Thoughtography, also called psychic photography, nengraphy or projected thermography, is the claimed ability to produce a visible, usually photographic image, by purely mental means.^[1][2]

In about 1910, during a period of interest in SpiritualismSystem of beliefs and practices intended to establish communication with the spirits of the dead. in Japan, Tomokichi Fukurai, an assistant professor of psychology at Tokyo University began to carry out parapsychology experiments using Chizuko Mifune, Ikuko Nagao, and others as subjects. Fukurai published the results of his experiments with Nagao in his Clairvoyance and Thoughtography (1913), in which he claimed that she was capable of telepathically imprinting images on photographic plates, an ability he called nensha,^[3] from the Japanese nen, meaning “thought, idea” and sha, as in shashin meaning “photograph, photography”.^[2] Fukurai’s work was not well received, forcing him to resign from his position at the university.^[4]

Thoughtography was later popularised by the American psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud in her book The World of Ted Serios: ‘Thoughtographic’ Studies of an Extraordinary Mind (1966), about a Chicago hotel porter who claimed he could make images appear on Polaroid film just by thinking about them. Serios was subsequently exposed as a fraud in an article that appeared in the October 1967 edition of Popular Photography.^[5]

In 1995 the “psychic superstar”,^[6] Uri Geller, began to use a 35 mm camera in his performances. With the lens cap left on, Geller would take pictures of his forehead and then have the photographs developed, claiming that the images had come directly from his mind. The magician James Randi has suggested that Geller’s was a trick done using either a handheld optical device or double exposures.^[5]

See also

• SkotographyProcess by which purported spirit photographs are produced in the course of a séance.