2,000 Greater & Lesser Mysteries/2,000 Greater and Lesser Mysteries.iso/psychol/mys01640.txt

Text File | 1994-06-10 | 8.5 KB | 207 lines

                   SPOON BENDING

An extract from "Travels" by Michael Crichton (1988,
Macmillan; 1989 Pan Books pb.) - copied here without
the permission of the author or publishers, for the
purpose of discussion only.  This is copyright material,
and may not be freely copied, printed, sold or uploaded
elsewhere.




In the spring of 1985, I was invited to attend a spoon
bending party.  An aerospace engineer named Jack Houck had
become interested in the phenomenon, and from time to time
had parties at which people bent spoons.  I was given a
street address in southern California, and told to bring a
half-dozen forks and spoons I didn't care about, since they
would be bent during the evening.

It was a typical suburban California house.  About a hundred
people were there, mostly families with young kids.  The
atmosphere was festive and a little chaotic, with all the
kids running around.  Everybody was giggly.  We were going to
bend spoons!

We all threw the silverware we had brought into the centre of
the floor, where it made a great metal pile. jack Houck then
dumped a carton containing more silverware onto the floor,
and told us what to do.  He said that in his experience, to
bend spoons we needed to create an atmosphere of excitement
and emotional arousal.  He encouraged us to be noisy and
excited.

We were supposed to choose a spoon from the pile and to ask
the spoon, "Will you bend for me?"  If we didn't think the
spoon would respond, we should toss it back into the pile and
choose another.  But if we had a positive feeling about our
chosen spoon, we were instructed to hold the spoon vertically
and shout, "Bend! Bend!"  Once intimidated by being shouted
at, the spoon was to be rubbed gently between our fingers,
and pretty soon it would bend.

That's what Jack Houck said.

People were looking at him pretty skeptically.

The party began: a hundred people selecting spoons and
saying, "Will you bend?" and tossing them back in the pile
if the feeling wasn't right.  Then all around me, I heard
people shouting, "Bend! Bend!" at their chosen spoons.  A
lot of people were laughing.  It was hard not to feel self-
conscious, holding up a spoon and shouting at it.

I was sitting on the floor next to Judith and Anne-Marie.
They had finished shouting at their spoons, and now were
rubbing them between their fingers, but nothing was
happening.  I was also rubbing a spoon, but nothing was
happening for me, either.  I felt foolish.  As we rubbed,
a gloom descended over the three of us.

Rubbing her spoon, Anne-Marie said, "I don't think this is
going to work.  This is silly.  I just don't see how it can
work.  I looked down at her hands.  Her spoon was bending.

"Look, Anne-Marie..."

Anne-Marie laughed.  Her spoon was like rubber.  She easily
twisted the spoon into knots.

Suddenly Judith's spoon began to bend, too.  She was able to
bend the bowl in half.  All around me, spoons were bending.
My spoon remained stiff and solid.  I rubbed it dutifully,
but it wasn't even getting warm.

I felt annoyed.  The hell with it, I thought, I'll bend it
with sheer force.  I tried: the neck of the spoon would bend,
of course, but the bowl itself wouldn't bend.  I was hurting
my fingers trying.  I relaxed.  Perhaps it wasn't going to
happen for me.  jack Houck had said a few people couldn't
bend spoons.  Maybe I was one.

"Congratulations," Judith said to me.

"What?"

"Congratulations."

I looked down.  My spoon had begun to bend.  I hadn't even
realized.  The metal was completely pliable, like soft
plastic.  It wasn't particularly hot either, just slightly
warm.  I easily bent the bowl of the spoon in half, using
only my fingertips.

I put the spoon aside and tried a fork.  After a few moments
of rubbing, the fork twisted like a pretzel.  It was easy.
I bent several more spoons and forks.

Then I got bored.  I didn't do any more spoon bending.  I
went and got coffee and a cookie.  I was now far more
interested in what kind of cookies they had than anything
else.

Of course, spoon bending has been the focus of long-standing
controversy.  Uri-Geller, an Israeli magician who claims
psychic powers, often bends spoons, but other magicians, such
as James Randi, claim that spoon bending isn't a psychic
phenomenon at all, just a trick.

But I had bent a spoon, and I *knew* it wasn't a trick.  I
looked around the room and saw little children, eight or nine
years old, bending large metal bars.  They weren't trying to
trick anybody.  They were just little kids  having a good
time.  Staying up past their bedtimes on a Friday night,
going along with the adults, and doing this silly bending
stuff.

So much for the controversy between magicians, I thought.
Because spoon bending obviously must have some ordinary
explanation, since a hundred people from all walks of life
were doing it.  And it was hard to feel any sort of mystery:
you just rub a spoon for a while and pretty soon it gets
soft, and it bends.  And that's that.

The only thing I noticed is that spoon bending seems to
require a focussed inattention.  You had to try to get it to
bend, and then you had to forget about it.  Maybe talk to
somebody else while you rubbed the spoon.  Or look around the
room.  Change your attention.  That's when it was likely to
bend.  If you kept watching the spoon, worrying over it, it
was less likely to bend.  This inattention took learning, but
you could easily do it.  It was comparable in difficulty to,
say, learning to count off exactly five seconds in your head.
You practiced a few times, and then you could do it.

Why do spoons bend?  jack Houck had theories, but I had long
since decided to concentrate on the phenomenon, and not worry
about the theories.  So I don't know why spoons bend, but it
seems clear that almost anyone could do it.  What was all the
fuss about?

The party broke up about 11.00 pm.  Judith, Anne-Marie, and I
went home, taking our bent spoons with us.  the next day I
tried to bend one of my spoons back into its original shape.
I couldn't do it, but I didn't try very hard.  I showed my
bent spoons to some friends, but not many.  The whole thing
seemed rather ordinary.

A year later I mentioned to an M.I.T. professor that I had
bent spoons.  He frowned in silence for a while.  "There's a
way to bend spoons," he said, "by a trick."

"I think so," I said. "But I don't know the trick."

The professor was silent for a while longer.  "You
*personally* bent the spoons?"

"Yes."

Then he went through the whole thing.  Where did I get the
spoons?  How did I know the spoons had not been previously
"treated"?  Did anyone help me to bend the spoons?  Did
anyone touch me while I was bending, or substitute a bent
spoon into my hands....  He went on like this for a while.
I tried to explain the quality of the room that night, and
how impossible it was that everyone could have been tricked.

"So you believe the spoons bent?"

"Yes."

"Did you investigate why the spoons bent?"

"No," I said.

"You mean you experienced this extraordinary phenomenon and
you didn't try to explain it?"

"No," I said.

"That's very strange," he said.  "I would say that your
behaviour is a pathological denial of what happened to you.
this incredible experience occurs and you do nothing to
investigate it at all?"

"I don't see why it's pathological," I said.  "I don't go
investigating why everything in the world happens.  For
example, I know that, if I bend a wire rapidly, the wire will
get hot and break - but I don't really know *why* that
happens.  I don't think it's my job to rush out and find out
why.  In this case, spoon bending, the room was full of
people doing the same thing, and it seemed very ordinary.
Kind of boring."

In fact, this sense of boredom seems to me often to accompany
"psychic" phenomena.  At first, the event appears exciting
and mysterious, but very quickly it becomes so mundane that
it can no longer hold your interest.  This seems to me to
confirm the idea that so-called psychic or paranormal
phenomena are misnamed.  there's nothing abnormal about them.
On the contrary, they're utterly normal.  We've just forgot-
ten we can do them.  The minute we *do* do them, we recognize
them for what they are, and we think, So what?  Spoon bending
is like doing the laundry, or riding a bicycle.  No big deal.
Not really worth much conversation.