- Source: Mental Radio
- Source: Mental radio
Mental Radio: Does it work, and how? (1930) was written by the American author Upton Sinclair and initially self-published. This book documents Sinclair's test of psychic abilities of Mary Craig Sinclair, his second wife, while she was in a state of profound depression with a heightened interest in the occult. She attempted to duplicate 290 pictures which were drawn by her brother. Sinclair claimed Mary successfully duplicated 65 of them, with 155 "partial successes" and 70 failures. In spite of the author's best efforts, the experiments were not conducted in a controlled scientific environment.
The German edition included a preface written by Albert Einstein who admired the book and praised Sinclair's writing abilities. The psychical researcher Walter Franklin Prince conducted an independent analysis of the results in 1932. He believed that telepathy had been demonstrated in Sinclair's data. Prince's analysis was published as "The Sinclair Experiments for Telepathy" in Part I of Bulletin XVI of the Boston Society for Psychical Research in April, 1932 and was included in the addendum for the book.
Critical reception
On the subject of occult and pseudoscience topics, Sinclair has been described as credulous. Martin Gardner wrote "As Mental Radio stands, it is a highly unsatisfactory account of conditions surrounding the clairvoyancy tests. Throughout his entire life, Sinclair has been a gullible victim of mediums and psychics." Gardner also wrote the possibility of sensory leakage during the experiment had not been ruled out:
In the first place, an intuitive wife, who knows her husband intimately, may be able to guess with a fair degree of accuracy what he is likely to draw—particularly if the picture is related to some freshly recalled event the two experienced in common. At first, simple pictures like chairs and tables would likely predominate, but as these are exhausted, the field of choice narrows and pictures are more likely to be suggested by recent experiences. It is also possible that Sinclair may have given conversational hints during some of the tests—hints which in his strong will to believe, he would promptly forget about. Also, one must not rule out the possibility that in many tests, made across the width of a room, Mrs. Sinclair may have seen the wiggling of the top of a pencil, or arm movements, which would convey to her unconscious a rough notion of the drawing.
When Mrs. Sinclair was tested by William McDougall under better precautions the results were less than satisfactory.
References
Further reading
Leon Harris (1975). Upton Sinclair, American Rebel. Crowell.
The mental radio is a fictional object that features prominently in the Golden Age and some later adventures of DC Comics superheroine Wonder Woman. It was created by William Moulton Marston as an allegory for intuitive telepathy, or ESP, which he believed was a real phenomenon.
Fictional history
The mental radio device was created by the scientifically advanced Amazon nation on Paradise Island. It first appeared in Sensation Comics #3.
It was frequently used throughout the Golden Age as a means for Wonder Woman to maintain communications with her mother and fellow Amazons on Paradise Island and for Wonder Woman's allies Steve Trevor and Etta Candy to communicate in times of distress.
The mental radio was needed primarily as a receiver. Wonder Woman and her allies were shown to be able to broadcast their distress calls even when they were nowhere near a mental radio, but they had to sit down in front of a mental radio device in order to receive telepathic transmissions.
Although the character most frequently shown to broadcast distress calls via mental radio was Wonder Woman, typically in the form of an "electronic" word balloon with a tail emanating from her forehead, mental radio broadcasting was not originally considered a feature of her tiara but was instead something even Steve Trevor and Etta Candy could do, with electronic thought balloons similarly pointing at their foreheads.
Mental radios featured prominently in a plot by Nazi agent Fausta Grables to steal a device in order to eavesdrop on Wonder Woman and her companions.
The mental radio appeared less frequently after the Golden Age. By the later pre-Crisis adventures, only Wonder Woman was shown to possess a mental radio outside of Paradise Island, and it was installed in her invisible jet.
References
Brown, Matthew J. "Love Slaves and Wonder Women: Radical Feminism and Social Reform in the Psychology of William Moulton Marston", (Uncopyrighted manuscript) (2016): 1-39.
Jett, Brett. "Who Is Wonder Woman?", (Manuscript) (2009): "Allegories", pp 1-71.
Lamb, Marguerite. "Who Was Wonder Woman? Long-ago LAW alumna Elizabeth Marston was the muse who gave us a superheroine". Boston University Alumni Magazine, Fall 2001.
Valcour, Francinne. "Manipulating The Messenger: Wonder Woman As An American Female Icon", Dissertation (2006): 1–372.