By Prof. Si-Chen Lee
1. A finger reading camp held at Stanford University
From September 2002 to February 2003 I spent half a year as a visiting professor at Stanford University. Besides the warm California sun and the mild climate, I got to see a good many friends and students I had not met in more than twenty years. Back when I graduated, most of my classmates went abroad for further study and scattered across the United States, so meeting up was never easy. Today's students are the reverse: most of them stay in Taiwan. Times change, and the change is itself a witness to Taiwan's economic growth over these two decades, which has greatly narrowed the gap with the United States.
When I came home twenty-one years ago after finishing my studies and joined the faculty of my own department, going abroad was still very much the fashion, and most of the students I taught in those first years left too. Many of them now have fine careers and achievements in the United States. In the very Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford where I was visiting, one of my former students was a professor: Prof. Meng, whose laboratory was in the same building as mine, so we ran into each other every week.
These friends and students knew I was doing research into "exceptional human functions" and wanted to hear more, so two public talks were arranged in the Bay Area on qigong, finger reading, psychokinesis, the information field and deities. Both were held in Chinese restaurants — dinner first, then the talk — with more than ten tables and over a hundred people each time. Many friends and students who had not seen one another in years met again on those evenings, and the response afterwards was broadly good. Prof. Meng and her classmate KC were clearly captivated by the phenomenon of finger reading, and kept pressing me to run a finger reading training camp in the Bay Area as well. Their classmates' children were mostly between 6 and 13, exactly the age at which the ability most readily appears. To be honest I was not very keen: these children came from family backgrounds that were far too alike, unlike the wide range of children trained in Taiwan, and I suspected the proportion who developed the ability would be low. KC would not let it go. The emails kept coming, and she had most of the logistics ready. It was only a week before the planned start, while I was back in Taiwan chairing an international conference, that we settled on the venue: a meeting room in Stanford's Department of Electrical Engineering.
2. A startling success rate
KC's classmate Zhong-He took charge of signing the children up, and he mobilized his classmates' children along with the students in his wife's music class — 21 in all, as shown in Figure 1. Every one of them had been born in the United States, and most had studied some Chinese, though not a great deal. Some, like Kevin, thought it sounded boring and did not want to come; his mother coaxed and pleaded to no effect, until she hit on an idea and told him it was a Jedi Camp. Kevin was a Star Wars fan, and the moment he heard he would be trained as a Jedi he agreed happily, arriving at the camp full of hope. My training follows a standard procedure. First, half an hour introducing the phenomenon of finger reading to the parents and the children, to build their confidence; then ten minutes of sitting meditation to let the children quiet down; then an attempt at forming images in the mind, to gauge their capacity for imagination. After that the training begins.
To my surprise, five children — Kevin among them — showed the ability on the very first day. Word travels fast in the Bay Area, and over the following days some parents heard about it and brought their children along, while others had to drop out. Across the four days, only fifteen children attended from beginning to end. Nine of them displayed the ability to read with their fingers: a rate of sixty percent, far above the best record of thirty-five percent from my training in Taiwan, and hard for me to believe. The parents talked of nothing else, astonished — so finger reading was real after all. And I suddenly realized that I was Yoda, the master of the Jedi in Star Wars.
Prof. Meng decided to take it on and carry the training and research forward. A seed sown by accident in America had begun to sprout. Kevin was the strongest of them all; according to his mother, his behavior and his attention changed a great deal from then on — he could concentrate on mathematics and made fewer slips, and he asked to sit in meditation every day of his own accord. A new Jedi had been born.
3. Discovering how a magnetic field affects finger reading
After I finished my visiting appointment at Stanford in February 2003 and returned home, KC went on training Kevin, the most able of the children, at weekends. In mid-March she sent me an email describing a strange finding: when Kevin held a magnet in his hand while reading with his fingers, the image he saw in his mind was enlarged. I found this both surprising and exciting. In nearly ten years of research into finger reading it had never occurred to me that the phenomenon might interact with a physical magnetic field. To test the observation, on 20 and 23 April 2003 I invited Miss T and young Miss Hsu respectively to repeat the experiment. Miss T's results are shown in Figures 2(a) and 2(b). Sure enough, with no magnetic field the characters seen by the third eye felt about the same size as ordinary characters; but when the sample was pressed against the S pole, the characters seen were enlarged, and against the N pole they shrank slightly. When the field was raised to 4KG (4,000 gauss), the numbers swelled beyond the edge of the third eye's screen. Figure 3 shows young Miss Hsu's results, and they agree: with no field the characters felt about normal size; pressed on the S pole they were enlarged; pressed on the N pole they shrank slightly. These experiments indicated that the S pole enlarges the characters seen by the third eye. What is the principle behind it?
4. The principle behind the magnetic effect
In future work I will set out evidence to argue that the third eye the brain opens during finger reading bores into the void to scan the virtual image of an object, so that the field of the magnet's S pole would evidently bore into the void as well and interact with the third eye there. A magnet's field is produced by the spin of magnetic atoms. On this account spin angular momentum drills a hole in real space-time, and because the magnetic moment points in the opposite direction to the spin angular momentum, the S pole faces the hole and part of its field passes into the void, while the N pole faces away from it, so its field stays largely confined to real space-time and interacts less with the third eye.
