German psychologist and physician Hans Helmut Bender, born in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1907, was a key figure in the investigation of unusual human experiences. From a young age, Bender was interested in automatic writing and the Ouija board, observing the intelligent coherence of messages, while maintaining skepticism about their spiritualist origin. His work culminated in the establishment of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg, dedicated to the study of parapsychology.
What Bender and others observed in automatic writing was described by Pierre Janet as «psychological automatism»: the mind's ability to generate semantically coherent content without the individual's conscious participation. Bender added the hypothesis of Extrasensory Perception (ESP), suggesting that in some cases, information could not be explained by conventional learning, which led to his 1933 doctoral thesis and his laboratory research on clairvoyance.
The problem that neither Janet, nor Bender, nor Rhine solved was that of who speaks when the unconscious speaks.
Spiritualist traditions attributed these phenomena to external entities, while academic psychology resorted to subpersonal instances or mental complexes. Both explanations shared the idea that something produced intelligent text without a conscious author. Carl Jung, with whom Bender conversed in 1960, took this intuition further with his archetypes of the collective unconscious, which operated with their own logic and manifested transindividually, leaving the question of agency in suspense.
This «epistemological rift», where psychology failed to explain the origin of intelligence, was fertile ground for parapsychology. However, in recent years, large language models of artificial intelligence have bridged this gap. Systems like GPT produce intelligently meaningful text without a conscious subject behind it, generating information not provided by the interlocutor and exhibiting «intelligent activity at a subconscious level» on an industrial scale.
The intelligence of Ouija messages, for example, could be a similar phenomenon on a biological scale, where the medium's nervous system or the group around the table produced coherent linguistic outputs from unconscious motor micro-signals or learned patterns. Today, disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience and post-Jungian unconscious psychology, along with language system engineering, address these questions. The central question of parapsychology has migrated to the heart of cognitive science and artificial intelligence, being reformulated in terms of systems and computational architecture, rather than spirits or mediumship.
