Thoughtography

Thoughtography, also called projected thermography, psychic photography, nengraphy or nensha (Japanese: 念写), is the claimed ability to "burn" images from one's mind onto surfaces such as photographic film by psychic means. While the term "thoughtography" has been in the English lexicon since 1913, the more recent term "projected thermography" is a neologism that originated from the 2002 U.S. film The Ring, a remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film Ring.

Thoughtography (also known as psychic photography) first emerged in the late 19th century due to the influence of spirit photography. Thoughtography has no connection with Spiritualism, which distinguishes it from spirit photography. One of the first books to mention "psychic photography" was the book The New Photography (1896) by Arthur Brunel Chatwood. In the book Chatwood described experiments where the "image of objects on the retina of the human eye might so affect it that a photograph could be produced by looking at a sensitive plate." The book was criticized in a review in Nature.

The psychical researcher Hereward Carrington in his book Modern Psychical Phenomena (1919) wrote that many psychic photographs were revealed to be fraudulent produced by substitution and manipulation of the plates, double-printing, double-exposure and chemical screens. However, Carrington also stated he believed some of the photographs to be genuine. The term "thoughtography" was first introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century by Tomokichi Fukurai.

Skeptics and professional photographers consider psychic photographs to be faked or the result of flaws in the camera or film, exposures, film-processing errors, lens flares, flash reflections or chemical reactions.

Around 1910, during a period of interest in Spiritualism in Japan, Tomokichi Fukurai, an assistant professor of psychology at Tokyo University began pursuing parapsychology experiments using Chizuko Mifune, Ikuko Nagao, and others as subjects. Fukurai published results of experiments with Nagao that alleged she was capable of telepathically imprinting images on photo plates, which he called nensha. When journalists found irregularities, Nagao's credibility was attacked, and there was speculation that her later illness and death was caused by distress over criticism. In 1913, Fukurai published Clairvoyance and Thoughtography. The book was criticized for a lack of scientific approach and his work disparaged by the university and his colleagues. Fukurai eventually resigned in 1913.

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