Copy of a letter from Celia Green

Of course IQ tests were only a correlate with academic ability, nevertheless they did correlate and their current unfashionability corresponds to hatred of the exceptional and destructiveness towards it rather than any wish to recognise ability to the full, whether or not it happens to be correlated with an especially high IQ.

In my case, an IQ of 180 put me in the top 0.001% of the population, also I was about as intellectually precocious as anyone I have heard of and would have been in the running in any competition for the person in the country with the greatest claim on an academic career in terms of aptitude. But the educational system, recognising no need to make concessions to my ability, succeeded in turning me out at the end with a second-class degree and no research scholarship, regarding this as no reflection on itself nor any cause for giving me help, even in the form of moral support, in remedying the situation.

My abilities have remained woefully and painfully under-utilised ever since, and my books should be regarded as distress flares sent up by someone marooned on the Arctic ice. I am afraid your idea that I am busy is wishful; it is more that I am straitjacketed, not surprising since there is nothing I can do for which I can be paid a salary. Still, it is true that the consequence of lying nearly paralysed under a pile of bricks is that there is little spare capacity for writing letters, (or doing anything else.)

Psychokinesis is, perhaps, the thing on which I find it most intensely painful to be unable to do progressive research, because the issues involved are so crucial and, although I do not like to base any conclusions on the anecdotalism which is all I have to go on, I feel that my subliminal ideas are on the verge of adding up, and soon might do so if I could do any research commensurate with the problem (by which I mean more than mulling over further anecdotes).

When I was at school my mind always had this way of creating structures of ideas seemingly in advance of sufficient information, which gave one a strong drive to continue and see how the fully crystallised structures would come out. This was a part of what went into my almost preternatural ability to do well in exams on new academic subjects at very short notice, of which little evidence remained at the end of the educational process. As a result of legal and other prohibitions I appeared to have taken only about as many exams, and at about the same ages, as any other person with a fairly high IQ might have done.

I certainly would not like to say what the challenge of the PK phenomenon is based on as if I were certain it was a phenomenon at all; the challenge is that, if it is there, it is not compatible with the existing framework of ideas, though I do not suggest a facile abandonment of scientific method.

Lucid dreams are just another thing on which I have not been able to do research, and they do not seem to present any particular anomalies, although they might be used as part of a research programme designed to shed light on the process of perception (and some other things regarded as fundamental in experimental psychology). There seems to be no need to postulate quasi-independent environments; the departures which are observed from the laws of physics in waking life can probably be accounted for by reference to psychological or physiological factors if and when sufficient research can be carried out.

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined education with no way of making a career or getting back into a position to make one I was being thrown out of a life in which I could have used my abilities to a reasonable if not optimal extent, experienced considerable wellbeing, put my drive into making progress, and been at least modestly productive. I would have aimed to become head of a research department to increase all those factors. Outside and unsalaried I was in a position of severe deprivation and hardship. It is something like being on the rack, constantly aware of the research I am being prevented from doing, some at least of which would undeniably contribute to scientific knowledge.

In my early teens, when I had been prevented from taking exams earlier than the average age and caught in legislation which would hinder me from doing so for three more years, I started to wake with claustrophobia in the night because it was the only life I had and what might have been an exceptionally good education which would have set me well on the way to my academic career had been ruined. Now I wake with claustrophobia in the night because I am likely to die before I have implemented any of my ideas for research, and before I have returned to a way of life in which I can even write and publish books at a tolerable speed. I shall be off the rack, I think, when my organisation, which I set up to provide myself with the environmental support which I lacked outside a university, has a six-figure income. At present it has none except from the tax consultancy and economics consultancy work of my associates, and what they can contribute is far from the required goal.

When I was thrown out of the university at the end of my ruined education I thought from time to time I would surely sometimes meet someone who would realise how unnatural it was that I was not able to live as a salaried academic and would wish to relieve my suffering and increase my productivity at the same time, so the income of my organisation would slowly increase. Surely, occasionally someone would wish to respond to a need so obvious and so painful; one would wish oneself to release an animal from a cruelly constricting cage. But people all react in the same ways and, although I have received letters from wealthy people who professed enthusiasm for the distress flares I have managed to send up, this has apparently been entirely disconnected from any desire that work should be done in the areas which so interested them, if that depended on releasing the screws of my rack.

I am a person grievously in need of help. If I had an income of £50,000 a year that would pay for a salary for me, upkeep on the premises, running costs, one secretary and perhaps a part-time research assistant (who would need to be paid at a little more than market rates since I don't have the prestige which enables the university to employ research assistants to work hard and meticulously for relatively low pay). £100,000 a year would enable continuous work to proceed using the EEG equipment which we have here. If you could feel able to contribute £1,000 a year one-fiftieth of my most basic problem would be solved. Then I should only have to find forty-nine further people.