Psychometry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For information about the psychology discipline that deals with the measurement and assessment of cognitive abilities and traits, such as intelligence and personality, please see psychometrics.

For information about the measurement of the heat and water vapor properties of air, please see psychrometrics.

In the field of parapsychology, psychometry is defined as a form of extra-sensory perception wherein a psychic holds an object in his or her hands in order to obtain information about the object or its owner. In recent times the term has been superseded in favor of “token-object reading”, due to the confusion with a psychological term, “psychometry.” The term was coined by Joseph Rodes Buchanan in 1842.^[1]^[2]

According to Buchanan,

The past is entombed in the present, the world is its own enduring monument; and that which is true of its physical is likewise true of its mental career. The discoveries of Psychometry will enable us to explore the history of man, as those of geology enable us to explore the history of the earth. There are mental fossils for psychologists as well as mineral fossils for the geologists; and I believe that hereafter the psychologist and the geologist will go hand in hand, the one portraying the earth, its animals and its vegetation, while the other portrays the human beings who have roamed over its surface in the shadows, and the darkness of primeval barbarism. Aye, the mental telescope is now discovered which may pierce the depths of the past and bring us in full view of the grand and tragic passages of ancient history."^[2]

Clairsentience is related to psychometry^{[citation needed]}.