patterns of its activity, and play them back in incredible detail. Unable to cope with her condition, Marley had taken her own life in 1983, but another subject, a Scot called Joseph Dean, was proposed for the study.

Dean had been in and out of mental institutions in the south of England for most of his adult life suffering from what had been thought of as paranoid delusions. Now correctly diagnosed as having genuine Precognitive Disorder, the Kings College team, led by Professor Carole Mayall, had the first chance to discover what really causes this strange and often frightening condition.

The scanner data the team produced showed the same sudden leap in activity in the left and right hemispheres described in the 1976 study, but now they could also see clearly the brain structures involved. Dean’s brain had an unusually large corpus callosum. This acts like a conduit for communication between the two hemispheres. In Dean’s case, this became a kind of junction box during an attack, routing data to unexpected areas, almost as if directing traffic. Areas of the brain normally used in isolation, such as those dealing with logic, emotions and time, became used in conjunction, giving rise to the effect.

Dean, an articulate individual despite his condition and general lack of education, was able to give the researchers a clear description of his attacks, which the team found could be induced at will using trans-cranial stimulation. This is a technique in which electro magnets induce tiny currents in precisely controlled areas of the brain. These effectively “switch off” the targeted area, leading to the discovery of the role played by the anterior cingulate cortex in both triggering and moderating precognitive attacks.

At last, there was a good description for Precognitive Disorder that enabled it to make the leap from books on metaphysics and mysticism to medical literature. The condition has even been posited as a possible reason why so many people suffering from delusional illnesses have such accurate premonitions. This has led to the early stages of the development of a family of drugs that help to lessen the (sometimes overwhelming) emotional effect of the attacks on their sufferers.

There’s just one problem with this story, however. I hate to admit this, but I deliberately made all of it up. It took a couple of days to assemble enough facts to hang the lie from. The general details are correct: there is a 741 operational amplifier, corpus callosum and anterior cingulate cortex, a Kings College and a New England Journal of Medicine. There’s even a pulp fiction writer called Jeff Lint, though he’s a fictional character created by the very funny comedy writer Steve Aylett. All the other names and “facts” came from the first things that hit my eye on the bookshelf as I made it all up. There’s a good reason for this subterfuge, however.

I recently re-read Bob Cassidy’s “Fundamentals”, which he begins by talking about creating a plausible character. For this, he says you need something he describes as a ‘subscript’, which he describes as “a detailed description of your stage persona’s powers, how he got them, how they seem to work, and what his limitations are.” This is better known in other fields as a back-story, but the advice is still perfectly sound. When questioned, it gives you the ability to seem to draw upon your past and your memories, rather than having to generate them to fit the situation. It avoids the kinds of inconsistencies that will catch you out. But think about it deeper, and it could also be a solution to the problem of youth in mentalism.

Over the decades, an argument has raged about age. Some argue quite vehemently that younger performers shouldn’t do mentalism simply because they don’t command the authority that makes them credible. Cassidy, however, contradicts this claim: “It would be extremely difficult,” he says, “for an eighteen year old to convincingly portray a parapsychologist or a professor of metaphysics.” Rather than leaving it at that and denying access to mentalism for those under a certain age, he simply suggests creating a subscript that is consistent with whoever the performer actually is.

So, an eighteen year old could conceivably have fallen from his skateboard, suffered a fractured skull, and realised that he could sometimes hear the thoughts of the nurses and doctors who treated him. He could equally have suffered from meningitis or some other serious disease as a child. Or how about a subscript that places him on medication to moderate his Precognitive Disorder, which he foregoes for the purposes of demonstrating the condition...?

Regardless of the claim for the origin of his ability, the idea is always the same. Every step in the history of the subscript is a step in a chain of believable events. Each is well defined and detailed so that when questioned, the facts are there, consistent and waiting for recall, apparently as real memories. An expert in body language might have become fascinated during a demonstration in a sales seminar. If so, he should be able to describe the train of events that beguiled him into seeking out such skills himself, naming the people who inspired and taught him, and how much there is still to learn.

Be careful, however, because this subscript, as Cassidy points out, permanently closes some doors, and so shapes your direction as a mentalist. If, for instance, your persona is precognitive, it’s not credible to also have him bending spoons. After all, the central ability is about being able to see through the mists of time, not command matter.

Jon Thompson