Santiago Ramón y Cajal is known worldwide for his contributions to neurology and neuroscience . He was deservedly awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his pioneering contribution to these sciences. His humanist side and his interest in philosophy or literature are also well known. In fact, in 1905, he published several short stories titled Holiday Tales . But less well known, although no less important, was his curiosity about disciplines as picturesque as hypnosis, spiritism or parapsychology , and which allow us to speak of Ramón y Cajal as a skeptic. Not in vain, the suggestive subtitle of the aforementioned Holiday Tales is: Pseudo- scientific narratives .
Ramón y Cajal, distrustful
Let’s go back to 1875. Cajal is 23 years old and returns from Cuba to Spain on a transatlantic liner bound for Santander in which he is going to live an experience — described by himself in Memorias de mi vida — which, due to its anecdote, is no less revealing of his character and skeptical spirit.
On the ship he meets an advantage player who used to win at card games with his cheating. His “trade” consisted of continually coming and going from Spain to Cuba to fleece the unwary in the scams that were organized during the trip. The gambler offers Cajal to be his partner . It explains how you mark cards during play, allowing you to spot them later and, when the time is right, place a winning bet. He would only have to make a strong bet at the time the player gave him those winning cards. The trap was set for Cajal to win , and then the profits would be shared. Everything was concealed as it was not the cheater who won.
However, Ramón y Cajal declines the offer of his new “friend” . «I thought, and I also think, that there is only one rational and sure source of economic prosperity: intense work, fertilized by intellectual culture. Far from pitying the loser in gambling, I regard him as a frustrated swindler, or a greedy slacker. His honesty almost always ends when he loses the last penny.
Skepticism led Cajal to realize that the gambler had tried to cajole him with the classic “hunted hunter” trick , also the basis of other scams such as the famous “la estampita”. The victim (or cousin), believing to earn a lot of money easily by cheating others, spends a significant amount that he never sees again.
“Soon I congratulated myself on my mistrust. Several rich merchants, invited like me to coincide in the stakes with the aforementioned hook, were plucked. The unfortunates had liquidated twenty years of honest work and austere savings in a few timba sessions. We had to pay for one of them to the boat that took him to the dock.
That “distrust” (as he calls it) or skeptical intuition that saved him from going bankrupt on his return from Cuba was perhaps what later led him to investigate other types of phenomena on his own, such as hypnosis, spiritism or parapsychology. If what this gambler offered was too impressive to be true, the claims of hypnotists, spiritualists or parapsychologists also seemed too extraordinary to be believed without further ado. The skeptic Ramón y Cajal could not help but check it for himself.
Spiritism and parapsychology
Starting in 1875, Ramón y Cajal began his doctorate and his research. But not everything was formal research in the doctorate. During his stay in Valencia he will develop another informal investigation, although no less rigorous, regarding hypnosis, spiritism and parapsychology. An investigation that led him to open his own home to mediums and psychics to verify his extraordinary claims in the first person. He himself recounts them in the second part of his Memories of my life (chapter III) :« To study them methodically, several friends, some of them members of the Casino de la Agricultura, organized a psychological research committee. And we inaugurate our investigations with the search and capture of suitable subjects. Through my house, converted for that purpose into a social address, paraded very remarkable species of hysterics, neurasthenics, maniacs and even accredited spiritualist mediums».
Today it may seem strange that a scientist like Ramón y Cajal would be interested in these questions. But you have to understand the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The positivist philosophy of the time placed all the weight of knowledge on the positive sciences (hence its name), especially physics, and was suspicious of all disciplines that did not conform to this positivist model. A model that requires observation, experimentation and falsification and that questions religion and the supernatural. At the same time, the rise of phenomena such as hypnosis (Mesmer, Charcot…), psychoanalysis (Freud), spiritualism (Alan Kardec and the Fox sisters) and other parapsychological phenomena took place. All will attract scientific interest about their credibility and will provoke an interest in investigating them empirically, that is, skeptically. In fact, skepticism comes from the Greek skeptikós which means rigorous investigation. Cajal was one of those scientists who did not escape the temptation to see for himself what part of science and what part of trickery was in them. Even more so given that the supposed explanation of these phenomena referred to faculties or powers of the brain, the object of attention of the Spanish.
hypnosis
It was one of the practices studied and applied by Ramón y Cajal. At that time it was also known as artificial somnambulism or suggestion . It was on the rise due to figures such as Mesmer, Charcot, Liébeault, Bernheim or Beaunis, and linked to theories such as animal magnetism. The investigation led Cajal to separate the wheat from the chaff. Hypnosis was a real phenomenon, albeit fraught with myths and falsehoods that hypnotists at fairgrounds and spectacles and pseudoscientists in white coats took advantage of. Cajal himself practiced hypnosis and attested to his achievements , although expressed in the language of the time and now obsolete (“drowsiness, dream…”): catalepsy, hallucinations, amnesia, anesthesia by suggestion in childbirth, etc. .
However, Ramón y Cajal’s conclusions were ambivalent: the effects of hypnotic suggestion, which, when used well, could be effective in a controlled context, could well be used for perverse purposes by those who had no moral qualms about doing so. «I declare that the well-known experiments of suggestion caused me a double feeling of astonishment and disappointment: astonishment when recognizing the reality of phenomena of cerebral automatism estimated until then as farce and trompe l’oeil of circus magnetizers; and painful disappointment when considering that the much praised human brain, the ‘masterpiece of creation’, suffers from the enormous defect of suggestibility; by virtue of which, even the highest intelligence can, on occasion, become, through the ministry of skillful suggestors, conscious or unconscious (orators, politicians, warriors, apostles, etc.), a humble and passive instrument of delusions, ambitions or greed» .
Ramón y Cajal’s hypnotic abilities reached such a level that he himself had to take action : «The fame of certain miraculous cures for relapses in hysterics and neurasthenics spread rapidly throughout the city. My consultation was attended by swarms of unbalanced and even raving madmen. A propitious occasion would have been that to create a large clientele for me, if my character and my tastes had allowed it. But, my curiosity satisfied, I discharged my patients, to whom, naturally, I did not usually pass the note of fees: I was paid enough if they docilely lend themselves to my experiments».
Empirical and applied research on hypnosis has continued after Ramón y Cajal picking up his witness. Interestingly, also in Valencia, through the Hypnosis Working Group of the Official Association of Psychologists of this Autonomous Community, led by Antonio Capafons and continued by the Association for the Advancement of Experimental and Applied Hypnosis (AAHEA).
the pseudosciences
If research with hypnosis gave good results, as truth was separated from myth, other phenomena such as spiritism and parapsychology in their various manifestations did not have the same luck. « During those epic investigations into morbid psychology, only those extraordinary phenomena bordering on spiritualism tenaciously resisted me, namely: vision through opaque bodies, sensory transposition, mental suggestion, telepathy, etc .» .
Ramón y Cajal was not able to observe a single one of the alleged paranormal phenomena under laboratory conditions , despite the tenacity with which he devoted himself to trying. His conclusion was to reject them outright: “Perhaps they failed because they were impossible? I think so today. The followers of Allan Kardec [founder of modern spiritualism] and the supporters of radiant brain power will perhaps say that I was unlucky. However, I put my best will into my observations and spared no expense or diligence to procure for myself the subjects endowed with the most transcendental virtues. But it was enough for me to attend a session of divination, mental suggestion, double vision, communication with the spirits, demonic possession, etc., so that, in the light of the simplest criticism, all the wonderful properties of mediums or hysterical dowsers.”
Another of his conclusions regarding these alleged paranormal phenomena and those who believe them is very significant. « What was admirable in those sessions was not the subjects, but the incredible ingenuity of the assistants, who took as supernatural manifestations certain nervous phenomena (autosuggestion above all) of the mediums, or the mere coincidence of facts, or the effects of mental habit, or, in short, the easy and well-known tricks of Cumberlandism [muscular reading], so exhibited later in the theaters».
The skeptical wake of Ramón y Cajal
The skeptical interest in investigating what Ramón y Cajal called «morbid psychology» has continued after him with other skeptics. It was James Randi who decades later picked up the baton by offering his famous million-dollar challenge to whoever demonstrated some paranormal phenomenon under laboratory conditions. Previously, he had already denounced parapsychology, or rather malpractice when studying it scientifically, with what he called the Alpha Project : magicians trained by himself (such as Banachek) who deceived scientists into believing that their magic tricks magic were true paranormal phenomena. Years before, Ramón y Cajal had already warned of the same in the context of the examination of spiritism. Previous beliefs can deceive even a scientist and make him accept as true what are nothing but mere frauds: «Despite the scientific apparatus with which they were observed, we suspect the supernatural phenomena reported by W. Crookes, Zöllner, Flammarion, Lombroso, W. James, Luciani, etc., deceived by Eusepia Paladino and other no less cunning mediums. These falls of mentalities that, in the domains of science, have shown to possess critical faculties of the first order, show how dangerous it is to approach the study of mediumistic phenomena —so prone to fraud and trickery— with the prejudice of the communicability of the dead with the living. Whenever such a state of belief is lacking, the ingenious tricks of mediums are surprised even by the least astute observers.
James Randi, founder of the main North American skeptical association, the CSICOP —similar to the Psychological Research Committee that Cajal formed for his research in Valencia—, managed to unmask Uri Geller and many others. The legacy of both has been developing for years in Spain by associations such as ARP (Society for the Advancement of Critical Thinking and Skeptic Circle).
Andrés Carmona Campo has a degree in Philosophy and in Social and Cultural Anthropology.
