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Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages To Facilitated Communication

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There aren't many good books illustrating the complexity of our nonverbal communication in a practical way. They usually break down into simplistic popular books claiming that specific gestures mean specific things, and then scholarly but tedious tomes about the myriad factors in nonverbal communication. This book fills part of that gap very nicely with practical real-life examples of ways we communicate and act without explicit awareness of what we are doing. And most importantly, it discusses the implications of these phenomena. Many things that seem mysterious or even supernatural can be elegantly and usefully understood in terms of sophisticated forms of communication without conscious awareness. This book thankfully goes well beyond the crude 'debunking' of pendulums and calculating horses, and shows a real appreciation for mechanisms underlying a number of remarkable effects. The only weakness, as an academic text, is that the book does not cover some of the pertinent recent research, but its moderate scope is part of what makes it so readable compared to other similar texts.

Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages to Facilitated Communication by Herman H. Spitz is a seminal and scholarly work organized into several major chapters: "Facilitated Communications"; "Involuntary Muscle Movements, Clever Hans, and Lady"; "Clever Hans and Facilitated Communication"; "Involuntary Muscle Movements in Other Phenomena"; "Scientific Studies of Involuntary Muscle Movements"; "Additional Psychological Mechanisms Relevant for Understanding Facilitator Behavior"; and "Confirming False Beliefs". Justifiably considered to be the quintessential work on "facilitated behavior" brought about by unconscious muscle movements that gave rise to severe misunderstandings of such commonplace metaphysical phenomena and activities as the Ouija boards, mind-reading, divining rods, and automatic writing, Nonconscious Movements is a welcome contribution to the psychology underlying the processes of all manner of so-called spiritually facilitated or metaphysically enhanced communications.