‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I should have told you. All these phenomena seem to be linked to an alpha-rhythm in the brain of around eight to twelve cycles. It seems that people who can do telepathy and telekinesis and thing like that are people who can more or less organize their alpha-waves. Sometimes it can be induced by hypnosis, sometimes it just occurs naturally when one is falling asleep or in a half-aware condition when awakened from sleep too soon; adolescents and menopausal women can often induce it by thinking unclean thoughts with their eyes shut. Mediums who insist on half-darkness and silence and so forth during their parlour-séances are usually, if they’re at all genuine, fumbling for conditions in which they can depress their alpha-waves to the required level, whether they know it or not. I suspect that many “fake” mediums are women who are genuinely receptive at times but do not understand how to set up the conditions properly and so fudge the results when it doesn’t really work.’

I was a little taken aback. Not much of this made a great deal of sense to me, but it certainly didn’t sound like the ramblings of a drunkard.

‘They’ve done a lot of work on this in the Soviet Union,’ he went on, ‘and I must say that it does rather look as though their approach has been rather more intelligent than the Americans. I mean, they feel that things which are clearly outside the laws of science as at present understood cannot be examined by standard scientific methodology. Like trying to weigh neutrons on a grocer’s scales, do you see.’