WILL HUMANS EVOLVE LEGILIMENCY AND OCCLUMENCY LIKE SNAPE?

The mind is not a book; not according to Professor Severus Snape, the renowned legilimens. The mind cannot simply be unlocked at will and analyzed with ease. Nor were wizards’ thoughts, “etched on the inside of skulls.” Rather, the mind is a psychic onion. It is a complex organ of concentric layers. And yet, those who had mastered the necessary powers could still delve into the minds of their prey.

In the Harry Potter Universe, legilimency is the skill of magically passing through the numerous layers of a wizard’s mind, and properly fathoming what you found. Wizards, like Snape, who adeptly practiced the art of such psychic probing, are known as a legilimens. To muggles, the skill might be called mind reading. But, naturally, practicing wizards regarded the comparison as guileless.

The opposite of legilimency is occlumency. Wizards use occlumency to shield their mind from the intrusion of a legilimens. Voldemort used legilimency widely, both wandlessly and without words, to enter the minds of wizards. Indeed, Voldemort was regarded as the most accomplished legilimens ever, though that was mainly by his death eaters. Nonetheless, Harry had to be sure to master occlumency to hide his mind from Voldemort.

The very word, occlumency, reminds the reader of the occult. The occult (from the Latin word occultus, meaning clandestine, hidden, or secret) is knowledge of the hidden. Though commonly, occult also refers to knowledge of the paranormal, as opposed to knowledge of the measurable, usually referring to science. So, what does science have to say about such occultist practice?

Fantasy of the Mind

Occultist notions of psychic power have been with us for centuries. Had Isaac Newton not been inspired by the occult concept of action at a distance, he might not have developed his theory of gravity. Newton’s use of the occult forces of attraction and repulsion between particles influenced British economist, John Maynard Keynes to suggest that, “Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians.”

The study of the occult is associated with hidden wisdom. For the occultist, such as Newton, it is the study of truth, a deeper and more profound truth that lies beneath the surface. Much fantasy has been written about this sense of a deeper spiritual reality, which is thought to extend beyond pure reason and the physical sciences. Many writers on this topic believe that re-discovered powers based upon such a hidden reality might be developed in the course of our future evolution.

Psi powers is the name given to the full spectrum of mental powers, which are an assumed element of this hidden reality. The name stems from the study of the pseudoscience of parapsychology, and is a widely used term in the fantasy tradition. In the United States, the term was particularly prominent during the “psi boom” that John W. Campbell Jr. promoted in Astounding Science Fiction magazine during the early 1950s. A related term, psionics, derived from combining the psi, signifying parapsychology, with electronics, arose in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Again, Campbell was key. Psionics revolved around the application of electronics to psychical research.

An early instrument used was the Hieronymus machine. Ostensibly, the invention of Dr. Thomas Galen Hieronymus, but promoted widely by Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction editorials, Hieronymus machines were mock-ups of real machines. They allegedly worked by analogy or symbolism, and were directed by psi powers. For example, one could create a receiver or similar device of prisms and vacuum tubes by using simple and cheap cardboard or schematic representations. Through the use of psi powers, such a machine would function like its real equivalent. Campbell claimed that such machines actually did perform this way. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the concept was never taken seriously elsewhere. Still, fantasy writers speculated about a future where man could harness such mental capabilities.

Typical is Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953). The first dawning of a space age suddenly aborts when enormous alien spaceships one day appear above all of the Earth’s major cities. The aliens, the overlords, quickly end the arms race and colonialism. Sound familiar? The idea has been copied in movies many times since. In Childhood’s End, after one hundred years have elapsed in the story, human children start displaying psi powers. They develop telepathy and telekinesis. They become distant from their parents. The overlords’ purpose on Earth is finally revealed. They are in service to the overmind, an amorphous extraterrestrial being of pure energy. The overlords are charged with the duty of fostering humanity’s transition to a higher plane of existence and merger with the overmind.

Facts of the Mind

Reality check. Interestingly, in the preface of a 1990 reprint and partial re-write of Childhood’s End, Clarke attempted to unravel pseudoscience from his extraterrestrial message:

“I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media. Bookstores, newsstands, and airwaves are all polluted with mind-rotting bilge about UFOs, psychic powers, astrology, pyramid energies.”

So, what exactly is the problem with mind reading? And what are the future prospects of humans evolving a type of telepathy? The nearest thing to telepathy at present on our planet is shark sense. Sharks and several other fish have evolved an electro-sensitivity. They use organs called ampullae of Lorenzini to sense spurts of nerve impulses in other fish and worms, as the prey try to bury themselves in seabed sand, away from the predatory shark.

But the reading of thoughts, from brain to brain directly, would need some kind of electromagnetic transmission. And even if there were a potential channel of chatter apart from the electromagnetic transmission, the communicating minds would need to be matching—that is, the identical nerve cell in both brains would have to have the exact same purpose. We already know this is not the case for muggle brains. Not even identical twins, who are commonly conceived to have telepathic powers, have more than most muggles. Even twins have contrasting experiences in their primary years. And these differences program each individual brain with diverse nerve cell links, with numerous types of contrasting connotations. In short, a concept like quidditch will have different nerve nuances from one muggle to another.

The same would go for wizards. Differing brains based on the differing experiences of a lifetime would mean dissimilar mental architectures. Resonance between such minds would make it hard for messages to pass from one wizard to another. Wizard minds would be as different from one another as muggle minds are.

For muggles, technological telepathy might prove more promising. In the future, we might be able to develop a form of psionic wetware—computer technology in which the muggle brain is linked to artificial systems. An internal modem, for example, might make it possible to send messages to another device, planted in another head. This second device would then relay the missive to the recipient. And, to those who knew no better, it might look like telepathy from the outside!