An article in Psychology Today described a study of the brains of mediums when they were engaged in psychography, or automatic writing. The mediums were scanned using single photon emission computed tomograhy (SPECT). The results were surprising.
The skilled psychographers displayed reduced activity in the left hippocampus (limbic system), right superior temporal gyrus, and frontal lobe areas while engaging in psychography compared to their normal writing. These frontal lobe regions are typically responsible for reasoning, language generation, problem-solving, and planning. Consequently, the experienced mediums seemed to experience diminished focus, decreased self-awareness, and altered consciousness during the psychography process.
An unexpected finding was that the complexity scores of the content mediums produced were higher across the board when compared to the control writing samples. Particularly, the more experienced mediums achieved higher complexity scores, which would typically require more activity in the frontal and temporal lobes. However, counterintuitively, these experienced mediums displayed reduced activity in those areas during psychography.
Another finding was that less experienced mediums exhibited the same heightened activity in the frontal lobe regions during psychography that they experienced in their regular writing. This suggests that the less experienced mediums might have been trying too hard, indicating that they were still developing their psychographic abilities.
In essence, these findings challenge conventional expectations, indicating that experienced mediums can produce highly complex psychographed content with less brain activity in the frontal and temporal lobes, while less experienced mediums require more frontal lobe activity and effort to achieve similar complexity levels. “. . . the low level of activity in the experienced mediums’ frontal lobes should have resulted in vague, unfocused, obtuse garble. Instead, it resulted in more complex writing samples than they were able to produce while not entranced.”
