Book Reviews

Review of Beyond Telepathy. An Exploration of the Personal World of Your Own Mind by the Biographer and Mentor of Uri Geller. By Andrija Puharic, London, Pan Books, 1975

Notes and Queries, October 1976, p. 478

   This book was first published by Double­day in 1962. The long subtitle might have been dropped on republication, since the authenticity of the phenomena pro­duced by Uri Geiler is now, to say the least, controversial. A similar lack of tact is shown elsewhere, and is to be regretted in a work that claims to be scientific. So­called observations and experiments, e.g. the materializations produced by Sir William Crookes and the levitation of D. D. Home, whose fraudulence has been established beyond reasonable doubt, are quoted in evidence as if they could still be thought valid. And no mention, in the text or in the extensive bibliographies at the ends of the several chapters, is made of the work of Hansel or of any of the other critics of telepathy and its ilk.

   Nevertheless, the book is well worth reading. The author is a medical man, a neurologist, and he makes no mistakes in his neurophysiology. It is on the basis of this special knowledge that he advances a general theory of the nature of psi phenomena. To be able to transmit tele­pathically one must be in a highly adrener­gic state, i.e. in a particular chemical state of the brain, highly aroused and excited. To be able to receive a telepathic transmis­sion one must be in the opposite, relaxed, chojinergic phase. The all‑embracing theory hypothesizes a psi plasma which is mathematically related to quantum theory, subatomic events, gravitation, and waves travelling at velocities in excess of the speed of light. Specific predictions can be and are made, e.g. that astronauts in free fall, under zero gravity, will show, if tested, a very greatly enhanced telepathic receptivity, especially to communications from ,a trans­mitting agent subjected to high gravity in a centrifuge.

   The book is presented with every deference to scholarship, with long notes and bibliographies at the end of every chapter, 87 pages of appendices, author index and general index.